Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and blogs are supposedly the modern
silver bullets for marketing success. But how do you know if
they're working for your business? Here, Kerry Bridge, social media
manager at Dell Marketing, explains the top seven ways to track
your social media campaigns.
The number of businesses experimenting with and finding value in
social media as a promotional and customer engagement tool is on
the rise. Yet, according to a 2009 study, 84% of professionals from
a variety of industries reported they didn't measure ROI (return on
investment) when using social media.
This is suprising. By using simple ROI models you can measure
your output and uncover the cold hard figures to prove whether
social media is delivering for your business objectives. This means
it's much easier to justify sustaining your efforts or stopping
them. It can also help you decide whether to make further
investments in specific social media areas which are showing
promising results.
Here are seven free and simple tools to measure how effective
your social media strategy really is:
This shows you how many Twitter followers you have and provides
a graph of the growth of your followers over time. It highlights
how fast your base is growing and informs you of your behaviour at
the time of growth so you can act in that same way to achieve
further success.
This allows you to search hashtags, URLs, Twitter names and
highlights tweets that match your search, demonstrating how much
exposure they achieved. The starter service provides an
initial lead on the last 50 tweets for free.
This tool provides Facebook Page owners with metrics around
their content. By understanding and analysing trends within user
growth demographics, consumption of content, and creation of
content, you will be better equipped to improve your business
through Facebook. The data can be exported in a handy excel or word
document and the metrics are updated on a daily basis.
This service not only shortens URLs but also provides real-time
traffic and analytics data for all links created. Monitoring which
links are popular with your followers allows you to tailor your
posts to satisfy existing followers and attract new ones.
Ultimately growing your overall social media traffic.
The Archivist is a free desktop application that lets you run
any Twitter search and create a self-updated permanent archive. The
tool also provides an easy way to export the whole Archive to
Excel, enabling you to store and analyse relevant data regarding
your business.
This is a search and analysis tool providing a single stream of
real-time content to show what people are saying about your
company. It enables you to access information across a range of
social media channels, all in one place.
These tools enable users to measure their online influence.
Influence is measured by the way you share, create and recommend
content as it engages your 'audience' and has an impact on your
online communities. Calculating these scores can show you how
many people in your online community rely on your recommendations
and opinions.
Follow Kerry Bridge on Twitter