Social media success can be hard to measure, especially for small business owners who may not be the most tech-savvy individuals. Regardless of your skills, social media has proven to be an incredibly important tool for businesses of all sizes. In fact, 64 percent of Twitter users and 51 percent of Facebook users are more likely to buy the products of brands they follow online through social media channels.
Whether you’re pressed for time, don’t understand how certain content becomes popular or goes viral, or simply don’t like the idea of interacting with strangers, social media is a challenge for many. However, it’s essential to engage with your customers on a personal level. It’s what the modern customer expects from a brand or business and social media is the best place to do it.
One of the main reasons some companies standout in terms of their social media presence is because they understand what content people want. It all comes from data they have received and analyzed in the past, allowing the companies to adjust and improve upon the kind of content they share going forward.
As such, you need to get your hands on some of the best tools for measuring social media success. With these tools, you can look back to see what the engagements levels were on certain posts, then restructure your strategy to focus only on the content that performs well.
The 5 Best Tools to Measure Social Media Success
Google Analytics
“Google Analytics Solutions offer free and enterprise analytics tools to measure website, app, digital and offline data to gain customer insights.”
One of the tools that often gets overlooked in terms of social media insight is Google Analytics. Sure, it’s a great app for checking to see where all of your web customers are coming from, but what about how those same customers interact on Facebook or Twitter?
What’s cool is that Google provides options for establishing social media objectives and goals for your website. Therefore, you can check back to see if you reached these goals and make changes to continue improving. Network referrals are key to seeing whether or not your social media posts are making money or generating leads for your business. For example, you can analyze the extent that Facebook drives traffic to your website. Sessions are tracked after someone clicks through to your website from a social media network, so you can evaluate how long customers stick around for and if they contact you, or buy an item from your site.
Analyzing social media metrics within Google Analytics
Kissmetrics
“Giving you the knowledge you need to make better decisions. Kissmetrics is a revolutionary person-based analytics platform for your whole team.”
Kissmetrics offers an entire suite of website monitoring tools, but the main area we want to focus on is the social media module. The whole point of Kissmetrics is to fully understand the ROI for each of your visitors. You can track individual customers and see when they leave your site, or consider grouping your customers into particular batches.
ROI can be tracked from places like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. The best part is that once a customer is attributed to a particular social media site you have the ability to track the whole customer lifecycle. For example, if you gained a visitor from Facebook it would register when they come back to your site and if they are looking to buy something. In addition, you can view if they’re a repeat buyer.
ViralHeat
“Viralheat is the enterprise content marketing and social media management platform that provides digital marketers with social media monitoring, publishing, analytics, content intelligence, and reporting in a single, intuitive interface.”
Viral Heat serves as an enterprise social media tool, and it allows for monitoring, publishing, analysis, and engagement. You get to review trends and evaluate key insights when someone visits your site from a social media network. The standout feature is the one that helps you find relevant content for sharing on your social profiles when you don’t have content of your own to share.
In addition, it lets you schedule and manage all of your posts from the comfort of one dashboard. So, if you’d like to schedule all of your posts a month in advance, it’s completely possible. After uploading a post, you can go back to evaluate each one to see which of them were most effective.
Analyzing Twitter metrics within ViralHeat
Klout
“Klout helps people who want to be great at social media. Join today to start sharing original content and measuring your online impact.”
Every company should be registered with Klout, since it’s free and it provides a true score of how well you’re doing on all of your social media accounts. It all starts with recommended content, which you share with your followers to get a reaction.
Based on your follower counts and reaction, your score goes up or down. Tracking things like re-tweets and likes adjusts your Klout score and encourages you to work on better content.
Hootsuite
“Enhance your social media management with Hootsuite, the leading social media dashboard.”
The most widely used platform for managing social media on the planet, Hootsuite was created by Ryan Holmes back in 2008. The app has some of the best social media scheduling and management features you can find on the market. Not only that, but the reports are beautiful for when you’d like to evaluate what went right (or wrong) in the past.
The social insights deliver real-time results, with charts and metrics telling you how many people are engaging with certain posts. In addition, it alerts you when trends are taking off, allowing you to take advantage of news that is getting talked about a lot online.
Analyzing social metrics within the Hootsuite dashboard.
