Social Media Measurement Tools
Understanding how to value and measure what you're doing in social media, and how others respond to what you're doing, is critical to making smarter decisions about your marketing efforts.
As a business owner, understanding the return on your investment, or ROI, for your social media marketing efforts and spend is important. Measurement is an essential part of any marketing effort – and that includes social media marketing. Understanding how to value and measure what you’re doing in social media – and how others respond to what you’re doing – helps you make smarter decisions about where you allocate money and resources for your social media activities.
Determine your overall business goals for using social media and be specific about what outcomes spell success for your company. Leverage free and fee-based tools that can help you monitor, measure and analyze your social media marketing activities and campaigns.
When determining how your social media messages are doing, start with the analytics tools offered by each social network:
Facebook Insights – Track user interactions and behaviors on your Facebook Page including top posts, the number of people reached, how many clicked on posts, reactions, comments, and shares.
Twitter Analytics – Twitter shows tweet impressions, Twitter profile page visits, number of mentions, follower growth and top tweets as well as top mentions.
Pinterest Analytics – Set up a Pinterest business account to gain access to your Pinterest analytics dashboard including average daily profile impressions and viewers, average monthly viewers and monthly engaged and top pin impressions. Link your website to your Pinterest account to get additional metrics.
YouTube Analytics – See watch time, average view duration, and views as well as a list of your Top 10 videos. If you monetize your videos, you can also see your estimated revenue.
Instagram Insights – You can see impressions, reach and profile visits as well as follower demographics such as gender, age range and location. You can also see which posts your audience sees and engages with the most. You can view insights from your posts as well as your Instagram Stories.
In addition to analytics tools built into most of the popular social networks, you can get metrics from social media tools and dashboards such as HootSuite, ZohoSocial, and SproutSocial. URL shorteners such as Bitly and scheduler Buffer also provide limited metrics.
Other third-party measurement tools provide different types of monitoring, tracking, measuring and analyzing tools for a variety of social networks. Most require that you give authorization access to your social media accounts, a standard practice that is relatively secure if you are using reputable tools.
Iconosquare – This app provides analytics for Instagram and Facebook that augment what Instagram and Facebook Insights provide. Includes follower growth, impressions and reach, tracking post and Story performance and finding the best times to post.
Klout – This app measures your brand’s influence by tracking and ranking your engagement on Twitter. Klout provides a score for your brand plus you can access the scores for other social media account holders to see how you compare.
Twittercounter – Fee-based app to track your follower growth trends. Compare your Twitter trends with other Twitter users such as your competitors. Receive email notifications of trends you’re tracking. Prices start at $8/month for individual accounts after a 14-day trial.
Tailwind – Use this app to get metrics for your Pinterest account to track the performance of your pins and repins as well as some Pinterest post management and Instagram integration with Pinterest.
While most companies want to measure the success of social media marketing in sales, understanding that social media marketing is not necessarily a direct sales tool is important. Look for engagement, conversions and actions of any kind that help you grow your company, from people sharing your content and amplifying your reach to direct business inquiries that come through social media as well as the ability to provide more immediate customer service and strengthening customer relationships. Be realistic about what social media can do for your company and take advantage of available tools to get a clear picture of how you’re doing in social media.