Keys to Social Monitoring, Analytics and Reporting

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Adriana Lordan, Chief Product Evangelist, Avangate

Measuring Marketing effectiveness

There's so much talk regarding social media nowadays, but what does it really mean when it comes to the bottom line? What is its impact on a business - and equally important - how can we turn a negative impact into a positive one, both in terms of awareness/ reputation and revenue. Monitoring your SOV (Share of Voice) is critical in this era of social interactions. So how can you determine what your social media strategy should include? A good strategy will generate positive conversation and engagement both online and offline.

By measuring conversations in the social media landscape and their sentiment, companies are able to see if their strategies are proving to be successful and, when needed, make adjustments to be sure that the market gets accurate information about their products and services.

A better understanding of how people see your brand has a direct relationship to their purchasing habits and how other people think about your business, which influences their purchase-decisions.

Choosing the right tool

Each one of the great number of social media analytics tools available today is somewhat different in its approach, metrics, measured channels, reports, depth of analysis etc. Also, you should be looking for a combination of tools to both measure and monitor your business' brand in the social media landscape.

Social Media Monitoring defines itself as the process of discovering conversations about your brand with the immediate purpose of learning and engaging. This monitoring is usually performed on a keywords basis. Relevant keywords include your brand name, product name(s), etc. Based on your chosen keywords, your monitoring tool analyzes the social networks you specify, grabs the relevant articles and messages, and provides you with the results.

Social Media Measuring is more concerned with data over a certain period of time. If Social Monitoring answers questions like, "Who is talking about your brand and what are they saying?", then on the other hand, Social Measuring provides answers to the questions, "How did my keywords perform over time?"/"How is my business doing compared to my competitors?" etc. Social Media Measuring works similarly to monitoring - your chosen tool/software goes out and looks for articles where that specific combination of keywords occurs. It then summarizes this information and presents it to you in data reports.

Measurement is critical for benchmarking and tracking your success rate over time. Monitoring, on the other hand, means listening and providing responses in real time in order to protect your brand from negative conversations. Clearly, both analytics should be used in your social media strategy for the best results.

Below is a list of applications that online marketing professionals can use to track and monitor their social media activities in order to better target and market their products and services:
Social Media Monitoring:

Social Media Measuring:

All these social media analytics smart tools will help marketers measure their social media efforts, and understand how social data on social networks and online communities influence their business performance.

Some of the key steps in using social media analytics would be:

Judging by the goals set up for every business (reach, engagement and influence, action), some types of success metrics could be: visits, unique visitors, links, pages viewed, sentiment of comments, brand affinity, time spent, membership, number of downloads, sales inquiries, risk reduction, new client acquisition. Clear objectives are key to success. Goes without saying, take the time to test & see what works best for you and don't forget to share with @Avangate.

This article is published in SIIA's Marketing in Today's Economy, released in 2012.