Click on the Best Story: Measuring Social Media

Because every click we make on the Internet leaves a data trail, it’s possible to use a number of tools to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing. Social media metrics are both qualitative (in the form of comments) or quantitative (measurable with a variety of tools).

To analyze sentiment qualitatively, organizations can use content analysis tools. For example, you can set a daily alert feed to search the “universe” (the web) or specific publications for terms. You can search for an organization’s name, its brands, and its competitors’ brands. To screen comments, you can use machine intelligence, but it’s probably preferable to hire someone who understands your organization’s goals to sift through what can amount to thousands of posts per day. With qualitative research, you can measure awareness, perception, preferences, consideration, trust level, commitment level, satisfaction level, and relationship level. In other words, you can measure brand and customer equity.

Traditional marketers love to measure clicks. Some popular analytics tools include Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and Twitter tools (such as Hootsuite). Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about visitors to a website. (Google is not entirely accurate; for example, it thinks I’m an 18- to 24-old man.) The service can track visitors and displays a high level dashboard for reviewing data, with more in-depth data available. You can use some of the following benchmarks to measure data: unique visitors, repeat visitors, length of time on the site, click throughs, registrations, and conversations. The question is how to determine success: How many clicks is good?

The company I work for hosts a blog and all employees are invited to participate. For the year 2011, one of my blog posts received the most traffic. The company is implementing numerous analytics tools for measuring its reach and success. It is generally understood in my industry (content development) that the best story gets the most traffic.