Social Media Analysis -

Are you using the right social media analytics tools to monitor, assess and improve your social media performance?

What social media analytics are you measuring and what should you be measuring in your social media tracking?

Monitoring your social media analytics can make the difference between the success or failure of your social media presence.

The Social Media Analytics Compass

The compass contains the essential areas that you need to monitor for your social media channels.

It’s not possible to monitor everything across every channel due to limitations of the tool and it’s not essential to monitor everything depending on the business.

From this compass pick out what’s important for your business and identify a relevant tool to provide the relevant reports.

Let’s look at each section of your compass (Note: you will need to differentiate between paid and unpaid). Audience Size

Does the size of your audience matter? Yes, of course it does….if you are building a relevant audience (see audience profile).

You need to continuously build your audience. Your audience typically grows gradually unless you use tools or paid advertisement to grow. There is nothing wrong in investing in audience growth tactics if you have a process of converting that audience (see our PRISM funnel)

On a weekly basis assess your audience growth and compare this with your competitors. Also, assess the people that are unfollowing you where possible. Audience Profile

As you are growing your audience you need to make sure you have the right audience profile.

On Twitter, you can run a report to see what categories of people are part of your profile. For example, are they entrepreneurs, marketers etc.

On Facebook, you can set up an ad (you don’t have to run it) targeted to your Facebook fans and then change the targeting options to work out the profile of your audience. For example, add an interest and see how many of your fans have that interest.

With a bit of smart thinking, you can do this analysis across other platforms. If you can’t do the analysis with the tools you can always run a survey on your audience. Reach and Engagement

How much of your audience are you reaching and how much are engaging with your content?

Reach without engagement is still important because a lot of people pay attention to your content but don’t respond to it. This doesn’t mean to say they are not interested and they won’t buy from you.

Engagement is also important to monitor because you expect that some of your audience will engage with your content. If no one is engaging with your content you have either the wrong content or the wrong audience!

In an audience you will typically have the following:

Lurkers – People that monitor what you share but don’t interact. This is usually the majority of your audience
Influencers – These are people that have access to a larger audience and have the potential of influencing this audience.
Engagers – These are people that are more active in your community and you’ll start recognizing some of the names

Traffic

Typically you will want to generate traffic back to your website from content you share and you’ll need to measure the impact of that traffic.

For some companies traffic is enough. For example, if you are media site you get paid for advertisements and more traffic means more money!

For most of the rest of us you want to generate leads and sales. Content Analysis

Creating and sharing content is an expensive task. On a regular basis, you need to analyze your content to see what’s working/not working.

Are videos, pictures or text updates working best?
Do you have the right mix of content?
Are you getting engagement on your questions?
What changes have happened on the platforms that mean you need to change? (e.g. changes to profile images).

You’ll need to monitor this on an ongoing basis. Community Responsiveness

If you’re not responsive to your community they’ll stop interacting so it’s important to measure this. This is particularly important if you are using social media as a customer service channel. The response rates are going to be equally important as an email support request. Competitor Benchmarking

We should all learn from our competitors as they are probably learning from us!

Do a comparison of your account versus your competitors.

What are their engagement stats like, audience profile, audience size growth, etc.

This active monitoring will give you ideas. Things to learn from and things to avoid! Sentiment Analysis

This is where you analyze positive, negative, or neutral mentions of your brand, product or service. A social media monitoring tool like Brand24 will measure and report on the sentiment of your social mentions. Sentiment analysis tools are not 100% reliable but they can give you a good indicator when there’s a problem.

Here’s a full description of sentiment analysis taken from Wikipedia: “Sentiment analysis (also known as opinion mining) refers to the use of natural language processing, text analysis, and computational linguistics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials”

When you are going through all your analytics you’ll need to start splitting out paid and unpaid media. All social media channels will require some paid media over time but this will affect your statistics.

NOTE: Thanks to the following people for contributing to the social media compass: Brian Carter, Mark Schaefer, Lilach Bullock, Dan Purvis, Martin Jones, Mark Fidelman, Steven Eisenberg, Stephan Hovnanian, Julia Bramble, Emeric Ernoult, Gregory Bailey, Beatrice Hunt,