Nowadays, just having a Facebook or Twitter page isn’t enough. If your business is “about” social, it’s about upkeep, attention, infiltration, and relevance. Guessing, experimenting, and straight-up repetition is the shots-in-the-dark methodology for too many social media campaigns. Interacting with customers and growing your fan base is a full-time job … and a science. Reaching people comes down to measuring and interpreting.
According to Boot Camp Digital, 72% of businesses don’t know how to measure their ROI. There’s no point in allocating marketing dollars to social media when you don’t have a clue if it’s working or not. The key to calculating ROI is measuring your activity, and the activity of those who visit your site(s). Thankfully, there are platforms out there to keep up with the progress of your pages. The question is, which one is right for you?
Truth is – most are awesome. Think of SM analytics as a cocktail – a balanced blend of flavors, spirits, and garnishes. When considering which platforms to utilize, think in terms of threes.
Basic 3-ingredient recipe ~
1) Plain and Simple Flavors: Google Analytics
It’s free! Google’s platform is the industry standard, not only because we google, but because we also love not paying for tools. Analytics measures everything from sales for e-commerce businesses to content and social feed analytics. What’s popular? What’s performing? What’s not? How do visitors interact with the features on your site? This is analytics 101.
2) Birds-eye Spirits: TweetStats
Monitoring your tweets is underrated. Twitter is relatively simple to keep an eye on using a separate platform to keep things clean and clear. TweetStats is a free platform that allows you to monitor and measure tweet density and tweets per day/week/month. It also allows you to examine those numbers in relation to your competition. How do you compare with similar businesses in your field?
3) The Wildcard Garnish: CrazyEgg
It’s not free (ranging from $10-100/month) but may be worth the extra change. The best feature CrazyEgg offers is “heat maps.” Aside from standard bookkeeping features available with free platforms like Google Analytics and Flurry, CrazyEgg shows you what pages people are viewing, which parts of those pages their focusing on, how much (and to where) surfers are scrolling, and where they’re clicking. This platform doesn’t just function as a tool for knowing what your fans are interested in, it also serves as a great way to reexamine your design. Are people focusing on the parts of your pages you want them to pay attention to? CrazyEgg puts a whole new spin on traditional graph-and-stat analytics.
A solid analytics recipe employs a traditional measurement tool with basic traffic information via charts and graphs, a Twitter-specific platform and some additional third-party platform that works a new angle on data analysis to provide for a more well-informed and dynamic examination of activity. Cheers!