How is Social Media activity measured?

(Image courtesy www.in-tuition.ie)

The question is a very good one. Obviously beyond the likes on Facebook and the follows on Twitter for example other activity is measured to determine the success of a small campaign. This activity is vital to companies for future strategy to allow them to adjust it or to scrap it and start again.

Looking at libraries for example ( but can apply across all industries) per infotoday.com "While trying to arrive at a workable means of measuring success with social media, you might benefit from applying the Trinity Approach for web analytics developed by Avinash Kaushik (www.kaushik.net/avinash/2006/08/trinity-a-mindset-strategic-approach.html). It arrives at actionable insights by focusing on three components:

1. Behavioral Data: This is the “what” of user behavior that librarians are used to collecting. How many blog posts? How many readers? What did the user do?

2. Outcome: This is the “so what” that gets to the heart of why you have an online presence. Take a look at your social pages and ask “so what?” Have your users and your library benefited? Have users found your applications and services useful and valuable? Are they more satisfied?

3. Experience: This is the “why they do it” question. At its most basic level, this is about listening to the voices of our users. What are they telling us? How are they experiencing our social media content and online services? We should invite comments and respond honestly, conduct surveys and act on the results, and let users help design our websites. By finding out “why they do it,” we can design and implement social media projects that result in optimal user behaviors and in win-win situations."

Monitoring the data is vitally important. To know what is the outcome of the company’s campaign, to be able to see the raw data, take the results on board and adjust going forward or start again. There is a lot of money tied up in such social media campaigns and if they "fall flat on their face" people are to be blamed and strategies need readjusting. There are various tools out there to allow this to happen. 

Hootsuite for example allows you to have several platforms on one dashboard and allows you to track tweets and posts and provides software to record and view statistics. Another piece of software available is Ubrvu which was acquired in January 2014 by Hootsuite. Per HOotsuite"uberVU’s product is a next-generation social analytics solution that turns data from blogs, forums and social networks into actionable business insightsuberVU helps businesses better understand their social audience by identifying key influencers on relevant topics, easily detecting real-time spikes in engagement (with insights on sentiment, location, and demographics), and highlighting important mentions." Even at a basic level seeing the number of likes on your Facebook page, or customer responses or the lack of response to a post will give you feels you can analyze and use going forward.

Knowing your audience is vitally important and trying to keep track of it is also important. In the company I work for we welcome comments on our twitter page and our Facebook page and we respond to them accordingly. Even in the digital age knowing your customer has not changed. It is vital to the success of a company and without them and adjusting your company’s needs accordingly a company will not get very far. 

http://blog.ubervu.com/ubervu-joining-forces-hootsuite.html