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Social Equity: Social Media Monitoring

July 26, 2013/by Corey Padveen

How can social media monitoring generate Social Equity for your business?

Keeping an eye open for brand, competitor and industry news mentions is certainly a helpful practice, but you might be surprised to find out that social media monitoring also generates significant Social Equity for your business!

The ability to track news and stories as they are evolving opens up the opportunity to share content when it is at its most relevant to an engaged audience. This phenomenon also lends its hand to Social Care, the Social Equity of which was discussed here, and provides a first mover advantage, which, as we all know, can be highly beneficial to business.

Let’s take a look at how value is added to your business from social media monitoring.

Engagement

By monitoring your brand, competitors and the industry as a whole, you have the ability to pick up on conversations that you may not have even known were taking place.

Imagine monitoring your competition and finding that a significant proportion of the conversation is negative. By engaging with these users in real-time you have an ability to convert leads that may not have even known they were leads yet.

With regards to Social Care, social media monitoring allows you to monitor your brand and prevent issues from spiralling out of control. By engaging with users speaking negatively about your brand and addressing their issues, you prevent said issues from escalating beyond your control.

First Mover Advantage

In the field of Economics, the ability to capitalize on a market before anyone else has is among the greatest advantages. Social media monitoring provides this kind of value.

The ability to watch industry conversations and analyze trends gives rise to opportunities never before made available in business. Tailoring your strategies and marketing efforts to the observed discussions allows your brand to preempt major (or even minor) changes in preferences as opposed to making said changes in a reactionary way. The value this can have both in the short and long run is virtually unsurpassed.

Social media monitoring can be an exceptionally powerful activity, yet so few brands are properly taking advantage of it.

Are you monitoring your brand, competition and industry conversations on social media? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

10 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

April 3, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Social media is all about listening to what people are saying about you, and monitoring your brand online. These 10 free tools are a great asset for any social media marketer.

While all of these tools feature paid and enterprise versions, the basic, free versions contain a wealth of information and are fantastic resources for any marketer looking to optimize his or her social media marketing.

1. HootSuite

Many people know about HootSuite. And for anyone who has used it, it should come as no surprise that it sits on top of this list. There are plenty of neat listening and monitoring features available in HootSuite, including the ability to listen to keywords and geo-target your monitoring to see what people are saying in a given radius.

2. TwentyFeet

Ever wonder how you can optimize your social media activity for maximum results? TwentyFeet is a great tool to help you get there. TwentyFeet aggregates your social media activity and mentions from a number of social media channels and helps you determine where your social efforts are paying off and where you could use some help.

3. PeerIndex

PeerIndex is a great tool for those looking to build up their influence in certain categories. The tool helps users determine their level of authority in different niches based on conversations taking place and the level of engagement a brand has with its fans.

4. SocialMention

With regards to free listening tools, SocialMention is among the best. This tool allows you to listen for your brand, company, product, service, competitors or industry keyword mentions across a multitude of social media channels. Data is pulled from dozens of social media services to give you the most accurate, real-time information.

5. SocialPointer

Engagement with your audience is crucial to the success of a social media program, and SocialPointer allows you to track mentions of your brand on different channels and respond to your audience in real-time. This is a great tool for those engaging in social care (social media customer service).

6. HowSociable

Ever wonder if your social media marketing efforts are enough? HowSociable measures your social media activity and provides you with a score to help you determine whether or not you or your brand are engaging enough on social media to be successful.

7. Brand Monitor

For every conversation you find about your brand, there may be hundreds if not thousands more taking place across the social sphere. Brand Monitor helps you track all of the mentions of your brand on different social networks to give you a better feel of how the conversation is taking place and where you should be involving yourself to improve your brand’s online reputation.

8. Kred/Klout

Kred and Klout are two scoring services that review your social media activity, engagement, influence, authority, etc. and provide you with a score that tells you how you rank compared to others on social media.

9. SocialBro

SocialBro is a great tool when it comes to determining your influence and success on Twitter. The insights offered drill deep into your follower lists and provide helpful analytics to determine if your Twitter marketing is paying off, if you are targeting the right audiences and whom you influence.

10. Topsy

Topsy is a real-time social media search engine. Configure your account to pull data only relevant to your industry, brand, product, competitors, etc. and receive plenty of real-time information that you can use to improve the success of your social media marketing.

As we always point out, these tools are a great asset to compliment your social media strategy, but real success is ultimately going to come from a well developed and properly implemented social media strategy. Tools alone cannot run a social media program. People are out there talking and you need to be able to use these tools to listen and then properly engage with your audience.

Which of these tools have you used? Which ones are you going to try? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media Monitoring with Google Analytics

February 5, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Measure the success of your social media marketing with the help of social media monitoring in Google Analytics.

There are plenty of features in Google Analytics that most users never bother learning about. One of the major categories where many of these features exist when it comes to social media monitoring. You can monitor a ton of social media data using Google Analytics – and there is so much built in that even beginners can do it!

Below are a few ways you can use Google Analytics to monitor traffic from your social media accounts and measure the success of certain social media programs while determining ways in which to improve on others to capitalize on all that social media has to offer when it comes to getting found.

1. Identify the Sources of Your Social Traffic

Watching the visits counter on Google Analytics can be extremely rewarding when you start to see the numbers rise. But in order to incorporate these results into your strategies, you need to know where this traffic is coming from. Luckily, Google Analytics has a feature built in that shows you the sources of this traffic, including social media. In your dashboard, on the left hand side, you’ll see the Traffic Sources tab. Under there, you’ll see two areas that will help you determine which social networks are driving traffic: Sources and Social.

To take it one step further, under your Sources menu, you can search by Referrals to see exactly which sites are driving traffic, and to narrow it down by social alone, you can select the Network Referrals tab underneath Social.

Knowing the sources of your social media referral traffic will help you do two things. First, you will able to see which social media networks are driving the most referral traffic to your corporate site. Second, you will be able to see where your social media efforts need improvement in order to drive increased traffic from those networks. One tip that will help is if you look at your Content tab in Google Analytics. It is there that you will be able to see which pages are being viewed the most, and, with a little tweaking, you will be able to see what the sources of the traffic on those individual pages are. If, say, you have a blog and notice that this is the most popular page on your site. If you see that much of your referral traffic to your blog is coming from LinkedIn but little comes from Twitter, you might want to consider promoting your blog a little more in Twitter.

2. Pay Attention to Mobile

As we all know, social media interaction on mobile devices is becoming increasingly popular; the numbers prove it. Therefore, it is important that we appeal to the mobile market be it from custom apps to mobile-friendly options on our websites. Now, while this should be a consideration, it is always important to do a cost-benefit analysis of any business decision. And in order for us to measure these benefits, we will need to measure how much of our social media traffic is coming from mobile.

In the Audience tab, there is a Mobile option. It is there that we can see what portion of our audience is coming from mobile.

To see if they are being driven via social referral, we need to create an advanced segment that segments only traffic from our social media networks. In order to do this, we follow a few simple steps from Google. First, we select Advanced Segments in the top left hand bar beneath the dashboard title. Then we create a new one inserting only those sources we wish to view. It should look something like this:

From there we can segment our mobile traffic to view only those hits coming from social referral on a mobile device.

3. Set Social Goals

Here is where things become a little more customized. In order to measure the success of certain social media campaigns using Google Analytics, you are going to need to set up Goals. Goals in Google Analytics can be a tremendously valuable tool. Not only can they help you see where you are finding success with social media campaigns, but you can also use them to measure ROI from social media. As we all know, ROI is the key to business decisions, and as marketers, we know that it is often the one mitigating factor when it comes to C-level decision-makers moving ahead with or shutting down social media programs.

Goals are set up in the Conversions tab of your Google Analytics dashboard. Under that heading, the first tab is Goals, where you can select the “Set up goals” option. Goals can range anywhere from a visitor downloading a white paper to making a purchase. It all depends on what you are defining as a conversion for a given campaign. Say for example we want to set up a simple goal whereby a conversion is made when a visitor from social media visits more than two pages. First we define the goal parameters.

Now that the goal has been defined, we can move on to segmenting the traffic so that only traffic vis social referral is measured for this particular goal. On the Overview page for our goals, we can select the advanced segment we defined earlier and apply it to any of our defined goals. After that, we can simply monitor the traffic coming from social that achieves the goal of multiple page visits.

These are just a few of the amazing things you can do with your Google Analytics account when it comes to monitoring your social media activity. There are plenty more – albeit slightly more complicated – features that can help you optimize every one of your social media channels.

Take a look at some of the social media traffic on your Google Analytics account and let us know if you have noticed anything particularly interesting in the comments below or on Twitter!

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