Social Media Marketing: Measuring Your Impact & Success

How is your marketing going? Do you know how to measure social media success? To be competitive (and thrive) in today’s technology-driven, mobile, economy —businesses need to have a comprehensive, engaging social media marketing program.

Your social media team can’t just put content out there blindly and then hope for the best. There are a wide variety of tools and targeted areas to cover to get the full picture of the impact (and success!) of your social media efforts across platforms and over time.

How to Measure Social Media Success

Areas of Reporting for Meaningful Social Media Metrics

The number of areas that are available for reporting on your social media efforts is quite vast. Here is a list of some of the most meaningful metrics you can receive to help you refine your strategy for the best ROI:

• Sentiment Analysis
• Internal Post & Engagement Metrics
• Community Analysis & Demographics
• Influencer Identification
• Advanced Keyword/Hashtag Queries
• Real-Time Stream Monitoring

Let’s dig into these a bit more.

Sentiment Analysis — also known as emotion AI or opinion mining, sentiment analysis aims to get at the heart of interactions, determining the attitude and/or emotional reaction to a particular subject, post, or event. This kind of information is yielded through text analysis, natural language processing, and computational linguistics.

Internal Post & Engagement Metrics — important for social media health and growth, this data highlights the success of your content in likes, shares, reblogs, repins, retweets, etc.

Community Analysis & Demographics — bringing critical info for your targeting and segmentation strategy, and understanding who is spending time where (on separate social media platforms) makes your overall program more efficient and effective.

Influencer Identification — unique to your field, product, or service, your social media influencers have the power to help potential customers make buying decisions. As a general rule, people tend to trust peer opinions on social media more than company advertisements.

Advanced Keyword/Hashtag Queries — helping you to discover multiple words your customers are using to describe your product/service, you can capture these to use in such content as landing page subtext, advertising headline text, website messaging, advertising call to action text, email communications, among others.

Real-Time Stream Monitoring — with the 24-hour moment-by-moment interactions on social media, monitoring real-time data can give you valuable information about engagement, user trends, and more that can give perspective to alter your game plan. From hourly volume graphs to live maps, real-time stream monitoring is a real friend to social media managers.

This list covers a majority of the types of data that you should be monitoring to understand the most effective ways how to measure social media success. Now, let’s get into the different types of tools that you can deliver this highly valuable information.

The Best and Brightest Social Media Analytics Tools

The popularity of social media and its impact on marketing has driven a boom in tech entrepreneurs, and it can be hard to wade through the products. The capabilities of social media analytics tools continue to surge ever forward; here are some of the best and brightest to help you get the information you need.

Sysomos

One of the top editor’s pics from PC Magazine, Sysomos is an influencer identification and social listening tool that makes it easy to gather social data and use that info to make your social media marketing better and better.

Synthesio

Another top contender, Synthesio is excellent for enterprise-scale social media analytics. With unmatched business value metrics and its broad scope of social audience breakdown tools and monitoring tools, it’s a go-to choice for enterprises.

Brand24

A good choice for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), Brand24 has a reasonable price and provides pretty comprehensive social analytics, social listening, and influencer management.

Hootsuite

Nicely priced with extensive integrations and one of the most popular social media management and analytics tools available, Hootsuite has comprehensive publishing and built-in listening features.

Zoho Social

This responsive and clean interface is easy to use with a generous amount of metrics, reporting features, and smart publishing tools. Good for SMBs.

Crimson Hexagon

A top-tier SM analytics platform, Crimson Hexagon is too expensive for most SMBs
but provides a glossy interface, extraordinary sentiment analysis, and live social stream monitoring among other high-quality features.

Talkwalker

A flexible platform for either SMBs or Enterprise applications, it has complex querying capabilities, pre-built dashboards, and good competitive benchmarking. It also has Hootsuite integration, ROI metrics, and interactive data visualizations.

Buffer for Business

For overall management capabilities, Buffer for Business is at the top of the class. Its usability with the drag-and-drop interface yields a smooth experience, and it is great in tracking basic post-based analytics and presence growth.

The Takeaway

Consider features, pricing, and the operating platforms of the different tools prior to making a decision on which one is the best for your company. The ease of use /learning curve will vary across the separate choices. All of the above options are rated well, and each has its particular pros and cons.

Social media agencies will typically have their favorites and have already made the investment in the needed hardware and software. Have you considered hiring an outside social media marketing agency? Agencies have the skilled personnel and dedicated tools for comprehensive social media management programs.

From content producers to specialists in analytics and strategy, SM agencies are a “one-stop-shop” to not only create dynamic content across Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, and other platforms but can also collate and deliver various reports on the impact of your campaigns.

Make an inventory of all your best options prior to purchasing a platform for your social media analytics. Just know that one way or the other, you need them. Without the critical information received from these tools, you are basically putting in a lot of effort without ever knowing if that effort is worthwhile. Considering the incredible power of social media in your total digital marketing program — it’s critical for your business. And your bottom line.