Social media receives a massive amount of attention on the web and attracts a great deal of interest from marketers, too. The primary complaint of those who invest seems to be consistent: it's hard to measure the impact to the bottom line. On this point, I must concede - while social's an exciting new area for online marketers, its value isn't always commensurate with the effort required and even when it is, it's tough to prove that point to clients or executives asking for justification.
This post is here to help. In it, I'll try to take a brief look at the topics surrounding this problem and offer some solutions, tools and methodologies to make things easier.
Why + Where Social Matters
Social media has an analytics problem. Whereas many other sources - ads, organic search, referrals, bookmarks - all drive traffic that directly converts (i.e. results in a purchase/signup action), social traffic is very temporal. Visitors from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, StumbleUpon, et al. are known to visit a page and quickly depart. This leaves marketers struggling to understand the value of these channels. High bounce rates, low browse rates and awful conversion rates make social the black sheep of the referring traffic sources.
I'll try to explain the problem, and the reason why social still matters, despite these poor metrics, in visual form:
On the web, visitors are rarely buyers (or "conversion action" takers of any kind) on a first visit. The web's a tool for discovery, research and investigation and people employ it that way. They browse around, find things that are interesting, discover potential needs or desires, further examine the options and eventually make a purchase decision.
For most, the web is less like the checkout aisle at the grocery store (stocked with tempting treats and not-so-tempting magazines, at least IMO) and more like the considered purchase of a grill, television set or automobile. Social media isn't the deal closer - it's the channel that creates potential for a future conversion. Social media can create brand familiarity and drive visitors to content that further draws them in, but it very rarely directly answers an expressly-stated need.
Let's take a look at a typical buying cycle for someone who takes a free trial of SEOmoz's software and look where social falls in the process:
Twitter and Facebook are early on in the process, likely prior to this customer's realization of need or knowledge of the product. Social channels are likely to be partially responsible for thousands of free trials at SEOmoz, but given the tools currently available, we'd have a very tough time figuring out just how much social participation and presence brought to the company.
Another great illustration of this phenomenon comes via Eloqua's Content Grid, which explores the types of content shared on various channels (including social media) and its impact on the buying process:
Social media does lots of good things for businesses and brands on the web:
- Drives traffic
- Builds brand familiarity
- Creates positive associations with the brand
- Delivers social proof via the people sharing the content and discussing the brand
- Attracts brand followers and evangelists who can help spread the word
The Atlantic recently had an article talking about why good advertising works, and many of the same principles apply to social media but are, in my opinion, even more powerful because they're not interruption-based, but inbound and organic. If 10 of the people I follow on Twitter or Google+ start sharing links to a new startup's website, I'm going to be far more engaged, impressed and enticed than if that same startup put banner ads on some of the websites I browse. Both create brand awareness, but social is more personal, more trustworthy and more likely to capture my click.
We know that social is a softer, more-difficult-to-measure traffic source, but we're inbound marketers and that means we can't live without data :-) So let's explore some of the ways we can monitor this channel.
Which Social Metrics to Track
In the social media analytics world, there are several key types of metrics we're interested in tracking:
- Traffic data - how many visits and visitors did social drive to our sites?
- Fan/follower data - how many people are in our various networks and how are they growing?
- Social interaction data - how are people interacting with, sharing and re-sharing our content on social networks?
- Social content performance - how is the content we're producing on social sites performing?
Getting the right metrics to answer these questions requires segmenting by network. Not every question will have direct answers in the data, so we may need to make assumptions or inferences.
Facebook offers a relative wealth of data about nearly all the metrics we care about through their built-in product for brand pages, Facebook Insights:
Here you can track key metrics over time, including the size of your fanbase, the reach and effectiveness of your content, the quantity of likes and shares of your content, demographics of your fans and more.
Insights also has a very unique and powerful feature - integration on your website. Using a small bit of Javascript code, you can embed the Facebook Insights functionality on your site and receive information about all the users visiting your pages that are logged into Facebook. Since it's been well-covered on SEOmoz (and around the web), I won't dwell too much on Insights other than to say it's the most robust of the built-in, social platform analytics tools by far.
More on Insights:
- Official Insights Page on Facebook
- 4 Facebook Marketing Tactics You Might Not Know About
- 6 Areas You Need to Monitor for Effective Messaging
Twitter and Facebook are likely to be the largest two social networks for referring traffic to most sites (StumbleUpon purportedly sends more outbound traffic, but is more of a discovery/browsing engine than a true social network), but while Facebook has relatively sophisticated analytics built into their platform, Twitter does not. This means tracking growth of metrics over time requires third-party tools (or a lot of time collecting data manually), which I'll cover in a section below.
The key metrics I care about on Twitter are:
- Followers (and follower growth over time) - the unique number of Twitter users who've "followed" my account
- Active Followers - the number of followers who've logged into or used a feature of Twitter in the past 30 days (those that have not are likely inactive or non-human accounts). This is challenging to get, and requires software that runs through your followers and determines which are actively using via the API. Some third party tools discussed below will show this information.
- @ Replies - the number of tweets sent that begin with my account name
- @ Mentions - a tweet that includes my account name, but uses it inside the tweet, rather than at the beginning, meaning others on Twitter can see the tweet by default, rather than only those who follow both accounts
- Brand Mentions - tweets that contain the brand/account name but don't use the @ symbol
- Domain/URL Mentions - tweets that include a link that contains my brand name/domain name. These now include, by default, any shortened URL that contains the brand/domain name as Twitter is automatically parsing the final destination URL for matches to the query.
- Direct Retweets - the quantity of retweets (using Twitter's native retweet button/functionality) appeared on the service
- RTs & Vias - the quantity of tweets that contained an RT or via of my account. These are similar to direct retweets, but aren't necessarily counted by Twitter's automatic RT system because they contain a modification of the original message and appear to come from a unique source.
- Best Performing Content - the content I shared on Twitter that earned the most clicks, retweets and shares. This is currently unavailable directly through Twitter, but some third-party tools will display it.
- Direct Traffic + Non-Twitter.com Drivers - sources that sent traffic to my site via Twitter's ecosystem, even if they come from desktop clients or other third-party software sources. Thanks to a recent change made by Twitter, these will now show up (mostly) as coming from T.co (Twitter's shortener).
In addition to these relatively standard metrics, I'd love to be able to see the impact of my interactions in Twitter on follower count, engagement, etc. For example, if my account sends a tweet that earns me 100 new followers, it would be terrific to see that growth, but currently isn't possible (to my knowledge).
All of these metrics are showing the growth, reach and traffic-level impact of my Twitter activity, but none of them help with the full-lifecycle tracking shown above. In an ideal world, I'd want to see the bottom-line impact of my Twitter interactions, but this is very challenging to achieve. Luckily, Google's Analytics evangelist, Avinash Kaushik, wrote a great post on tracking Twitter here, which can serve as further reference.
It's often mentioned that in analytics, nothing is worth tracking unless it can be used to take action and improve. For the metrics above, the primary action you're tracking is your own and the key to taking better actions is comparing successful interactions, tweets and content against less successful ones to determine what has the best impact on growing your audience, bringing visits to your site and, eventually, driving conversion actions.
LinkedIn functions like a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. Connections require acceptance from both sides, but public entities (like company pages) and groups can be followed. LinkedIn tends to be a great social network for those who are recruiting talent or involved in B2B sales and marketing. It's often far less effective as a pure consumer/B2B channel.
Like Facebook, LinkedIn has some built-in analytics for businesses, one for individual profiles, and lots of data points that are useful to track, including:
- Company Page Views + Uniques - these track the number of times your company's LinkedIn profile has been viewed over time and the quantity of unique visitors to the page
- Quantity of Followers - as with Twitter, individuals can "follow" a brand account on LinkedIn and receive status updates in their "updates" stream. The more followers, the greater your ability to reach more people on LinkedIn with the content you share there
- Connections - The quantity of unique connections for an individual profile on LinkedIn is a worthwhile metric to track, but unfortunately, I couldn't find built-in functionality to graph that data, just the raw, current count (on the "Network Statistics" page) and some data about the geographic and industry reach of those connections.
- Messages and Invitations - the number of invitations and messages to your account (I clearly need to find a free hour or two and comb through mine - sorry if I haven't added you yet). This, too, lacks any graphing or temporal analysis capability.
- Profile Views - how many people have looked at your profile over time and some data about who they are (if they're a "1st" connection, LinkedIn will show their name; if not, they'll display their company or industry)
- Top Keywords - a list of the top keywords users on LinkedIn searched for prior to discovering your profile.
- Content Shares - tragically, I couldn't find a way to measure or record the quantity of status updates/shares you've sent out over LinkedIn nor the number of "likes" you've received on the service... Hopefully they'll add those soon.
- Traffic - LinkedIn isn't a huge traffic driver for most, but for certain B2B sites, it can be relatively substantial and the quality is often higher than other social sources. Here's a screenshot from Moz's Google Analytics
Over the past month, LinkedIn's been our 4th largest referrer (since referrals from seomoz.org and pro.seomoz.org are technically internal referrers); not too shabby!
Few third-party tools exist to help with measurement of LinkedIn, but over time, I hope to see more tools in the social media analytics field achieve success with Twitter and Facebook and expand to LinkedIn and beyond.
Google+
Google's new social network is still relatively young, but given Google's intent to make it part of the signals that influence web search rankings and considering the dramatic growth (to 25 million+ members) in the first two months after launch, it's already worthy of marketers' attention.
Unfortunately, the network doesn't yet have any sophistication around metrics tracking, and very few third-party apps have integrated Google+ (an API and oAuth functionality still do not exist in robust ways). Despite this, there's plenty of interesting metrics worth tracking, it's just insanely frustrating because even raw counts are unavailable for many of these. Hopefully, Google will add some soon (heck, if you work on the Google+ team and are doing analytics for users/brands, please consider this list!):
- Number of Followers - This, at least, is possible. Technically, on Google+, these aren't called "followers" but instead use the more awkward nomenclature "have you in circles." You can see this on your profile page.
- +Name Mentions - It's tough to even reach the list of these (screenshot below), and, unfortunately, there's no raw quantity that I could find in the service, making it nearly impossible (and certainly unpragmatic) to track the number of named mentions you receive on Google+ today.
- Brand Mentions - Another bummer; I'm unaware of any way to find this through Google+ currently. However, you can use Google's "site:plus.google.com" search modifier and query for your brand name with date restrictions, as per this example query (illustrated below):
- Content Shares, Content +1s, Link Shares, Link +1s - These would all be excellent to add to the list, but tragically have no way of extracting data from the current Google+ system (to my knowledge, anyway). Hopefully in the future they'll arrive.
- +1s of Your Site's Content - This is currently unavailable in Google+, but is possible to track via Google's Webmaster Tools. The tool gives really excellent analytics data on the impact of +1s, the quantity and where they come from and point to:
- Traffic - Google+ is already a traffic powerhouse for many tech-forward brands and those that reach early adopters in general, especially considering their relatively small social market share (1/8 the size of Twitter in total users, probably smaller in actives). Here's a screenshot of Moz's traffic (for the record, they're our 9th largest referrer of visits to the site over the past 30 days):
Perhaps due to privacy issues, Google+ uses a single referring URL for all traffic, helping to consolidate it in analytics reports but making it frustrating to determine which shares/users/links sent what quantities or value of visits.
Reddit, StumbleUpon, Quora, Yelp, Flickr, and YouTube
Depending on the quantity and value of the traffic that other social networks send, there may indeed be additional metrics worth tracking. For SEOmoz, StumbleUpon, Slideshare, Reddit and Quora are all in our top 50 referrers, and each sends 500+ visits/month. These are likely worth some investment on the metrics and effort front, and if small quantities of contribution/participation yield large returns, more investment is likely warranted.
Blogs + Forums
The world of social started out as one where discussion sites (forums, Q+A, bulletin boards and the like) and the blogosphere reigned supreme. Eventually, consolidation and massive adoption of the major networks (those mentioned above) took over the hearts and minds of the press, but the social web is still very much alive in the blogosphere and forum world.
Marketers have massive opportunities in these spaces, too. At SEOmoz, we have tens of thousands of visits each week from blogs and discussion sites of all sizes, and participation/interaction with those sources often yields fantastic results in referral traffic, mindshare and links. Many brands do likewise, hiring community managers or evangelists to engage in the sites where industry topics are discussed and building up strong, recognizable profiles that help bring awareness and produce traffic+links.
Thus, as responsible inbound marketers, it's our job to measure these channels and quantify their impact.
- Site/Brand Mentions - mentions of a site or brand name, e.g. "seomoz" or "www.seomoz.org" in the blog/discussionsphere can help lead you to content and conversations worthy of engagement, as well as tracking the quantities of those mentions (and possibly the sentiment as well) over time. Google Alerts and Blogscape are potentially worth looking at to help monitor these mentions.
- Links - direct links are nice because they appear either in link-tracking tools like Google Webmaster Tools, Open Site Explorer or Majestic OR directly in your web analytics (if they send any traffic). Noting new referral sources (in quantity and location) and applying metrics (I like Domain Authority personally, but of course, I'm biased)
- Traffic - a must-have for any inbound channel, visit-tracking is the most simple metric here (though honestly, I wish it could be tracked alongside the quantitative metrics for mentions/links and stats like follow vs nofollow / DA / # of linking root domains / etc. to help give a sense of the SEO value, too).
For any inbound marketing channel (social or otherwise) you're considering, I really like this process:
Losing a few hours to channels that don't provide value is minimal next to the value of discovering and participating on those that do!
If you're curious about this process and want to dive deeper, this presentation may be helpful.
Tools for Measuring Social Media Metrics
The number of tools available to track social media has grown exponentially over the last 3 years, and while I'll be unable to list all of them, this will hopefully provide a good sample set:
- PostRank - great for tracking RSS feed content's performance in the social world, though with the purchase by Google, Facebook data is now gone (which is the largest network by far, thus rendering the service a bit less-than-valuable, IMO).
- Bit.ly - excellent for tracking clickthroughs on content from any source on any device or medium. It's frustrating to have an extra layer of analytics required, but given the non-reporting of many desktop and mobile clients, bit.ly's tracking has become a must for those seeking accurate analytics on the pages they share.
- Radian6 - probably the best known of the social media monitoring tools, Radian6 is geared toward enterprises and large budgets, but has impressive social tracking, sentiment analysis and reporting capabilities.
- Backtype - another fantastic tool for tracking social metrics that may be lost to acquisition by Twitter. I've got my fingers crossed that they're planning to build
- Social Mention - Enables "Google Alerts"-like updates from social media sources (Twitter in particular) along with several plugins and search functions.
- Raven Tools - A toolset that offers both search and social tracking functionality, Raven helps track many of the basic metrics from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and is likely expanding into other networks in the future.
- Converseon - A very impressive social and web monitoring tool out of NYC, Converseon, like Radian6, is geared toward enterprises, but offers human-reviewed sentiment classification and analysis - a very powerful tool for those seeking insight into their brand perception on the social web.
- Pagelever - specifically focused on tracking Facebook interactions and pages, they provide more depth and data than the native Insights functionality.
- TwitterCounter - a phenomenal tool for monitoring the growth of Twitter accounts over time (it tracks latently, offering historical data for many accounts even if you haven't used it before). Upgrading to "premium" provides analytics on mentions and retweets as well.
- FollowerWonk - technically more of a social discovery tool, Wonk lets you search and find profiles via a "bio" search function, but also offers very cool analytics on follower overlap and opportunity through a paid credits model.
- Social Bakers - stats monitoring for Twitter and Facebook (and several types of unique Facebook sources like Places and Apps)
- Crowdbooster - more than a raw analytics tool, Crowdbooster focuses on providing tips such as timing and suggested users for engagement to help improve your social reach.
- Awe.sm - link and content tracking, along with traditional social metrics analytics; they've also got a very pretty interface.
- TwentyFeet - aggregation of metrics and a datastream from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
- SimplyMeasured - reporting via Excel exports, including some very cool streams of data.
- Most Shared Posts - a plugin for Wordpress from Tom Anthony that enables Wordpress users to see the posts that are most shared on Google +1, Twitter and Facebook.
If you have tools you love, please feel free to add them in the comments (links are certainly welcome, too). OnReact in the comments noted this great post on tools specifically for Google+, some of which can be useful to gather the data above. Several other tools mentioned in the comments (apologies for my initial overlook):
Obviously, there's a ton of metrics and data worthy of attention, and no single platform to combine them (at least, not yet). For now, marketers are stuck with a combination of tools, manual collection, visit tracking via analytics and plenty of questions about the value of social media. However, much like the SEO space, I expect that we'll see an increasing growth of metrics, tools, sophistication from marketers and value derived through participation and network growth. It's exciting to be an early adopter in this space :-)
Rand, whenever you come out with a post like this I have just one word to describe myself: dumbfounded.
Great post, surely one that will become an evergreen for all the tips, hints, tools and tricks you share.
Ah! and a big time-waster (I'd like to know how much time people has spent trying all the tools listed).
Ciao :)
Fantastic information Rand. About the closest thing I've read / seen to an understandable explanation of click / conversion attribution too. Shall be reading it aloud to clients forthwith!
Yes this is very good information on SMM.
Thanks Rand - that is a comprehensive, well thought and (for me anyway timely post - you have just saved me a little bit of work!).
Tracking your social media efforts can be tough but a well thought out plan (and not diving in headfirst) is an absolute must for any business no matter what size you are...big or small.
I would add to the list - Visibli - whose analytics are pretty nifty for quick overviews.
Agreed - just met with Saif from Visibli this morning (he was randomly in Seattle), and I think I might write something about them when they launch some new features publicly. It's pretty impressive stuff.
New features, sounds exciting Rand, looking forward to what else they can offer!
Hey Rand, In regards to "Visibli" while I was digging around trying to solve an ROI problem with my SM tracking and team. I went to check this company tool you mentioned (although this was 3 years ago!), and the link seems to take me to a Wordpress style template filled with nothing? It looks as though it might have been abandoned, company was bought or closed down? Might want to remove the link to clean up the suggestion of checking them out. Just a heads up ;) Thanks.
I am always wondering how you always come up with great informations just like that.
Excellent tools list at the end.
This post arrives at the right moment: when i'm preparing my next conf at "salon du ecommerce paris" on this topic: SEO & social media
Thank you!
That said, i'm not totally agree with this point : "social traffic is very temporal". It this seems true on news websites or blogs but in an ecommerce perspective that ain't right.
We've observed that when we run a contest on facebook for example we attract a lot of new visitors. In addition, the total number of facebook visitors between the two period (before & after the contest) increase between 10% to 30% and that social trafic remains steady...during 60 days (minimum). Thus i can conclude that, for an ecommerce websites, social trafic is not so temporal maybe because of "brand equity"
Have I missed out? Is there a social media tracking included in the pro membership?
Excellent post Rand, sent this one over to our social media coordinator at my company, I think this is exactly what we needed to dive more into social media performance tracking. Measuring KPIs in social media is quite a challenge, but so easy with all the information laid out in this one post, thanks!
Wow, great digest!
You may also want to check out Engagor.com. It took them just two minutes to discover, comment and retweet after I mentioned them in my post on Social Media Monitoring Tools.
There seem to be hundreds of tools out there...
Thanks for mentioning us again! ;-)
--- Engagor ---
Woohoo! You guys are indeed awesome in social media monitoring!!
I'm impressed ;-)
My own monitoring is not so elaborate, I just happened to stumble over your comment. But yes, this earns you yet another commendation on my blog...
And here's a new comparison of low cost social media monitoring tools. I evaluated Raven, uberVU, Engagor and BrandWatch.
Read the full report here:
https://e-byz.ch/tools/social-media-monitoring/social-media-monitoring-tools-raven-ubervu-engagor-brandwatch
I don't like anything spammy but just wanted to let you and your readers know that Convertro essentially tracks all visits to a website regardless of whether they are last and gives credit back to those clicks that drove the conversion. One of the most common things our clients see is an increase in the number of conversions coming from social referrals, twitter and facebook specifically.
Rand! Awesome post. Good to shed light on this problem. I think the social media industry is maturing. Compared to just a year ago, many of the solutions you mentioned today are showing a lot of promise. Beyond analytics, for many on the front lines managing social, being able to quickly act on the analytics and adjust their real-time social media strategy is going to be key. That's where we want to come in. =).
- Ricky
CEO, Crowdbooster.com
SharedCount is another useful tool for tracking social shares of content. It's not always 100% accurate, but it's close. Great information.
This is such a valuable post. Thanks a lot for this.
Thanks Rand - great post. Some senior executives struggle to appreciate how generating traffic, leads and conversions works within social media channels.
Using social media to raise brand awareness is even less well understood and supported - because it's difficult to measure and report on.
Traditionally, marketers were happy to blow huge budgets on brand campaigns with no hope of ever understanding the results. But now digital channels are bringing accountability to campaigns, some execs are experiencing tunnel-vision in the way they regard success.
I really liked what Avinash said in his post here: https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-tips-identify-website-goal-values/
"I walk over to the Finance department and ask them for the value of one TV ad impression. They have that number. That is what they use to allocate the TV budget (the $$$ spent by the GRPs for the ad, or another faith based number of how many people "possibly" watched the ad, used to computed $ per TV ad impression).
Use that number as your goal value. After all, someone came to the website willingly and watched your TV spot! You know that these people were not in the bathroom when your ad aired on TV. They were there on your site. They hit Play and Pause and Next!"
You can find brand mentions on Google+ easily with this custom search engine: https://gplussearch.com/
I see 10 pages of "seomoz" mentions. Check out my list of Google+ tools for more useful lttle helpers like this one.
https://www.seoptimise.com/blog/2011/08/more-than-30-google-tools-extensions-tutorials-and-other-resources.html
Very cool! Thanks for sharing that - going to add a link to your post in mine.
Interestingly in a post on KPIs, KPIs are not mentioned anywhere. All i see is tons of clickstream data which at least won't make me happy. While it is always good to know that people are engaging with my website, sharing contents etc, but then on a second thought "so what". What I am going to do about it if I can't measure the impact of these social interactions on the bottomline. Majority of tools and metrics mentioned in this post just tell you only one thing 'what'. For an average Joe, analytics is all about 'what' (clickstream analysis). People liked my content, tweet it, mentioned it, puked on it ...... So what? Unless I can't find out that these many tweets resulted in these many conversions or these many facebook likes resulted in these many sales, the data is good only for entertainment. To determine the economic value of this social data, I integrate it with my analytics tool like Google Analytics, omniture, web trends etc.
Google does this job really well via social interactions analytics. Through Goal and ecommerce social reports, I can measure the impact of number of tweets, +1s, likes etc on conversions and revenue. As long as a social plugin provides a call back function you can interact with its API and track the social data via Google Analytics. So for twitter, i won't bother about followers, active followers or replies. These metrics are good only for ego boost. I would be bothered about 'converted follows' and 'converted tweets'. A converted follow is a following which resulted in a conversion (revenue, goal conversion). Similalry a converted tweet is a tweet which resulted in a conversions. For facebook, Google + and others, i would look for 'converted likes', 'converted +1s' etc. Then we have this multi channel funnel analytics which can tell you how different social media channels is helping in your sales and conversions. Explaining multi channel funnels any further is beyond the scope of this comment but i would highly recommed you to check out the Avinash's latest blog post on this.
So... I think maybe we're not on the same page about:
A) What I'm trying to suggest analytics/KPIs/measurement for in this post and
B) The definition of KPIs
For those who invest in social as a brand-building, brand-awareness and traffic-growth channel, I'm fairly sure these are KPIs (the Key Performance Indicators). However, as I noted at the top of the post, they don't track conversions, and much of social traffic does not immediately or even relatively quickly convert to a paid user, a signup or a capture.
I left a comment above regarding https://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-tips-identify-website-goal-values/ and Avinash's "faith based" approach, which I actually like (despite being an SEO and direct marketer who loves direct conversions). If you're thinking only in terms of driving actions or conversions to your site, social is going to be too early in the funnel to see much ROI, but I think as marketers, we need to think more broadly and more long term.
All that said, I think you have an excellent suggestion in regards to multi-channel attribution and if I'd had more time/energy, I would have liked to include that stuff at the end of the post.
Amazing, thanks for this!
I definately believe in value of social discovery. Seeing that either your friends, professional connections or others in the general public are sharing or talking about your product/service on social networks ad such value and a new found credibility to your brand.
This is so difficult to measure, but it's power is under apprecaited by many non marketeers.
I signed up for the pro tool through seing your blogs tweeted by connections of mine. I enjoyed the blogs and through there found the pro trial.
Safe to say im now a paying customer, so heres a +1 to social. It works, we just need better tools to measure it.
Hi Mr Fishkin, I bought your book, 'The Art of SEO' last year......bloody awsome! I have recommended it to at least 3 people who actually get what I am talking about! ( and you and your collegues!) Your book has helped me and my site, improve it's organic rankings and my understanding of this particular sphere of business marketing. However..I have gone through the gauntlet of employing 'SEO companies' in Australia and have ended up being burnt! losing thousands in dollars and time lost. I am stuck...I have finally reached the second page of Google for just about every keyword I can imagine but I just can't seem to improve on that......even after months of effort. I don't know what to do and I am wondering if you may be able to suggest anything. I am not sure if it is o.k to put my site details here as it could be percieved as self serving, so perhaps my email will suffice.
[email protected]
I look forward to hearing from you and keep up the great work! ( my girlfriend had to hide your book from me whilst I was reading it so I would put it down!)
Kind Regards,
Kitch
Bam! The Value of Social Media Demysitified! I'll return to this post many times for insight. Thanks for throwing down Rand.
Great articles; more on the monitoring and analysis of brand mentions than on business KPIs but it's interesting.
Rand, you mention SimplyMeasured as a tool but I would strongly recommend 2 of their free tools that are honestly great to use : Rowfeeder (great way to extract Twitter/Facebook feed based on KWs into Google Docs spreadsheets and fantastic pre-build excel dashboards) and Export.ly (allow you to extract data again into spreadsheets).
What I find the most imporant in any given tool is the ability to re-work the data in Excel as it's where to true analysis is.
Any comments are more than welcome :) !
Rand -- this is one of those bookmark, share EVERYWHERE kind of posts. Not only for the value in listing the latest tools that can help but also to compare against our current reporting and see what we might be missing or undervaluing. It's easy to get caught up in the data though, mostly because the wrangling of these numbers requires you to access disparate reporting systems, so it's important to know which KPIs are important to your business specifically, otherwise you could spend days digging deep. That being said, would LOVE for LinkedIn would provide "LinkedIn Insights for your Site"...
Also wanted to give you a heads up on a couple tools you might want on your radar:
Formulists (https://formulists.com) is one of my favorite tools to keep track of those Twitter followers that are not active. Can segment your followers/who you follow in a number of ways, and I tend to do a quarterly weeding of the folks that are no longer participating on Twitter.
Also, have you taken a look at ShareAndTell (https://pro.shareandtell.com)? I work with them, and they help businesses track who is sharing your content and engaging with your brand so that you can smartly reward these people on a 1-1 level. Right now the platform helps you produce sweepstakes & instant rewards for your site & Facebook and track what kind of traffic is resulting from those that participate in your promotion, but we've got a lot more on the way.
This post has inspired me to run with a social media campaign and spend some $$ on it.
Now that I know how to measure results. Found myself a smart SMM person who can monitor and actively run with it. Here is my 1st campaign for a Custom Mattress www.componentbed.com/get-social/
Just not sure how mattress shoppers take to Social Media?? Any thoughts?
Oh my goodness Rand!
I'm going to have to take a few hours off for Tool Time!
Seriously, putting all of these together with a clear description of where they fit and what they can and cannot do is a HUGE win.
Thanks for taking the time to do that and in the process give us another great resource for analyzing and communicating results where it is possible.
Between this post and the 10 Ugly SEO Tools that Actually Rock from Cyrus, its one of those weeks when I start to think Tools might almost be better than Chococate! :-)
Sha
It would be great to have an update on this post on Social Media tracking.
Superb post on Tracking the benefits from social media.
Thank you for this. We have been considering how to analyze our social media platforms in a way that would be meaningful to our powers that be. Much appreciated.
Though tracking and analysing tools are of varied options. When we test any site like textilesinfomediary.com . The result appearing in different tools are varied in nature and never unique. This situation puts question on authenticy of outcome at a given time and the tools which we have used. For example hitcounters are different.
Hi, great post. I was wondering if it is possible to track if a FB page sent out my link to their fans. Right now it is displayed as referral source from Facebook but not letting me know exactly which page or source it came from. Kinda difficult to say thank you to those guys that do.
I am almost shocked nowadays if I go to a site and do not see the SEOmoz Ad(#4) following me around! Great article though!
It's all based on your Cookies :-)
"LinkedIn tends to be a great social network for those who are recruiting talent or involved in B2B sales and marketing. It's often far less effective as a pure consumer/B2B channel."
Excellent article with really informative statistics. I agree that LinkedIn is not ideal for B2B companies - it focuses more on personal careers and on networking with business professionals, not really on business-to-business trade and lead generation.
I'm from MyTradeZone.com, which is B2B social networking website that helps businesses connect with other businesses to find deals and generate leads. Any business can sign up free and create their company profile, add their products & services, and follow other companies.
This is probably one of the most comprehensive posts I've read on social metrics and gaining insight into social data. Very nicely done, Rand - thank you!
There are so many tools out there but it’s important to find one that best fits a companies’ business needs.
Thanks also for providing a great list of SM monitoring tools. There are so many out there and each does something different, but it's important to find one that best fits one's business needs. My company, Visible Technologies, didn't make your list, but we also offer a solution called Visible Intelligence - an enterprise-ready social media monitoring and analytics platform. Feel free to test drive if you desire.
Again, thanks for a great post!
- Ellen Enrico
Director, Community Outreach, Visible Technologies.
thanks for this posts, it's very useful...i'm learning a lot with all the info and can't wait for the next one.
Hi Rand, I'll take you up on the offer to add a link to our tool, Social Snap (www.socialsnap.com), which is a mashup of social mention data, web analytics data, and data from social channels (Twitter, FB, etc.). Snap provides much of what you describe above, and more, in a single interface. Hope you will check out the product features on our site (www.socialsnap.com) or visit us at the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit in New York (part of Data Driven Business Week). Thanks for a great post which is very descriptive in many ways of the product we've built.
Great post! Looks like a good answer for my clients who keep saying that social media are just "nice-to-haves"... Thanks for this!
There are many tools but few only matter. With almost all of them, tracking remains a big blackbox.
Companies investing in social media are taking a leap of faith, which should not be the case. At SocialAppsHQ, we discovered several companies that are generating real and meaning business.
e.g. A wine company in India generated 3,000 leads from Facebook, out of which 300 subscribed to their lifetime membership A restaurant company in UK tracked number of calls made via Facebook (used a special tracking phone number and put it on SocialAppsHQ's restaurant app) and they reported getting 5-7 calls per day. (Not sure about incremental nature)
Early indicators are positive but we need more ways to find details on interaction, enhance the meaning of 'like', incremental nature of traffic (please read interesting reports by Spinback and TicketMaster) etc.
I'm really shocked because there are so many tools that it can be really difficult to find the good one. It would be very helpful if you can, in further posts, to select what do you think is the ONE for developing better whatever action. If we must trying all what you recommends we can desperate ;)
Thanks for sharing!
Great article. Hoping in time we get more tools on here to view and analyze social media metrics...
No mention for Hootsuite? Any particular reason or just an oversight?
Really excellent post, Rand. :]
I am very interested for G+ and this my 2 cents about number of people "have you in circles." as an important social metric for G+.
You can analyze that metric a litlle bit further in my opinion.
Number of people have you in extended circles is more important. 10k people that have you in circles with 100 people in their extended circles is not equal with 10k people that have you in circles with 10k people in their extended circleas each.
Wow, great post. Incredibly comprehensive and really gives me a grasp on something that is hard to track sometimes.
Shame we can't tap into the API's for each of those pieces of information / sites and pull together this information.
Your lifecycle of brand impressions is right on the money. Analytics may say that lead came from the search engines, but what prompted it? Did someone see a Tweet and click through to my blog one day, only to search for the company a few days after that? Which touch point should get the credit for conversion? Social media plays an integral role in brand awareness building.
Thanks Rand for sharing one awesome list of tools for measuring social media metrics! Nice job :D
Great post. We use a number of those tools. Pagelever is very insightful tool for testing different facebook campagines and stratagies.
Jeff here--one of the PageLever cofounders. Really glad you find it useful!
For those interested in SEO on Facebook, we released this study:
SEO for Facebook Fan Pages–Does it work?
Holy metrics Batman!
Rand - amazing post. Bookmarked and distributed around the Gadgetplex...
Great post! It's always hard to explain to the 'numbers and figures" guys the value of social media and awereness. Even if often it can't be linked to ROI.
Great stats and awesome tools! Adding this post to our Social media manifesto at eezeer.com
:) Thanks
Great post Rand, a fantastic resource for Social Media Tracking, deffiantly have already distributed it to the email list =)
But yes Social Media Monitoring is a core element of social tracking I have been using numerous software over the last few years, yet I find different markets different tools work better =)
One phenomenal and comprehensive post sir!
Yes social media tracking is difficult but the sort of tracking you are talking about is real deep and I think there is no single tool that provides the kind of information you are looking for…
For Social Analytics and Tracking, there are lots of tool that can help us with different stuff… I think what marketers and webmasters desperately need is a one tool that does everything! (I hope someone will make it)
Although I have hear and tried many of the tools than you have mentioned but few of them were really new to me!
I think what marketers and webmasters desperately need is a one tool that does everything! (I hope someone will make it)
psst... be patient, because Moz is surely preparing something about it and maybe for this last quarter of 2011.
Psychic abilities maybe?
Nope... just well reading between the lines of the SEOmoz staff comments (Rand first) :)
No letting the cat out of the bag!
Actually, yeah, one of our goals for the Fall is to launch something that lets you track many of these (at least on FB/Twitter) alongside search + traffic stuff. More on that in the next month or two :-)
This sounds awesome sir!
I mean SEOmoz can come up with something like that (off course they can!) then SEOmoz will surly hit the new height of awesomeness…
Proud to be a mozzer!
Thanks Rand for this comprehensive summary and for some useful tips and tricks. I often encounter clients asking how to prove the ROI of Social Media, and I always reply that when measuring its effectiveness you have to think of it as one step away from the money. Whilst I have seen leads generated by tweets, it's much better to set yourself Social Media goals that build up traffic and engagement and take you one step closer to those valuable leads or sales.
Great list of Tools for Measuring Social Media Metrics! Reminds me of the saying "anything that can be tracked, can be measured".
Well too long but very interesting article Rand in last White board Friday you inspire us to encourage the relation at social platforms and today you had posted a techniques to track the efforts at social networks.But I am disagree with seo-himanshu that these article has less information of KPIs. These article exactly all about Key Performance Indicators not about Return of Investment (ROI).I know many of us has been continuously got asked a same question “what’s the R.O.I. of social media” .But i just want to say a thing that getting traffic to the site and conversion after that are both a whole different concept's. Many peoples inside or outside the industry thinks that conversion is a part of promotion. As a marketer the maximum we can do is just attract good relevant traffic to our site, but after that traffic lands to the website whole new process and scenario starts which has nothing to do with promotions.
I really liked these post as it contains the fabulous information about tracking the social media campaign performance.
I think one significant advancement that a lot of marketers are going to get a lot of mileage out of are the social interaction tracking and multi-touch attribution that Google Analytics have recently added.
While it isn't possible to track all social interaction through plugins, the insight that it can provide a webmaster, marketer or business owner is quite remarkable. Google Analytics users have long been able to see the impact different social networks have on their site using referring reports or campaign tracking, however the ability to segment out socially engaged users hasn't been easy in the past. With the release of the social engagement tracking, it is now possible to easily see in Google Analytics what impact different social network users who engage with your content has. For example, you could now see that users who tweet your content are 15% more likely to download a case study or that someone who likes your content has an average order value 30% higher than those that are referred from a social network but don't share/engage with your content.
In addition to the above, the multi-touch attribution that was released in August has the potential to be a game changer as well. Marketers are now able to easily identify what role different social networks play in building awareness for their website or increasing their leads/sales. Armed with that information, it'll now be easy to identify where you should spend your time/money marketing to get the outcome that you want.
To help with the fact that social networking is also so fragmented, as Rand pointed out above with plethora of different referring sources for Twitter, the custom channel grouping within multi-channel funnels is going to be a boon as well. You're now able to product a channel called Twitter that includes several different sources & measure the total impact of that source instead of having to cobble it together.
Agree that multi-touch attribution is going to be a big key in helping determine the ROI on social media touchpoints that take place earlier in the conversion funnel.
Social Interaction Analysis, it should be noted, does take additional scripting work in order to track data; it's not part of GA right out of the box. That's an extra challenge for those of us who use sharing widgets on our blog posts, like ShareThis, because the API interactions are through the vendor. Does anyone have experience implementing SIA via a third-party sharing vendor?
In the case of ShareThis, they offer a callback function that you can register with. You could write a small piece of JavaScript that uses that callback function to lodge interactions with Google Analytics social interaction tracking.
Yes, I would include klout.com and peerindex.com.
Great post, i use many of those tools. A recent discovery that I am liking quite a lot is Sprout Social It gives analytics for twitter and facebook, including demographics. It also integrates google analytics which is interesting. I paticularly like the graph that shows facebook activity, twitter activity and site traffic in one pretty interface. It has a very nice interface btw and downloadable reports which are nice for showing clients (white label functionality). It also allows you to monitor conversations around keywords (like Radian6 light). Lastly it has a component like hootsuite, where you can actually post from the dashboard. Clearly i really like it LOL
Great piece Rand, just to highlight a tool with deeper tracking specifically with regards to influencers responding to a specific campaign check out https://www.crowdfactory.com/ and let me know your thoughts!
Love the tools listed for tracking. Thanks for sharing them. Am going to begin at the top and work my way down...
Have found Google Analytics is still a nice simple source for tracking how useful social media is for each client thankfully.
Nice to keep SMO simple sometimes :-)
Yet another great article. Thank you for taking the time to break all of this out and sharing the tools you enjoy. I am anxious to see how Google Plus will truly affect the market and social media all around - including it's potential impact on Facebook's share of the pie.
Thanks for sharing a great tip Rand! Very helpful...
+1 for your GREAT information Rand!!! As much as i hate doing the socal media marketing, it really is an important factor to the SEO efforts!
Super awesome and timely post. We have a client that we are trying to prove the value of social with right now and this post is definitely going to helpful to our team.
Well done!
Nearly a book in itself one to print and keep by elbow when speaking to people about social media and how to use it effectively. Most interested to see that Reddit and Stumbleupon still figure as useful tools. I bet you will have to review this post soon as Google+ does come to the fore more and more (I am a poet and I do not...) Thanks for the material... Love the screenshots and it is great to see such a well thought out article.
The analytics glossary alone made this blog fantastic. Forwarded along to most of the small business owners I know. The infographics tie in well, and like that you used yourself as an example...nothing breeds validity like walking the walk.
Thanks for this.
I always instruct my team that to fix the goal first before entering into any social sites, unless your time will be going to waste. Because it looks and seems to spread word, create brands is easy, but it’s not that. At last you may find no effects to your business. If you can't able to measure it, you may be demoralized to act on these. It’s important to measure your social media activities.
So your post is most helpful to analyze the activities and prepare a right strategy in right time. Thanks Mr. Rand.
To be sociable is an art and art can't be found in all. - I keep this in my mind and assign the work to a perfect one. It helps me a lot to build brands on social media sites.
Rand is there a reason you left out Klout.com from the list of social media analytics tools? They track Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, Linkedin, and a few more. Quora and Google+ tracking is on their development roadmap as well.
Or is it because It doesn't tracks your visitors but your own reach and influence?
Excellent post by the way!
I was wondering this too. Even though I think the overall Klout score is ridiculous and easily manipulated, I think the Amplification data and True Reach indicator can give you valuable insight into how engaged your audience is.
What about Klout.com? Do you guys use it? It's not even in the list