Social Media Analytics

A few years ago, it was common to think that a social media position in a company was held by some unpaid intern. Nowadays “social media manager” is recognized as a real, often difficult job. “Why would a company care about how it looks on Twitter or Facebook? It can’t be that hard, just give the passwords to the kid here for school,” people would think. Even now, on occasion I’ll hear someone talk about companies’ social medias as if it’s run by interns. Obviously, that’s not the case.

 

Social media analytics is basically public relations and brand management, updated. The purpose is to see what people say about your company, what they’re seeing by your company, and how the posts are being received. Most social media websites offer ways in-site to track analytics. Twitter, for example, allows you to “view tweet activity” on tweets sent out by your account. It’ll show you the total engagements (times people saw the tweet on twitter), total engagements (times people interacted with the tweet), likes, detail expands, profile clicks (times people clicked on the account’s name, @handle, or profile picture), retweets, replies, and link clicks. If a tweet did not receive any of these values, it is not shown. So, if a tweet has a hundred likes but no retweets, it will show the amount of likes but not mention retweets. Twitter also allows for paid promotions.

 

Besides in-site analytics, there are plenty of websites and services that provide analytics for you. Hootsuite is one such website. A paid service, Hootsuite is an advertising and analytics website. It allows you to publish (share and schedule engaging content to your profiles), engage (address incoming messages and deliver timely replies), monitor (stay informed about market trends and competitors), advertise (promote your organic content and manage paid ads), and analyze (measure your results across all social media networks). Hootsuite is integrated into over twenty social networks, including the big ones like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. Plans start at about $50 per month and increase in price.

 

By tracking analytics, companies get to see how they’re doing. They may see the audience they are reaching isn’t quite their target audience and shift marketing approaches to fix it. They can also measure their reach and make sure word is getting out at all. They can also make sure things being said about their companies are mostly positive, to keep their image clean.