Thalasar Ventures

Businesses need to focus on social media these days in order to measure and increase online effectiveness, and social media analytics is an important tool to help with this. Social media analytics offers an entirely new paradigm for measuring interactive marketing by enabling organizations to act on the intelligence gained and thereby expanding their reach, increasing their retention, and ultimately, driving more revenue. With the rapid growth of social media like Facebook, Twitter and blogs, marketers need to think differently about their next generation analytic requirements. The main uses for social media analytics tools are for brand monitoring and audits to provide insightful information. A company can begin measuring their social media efforts in a number of ways, some of which include tracking social media links back to the website, measuring the effect of social media efforts within the network, etc.

Understanding the effect of social media within the network

Measuring the success within the network is the first step in measuring your social media initiatives. As social media is more than a broadcast network, engagement matters. You can begin measuring your success in engaging with consumers by measuring more than just followers. For example measurement of Facebook might include monitoring the number of fans, fan demographics, fan interaction with posted comments, organic fan posts and traffic to a Facebook page. Although some Facebook analytics can be found in Facebook Insights, there are alternatives that can be added the web analytics solution for your Facebook pages.

How Campaign Tracking helps

If your social media marketing efforts do not result in the required traffic, the social network within the environment is not a justifiable option. With the help of campaign tracking, it is possible to analyze how different types of posts drive traffic and behavior, and look at how visitors driven from one particular post behave by just segregating posts into various content groups. The analytics behind these activities include a lot of information like whether these visitors leave your site, stay and engage, how many page views they see, how much time they spend, and whether they convert into a lead or a sale, etc. With this information, even future posts can be optimized as you have a rich analytics opportunity to provide insights for future posts. Campaign tracking even allows for calculation and optimization of ROI. It is possible to calculate the return on investment, if the time spent on social media efforts is known, and if you know the actual sales driven by traffic through those posts.

By leveraging social media analytics tools, campaign tracking and multi-channel efforts, it is possible to recognize the bearing of your social media efforts.