Social analytics help you understand what’s happening within your business. It can tell you how many people respond to an advertisement or blog post. It can tell you what time of day your visitors prefer to visit your site, where they come from, and what tools they use to find your information. There are different types of social analytics to consider. For example, you can look at conversions, search analytics and you can explore how effective social media is to market your business by looking at social media analytics.
Each social media site provides some functional analytics that you can use. For example, if you use Twitter then you can visit https://analytics.twitter.com, log in, and see your results. It’s a fairly narrow collection of information. You can see your activity over the past month. It shows you tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions, and followers. While this information can be useful, and certainly has a role in evaluating your specific Twitter efforts, there is other information that can be more useful.
Google Analytics as Top Social Analytics
Google Analytics is a free analytics service. While there are paid services that you can use, for ease of use and functionality we’re going to focus solely on the information that Google Analytics provides.
Attribution Analysis
Attribution analysis is an exploration or map of the path that a visitor takes from their first interaction to a sale. It includes the various touch points along the way. With this modeling, you can see the role that social media plays in the lead generation and conversion process. It can help you set goals for your social media and better understand how your audience uses social media during their research and decision-making process.
Conversions by Social Network
Google Analytics also allows you to look at detailed reporting that can tell you how effective different social networks are to your conversion process. You can use this information to better direct your social media marketing efforts to the sites that are generating results. And it also tells you what content drives the most activity and traffic to your site.
Social Media Traffic
Last, but certainly not least, you can use Google Analytics to view the site traffic and visitor behavior from all relevant social networks. This helps you understand how your audience is using social media, what posts, comments, ads, and shares are generating the most traffic and activity to your site, and more. You can then leverage this information to help you create your content and social media marketing strategy for each network you’re active on.
Social media doesn’t have to be a guessing game. With the social analytics available to you on each specific social media site and the analytics that tools like Google can provide, you have the information you need to create a highly strategic and measurable plan. Use the marketing metrics available to you to improve your social media return on investment.
