Monitoring Social Media Marketing

Posted on 08. Mar, 2010 by Pete Hollier in Social Media

Social Media Marketing performance monitoring is required to ensure your company benefits from the financial and human resources required to participate in the Social environment.

Including some basic Social Media Monitoring along side Google Analytics reports provides an indication of the effectiveness of your online promotional activities. Last week I published a Blog Google Analytic The Basics which reviews the web site metrics which should be reviewed in conjunction with Social Media Monitoring.

Social Media Monitoring

Social Media monitoring does not have to be a high cost, high complexity task. With a few basic tools and an understanding of what is important you can obtain the information required to indicate how well your Social Media Program is performing.

Social Media Elements to Monitor

The key Social Media Marketing performance indicators includes:

Blog Commenting: Blog commenting activity can provide an indication of your posts popularity. However, it must be remembered that in many cases your Blog visitor is time stressed and due to commenting requiring additional time it cannot be used as the only metric to determine how popular your posts are. To gain a better understanding of your Blog's popularity you should also review some of your Analytics reports such as:

• Number of pages
• TIme on pages
• Bounce rates

Social Bookmarks: How many Social Bookmarks are obtained by your site is also important. Again consideration must be given to how much effort is required to Bookmark your site. To put your data into perspective it is suggested you also review the Social Bookmarking performance of your competitors.

RSS Feed and Email Subscriptions: The number of RSS Feeds and Blog or Newsletter subscriptions you receive, is a good indication of how well you are engaging your web site visitor. These visitors are important due to providing a clear indication of wanting to learn more about what your company is saying.

Brand Saturation and Social Response: How often and what comments your company receives is an important indication of how well your Social Media Marketing is performing. The mood of the conversation should be closely monitored to ensure that should you be receiving negative responses, you can act to improve your company's reputation.

Social Media Monitoring Services

Some of the information required to monitor your Social Media Marketing performance are quite obvious. Monitoring your Blog commenting, RSS Feeds and Subscribers is straightforward. The only thing I would like to point out at this point, is you must keep a record of this data to obtain historical data which can be used for a comparative analysis as your move forward with your Social Media Program. The best tool for this is simply setting up a spreadsheet to record this information.

Monitoring Brand Saturation and Social Response

There is no way you can monitor your company's reputation or saturation without using some of the Social Media Monitoring Services available. Some of these services are expensive and often out of reach of small businesses. However, there are solutions available some of which are free which provide adequate information, however, it is often recommended that you upgrade to some of the fee based services to obtain additional information regarding your business' saturation and Social response.

UberView: Uberview offers an affordable solution with excellent reporting and ease of use. The interface provides details on conversations and the overall positive and negative response to your company's Social efforts. This service would be my first choice.

Alterian SM2: Alterain SM2 offers substantial free reporting under their "Freemium" service. The user interface is comprehensive and there is a certain amount of time required to learn and use the service to its maximum potential but well worth trying.

I have tried a few other services and out of all the various services I have tried the above are the only two that provide in depth reporting at a reasonable cost. I'm sure there are others and if you have discovered Social Media Monitoring Services which you consider offers value to your company please share by commenting below.

The Tools: A Warning

Having tried so many various tools I often come across tools which provide results which are not accurate. When testing a tool I always try to check the information using other methods. For example the tools which report on Social Bookmarking are very prone to error. Some of these results indicated nil results when I am aware that this is not the case. So be warned, be careful and try and test the tools you want to use to determine if they are providing you with quality data.

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If you would like to use this article on your web site please contact pete@seowizardry.ca for an html version. All I request is you provide Pete Hollier and Seo Wizardry with a reference to this article and provide a link back to www.seowizardry.ca