by | Jul 16, 2014

Not sold on social media yet? Here are 8 reasons why you must be active on social media and 4 benefits of successful social media marketing.

Once you have developed a social media strategy and begun to implement it, you must assess the success of your efforts and adjust your strategy moving forward. As with online marketing in general, it is crucial to track, measure, analyze, and optimize social media activities.

Monitoring Social Media Activities

Monitoring social media provides insight about how your organization, your competitors, and your industry as a whole are perceived. Interacting directly with customers – hearing about their problems and concerns – allows you to fine-tune your social media activities as well as your overall online marketing approach.

Keep an eye on what types of posts get the best engagement from your audience (e.g. Likes, re-posts, etc.). Be active and see what your customers are saying on social media.

Measuring Social Media Activities

There is no consensus about how to measure social media effectiveness; it is often difficult to make a direct correlation between social media activity and tangible business results such as sales growth.

However, social media is important. Search engines take cues from social media, social shares can drive traffic to your website, and good customer engagement can increase customer loyalty.

It is importance to maintain awareness of what is being said online, and to track – as best you can – how well social media tactics are impacting specific key performance indicators/metrics.

Quantitative metrics measure the volume of activity or level of interaction on social media platforms, and includes items such as:

  • Number of “Likes”
  • Fans/Followers
  • Unique Visitors
  • Tweets and Retweets
  • Posts
  • Video Views
  • Comments
  • Referrals

Qualitative measures are intended to gauge “soft” indicators like influence, engagement, beliefs, and sentiment. The most often used qualitative social media key performance indicator categories are:

  • Dialogue – How much is being said about your organization and your competitors? How engaged is your audience?
  • Advocacy – What is the level of “brand evangelist” activity and its impact on results?
  • Customer Support – Are you resolving customer problems? How long does it take to resolve a problem? What is the level of satisfaction with customer support performance?
  • Innovation – How satisfied are customers with your current products/services? How do customers perceive your products/services in relation to market trends or improvements?

Clear qualitative measures are more difficult to track and interpret; however, these metrics shed light on how your company’s reputation. Any organization should be keenly interested in this type of real-time feedback.

Tools for Analyzing Social Media Activities

Get a quick list of our favourite tools for measuring and analyzing social media activity. Some are even free!

The Bottom Line

As with any analysis of the effectiveness of marketing activities, you must:

  • Define goals
  • Establish key performance indicators and metrics based on goals
  • Set baseline targets
  • Analyze
  • Make necessary adjustments

The most effective approach is using a combination of quantitative and qualitative measures to gain social media insight. You can drive real business results with the effective use of social media. Analyzing your activities will help you determine which efforts are paying off.

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Ben Molfetta
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