How effective are your social media marketing efforts? Social media analytics will keep you out of the guessing game when it comes to finding out what works and what doesn’t when promoting your business online.
Keeping track of what’s going on in the social media world can actually be a reputation-saver when you realize that customers are telling everybody but you about something that went wrong. It’s also a great way to identify influencers to approach for guest blogging, email marketing partnerships, and other marketing activities.
Measuring your social media influence and reputation is easier than you might think with the right social media analytics tools.
Social Media Analytics Tools
PeerIndex has recently been acquired by BrandWatch, so its tools are being integrated into Brandwatch’s platform. These tools are best known for being among the top ways to interactively search Twitter’s author database and provide an advanced way to analyze what influencers are saying about your niche. The old analytics tool PiQ is gone, but the PeerIndex/BrandWatch merger is worth watching for new independent tools for analyzing what people are saying about your niche and your particular business.
UberVU via Hootsuite helps you understand how people feel about your brand and then easily filter results by location, language, and gender—for a multi-dimensional view of your market segments. If the conversation around your brand starts trending negatively within a specific segment—such as women on Twitter, or Spanish-speaking men—you can act quickly to understand and manage the issue. UberVU provides compelling, easy-to-understand graphics that give you the information you need to act.
The Kred platform works the same way as Klout since it gives your social account a unique score. The score is based on the number of influencers and message outreach. Again, the influence score is calculated based on the number of tweets, mentions, and replies. Initially, it will display your global Cred by default. However, you also have the option of viewing a breakdown of your Kred score from a different field — just in case you want to improve your influence or reach to other professionals. Other users are also awarded points when endorsed with a Kred, and this will contribute to their global Kred Score. Maps showing geographic locations of where influencers are most influential are provided, and this feature is quite beneficial to businesses wanting to try new markets. Lastly, this tool has the ability to summarize your best-performing posts as well as users with whom you interacted the most.
Klear collects stats from all your social media accounts before working on them. You can integrate it with your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media accounts. Influencers can be searched based on their location, skill, or even names. For instance, if you are an HR professional, you can look up a potential candidate’s social influence by searching their name. Once you find them, you will be able to see which fields they are highly influential in, their top content as well as the top influencers in their network. The tool is free at the basic level. However, for a more in-depth analysis of your social media influence, you will need the Pro version.
There are analytics tools popping up all the time, and also many going by the wayside. FitSmallBusiness.com has a great reviews page, as well as a well-maintained graveyard page to help you stay current. Check them out on a regular basis.
The bottom line is that you want to know not just how effective your social media efforts are, but also what people are really saying about your business. This can actually give you a heads-up for when you might need to dump an element in your social media marketing that just isn’t working. That means these social media analytics tools can actually save you time, effort, and a fair bit of money simply by keeping you ahead of the game.
