Using Social Media Analytics Effectively

Posted by Business
By Justin Maas


Everyone is beginning to see the value in using social media to generate fan growth and increase interaction between companies and consumers. You've created great social media pages, but how do you measure how effective they are? This is where social media analytics come into play. Social media analytics provide a way to measure just how strong your social media plan currently is.

The first step in using analytics effectively is figuring out what exactly it is that you want to track. Different focuses will require different tools in order for them to be measured effectively and accurately. If you want to measure how many times your page has been shared you will need a different tool than if you were trying to measure what the trend of a current viral video is.

The next step to successfully using social media analytics is to make sure your analytics software is setup in the optimal way. Google analytics is a very useful tool for measuring things such as page views or traffic sources, but it becomes an even more powerful tool if you attach the social media metrics greasemonkey extension to it. This allows you track things such as stumbles and diggs on your site.

Another useful social media analytics tool is webtrends. Using webtrends you are able to measure what tabs your fans are clicking on, what links they are sharing, conversions and a lot of other useful information. With these evolving tools it is possible to measure which parts of your social media plan are the most effective and which need some changing, which was not easy to do in the not so distant past.

The next step is a crucial one; combine all of your separate social media analytics into something useful. Since you will be using a variety of tools to measure everything you need to, it is up to you to combine this information into something meaningful and useful. Use baseline measurements and targets to gauge your success, and always look to find the reasons behind fluctuations to numbers - you may have to change your strategy accordingly.

The last step is to use this analysis and do something with it. After you crunch the numbers you need to figure out how to use this newfound information to adjust your social media plan for the better. There is no surefire way to do this so you will have to be creative. This shouldn't be hard as social media is constantly evolving and new ideas are being hatched every day.




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