Monitoring and Measuring Social Media for Your Business

One of the most popular arguments of why NOT use social media is that it’s too hard to track and calculate ROI.  Here are 10 tools to utilize when monitoring your social media presence and ultimately verifying the success of your campaigns:

1. Google Analytics – This is a tracking service offered free by Google.  By creating a campaign in Google Analytics that allows you to track back any and all links you post to your website, you’ll have an immediate ROI.  Google Analytics is a great tool when used correctly, so you’ll need to make sure you have someone knowledgeable on your staff to set up a campaign successfully.  Once the link goes active, you’ll be able to see how many people clicked through to your website and track where they went or what they purchased upon visiting.  make sure you capture any sales derived from links you’ve posted on social media sites by setting up goals within your analytics campaign.
2. Backtype – A real-time, conversational search engine that gives you an update about what people are saying about your company and products.  Compiled from Twitter, blogs and social networking article sites such as Reddit, Backtype allows you to effectively understand which bloggers will help you and your company establish a presense as an industry thought leader and could lead to an additional story about your company.
3. Twitter Search - Gives you a live feed of people discussing your company on Twitter.  Check up on trending topics involving your company to find the latest compliments, issues and opportunities.  Can’t find anyone talking about you?  Twitter’s a great place for your company to start the conversation and get noticed by potential customers.  Developing an online community of “followers” helps you have candid conversations with people who may not otherwise have any exposure to your brand.
4. Facebook Fan Pages - Facebook is used for individuals to connect, share photos, and relate to like people.  This social networking site offers many opportunities for small businesses to expand their audiences externally.  Whether your’re trying to develop new talent, increase ecommerce, or simply build brand awareness, Facebook offers measurement tools within a groups’ admin rights.  By measuring number of fans, amount of comments and shares, you can benchmark where you started and set goals for impressoins and click-throughs.  Here you can tell if what you are putting our is actually being read and from there what those fans are doing with that information.  Are they clicking back to your website? Sharing it on their own pages?  Facebook might seem like a big project, but by listening and measuring, your time spent will have a good ROI.
5. Addict-O-Matic - Similar to Backtype, Addict-O-Matic creates a custom page highlighting conversations, pictures, videos and articles mentioning your company.  If you’re looking for an all-encompassing snapshot of the buzz you’re creating online, Addict-O-Matic is the tool for you.  From a coporate perspective, Addict-O-Matic is the perfect tool for a busy CEO.  It allows you to stay on top of your online presense without signing into each individual service.
6. Website Grader - A free SEO tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website.  Website Grader scores your website based on things like website traffic, social popularity and SEO and then provides basic advice on how to improve your website from a marketing perspective.  The tool is a perfect compliment to a well-positioned social media campaign, as it helps make it easier for search engines to find and identify your corporate website.  As a CEO, utilize this tool to evaluate where your website currently stands and where it has room for improvement.
7. Compete.com - Gives you the opportunity to compare your website’s popularity and analytics to those of your competitors.  By entering your website address, as well as up to two competitors’ website addresses, you’ll be able to see a line chart highlighting the traffic to each of the websites as well as top search terms and referring sites for each company.  This is a great benchmark tool to help track success of your competition.  If your competitions’ score is higher than yours, research what they’re doing online and create a campaign that incorporates their successes.
8. Delicious – A social media bookmarking site that allows users to tag, save and share web pages in one place, Delicious helps you to better understand whether or not people find the content you’re publishing interesting and relevant.  The more people adding your website to Delicious, the more popular your website becomes and the higher it appears in search rankings.
9. Digg – Digg allows people to share content published anywhere on the web.  Once an article is shared, users can vote on the internet of the article and increase its popularity.  As popularity increases, your article is sorted to the top of the Digg pile, appearing for more people.  Oftentimes, you’ll find a select group of people are “digging” your content.  Follow up with these people as they may be interested in your industry or company specifically.
10. Social Meter - Social Meter scans major social networking websites to analyze a webpages’ popularity.  It looks at link-backs on websites such as Digg, Delicious, Google search and Technorati and tallies any results in a comprehensive bar chart.  By releasing relevant information via press releases. Twitter and blogs, you can increase your social meter score.  The higher the score, the more people are reading your content.

By: Lois Arbogast, Vistage International



3 Responses to “Monitoring and Measuring Social Media for Your Business”

1. Julie Weishaar says:

   February 22, 2010 at 4:16 pm

   Nice article about measuring social media marketing in response to concerns about the inability to measure it and monitor it. Addict-O-Matic is one I had not heard of before so I checked it out. I find it really neat that tools such as this one pick up anything and everything one does on the web. But at the same time – don’t you feel it is a little creepy? This ability to measure and monitor social media marketing lends credence to the importance of reputation management for all brands. Be careful what you do on the Internet, Big Brother is watching!
2. admin says:

   February 22, 2010 at 11:20 pm

   Thank you Julie,

   Gary
3. Gary says:

   July 13, 2010 at 10:01 pm

   Lotus Jumps is one of the best tools.