I’m very happy to introduce Julie Rogier, Principal of Rogier Communications! In this post, Julie provides some great insights about measuring social media success and some tools that can help.
Regular visitors to j+ Media Solutions know the power of Twitter when it comes to business-to-business marketing.
Whether a company sells products or services, Twitter can play an extremely valuable role. Why? Because a relevant community is engaging and connecting on Twitter related to the very same topic and industry sector. By tapping into relevant conversation and engagement, the social media platform can build interest and ultimately business development success.
Measuring Success
At the outset, it is critical to establish goals for a Twitter program, whether those goals are driving more traffic to a website, increasing conversions or forms, or raising engagement via conversations and retweets. It’s also equally important to measure the success of delivering on those goals.
To that end, here’s a list of three tools to help you analyze the success of your Twitter program. While not an exhaustive list by any means, the tools are an effective way to get started.
1) TwitSprout
https://twitsprout.com/
Let’s start with a current favorite. TwitSprout, which tracks social media activity for any Twitter account or Facebook page, is worth exploring for its elegant one-page dashboard.
- Metrics include number of followers or “fans” as well as growth rate, influence indicator, engagement level, historical trends and more.
- See a TwitSprout sample report here. https://twitsprout.com/#learnmoreanchor
- What sets TwitSprout apart is the competitive intelligence it provides, comparing social media accounts of competitors you select to see how your performance stacks up against competitor accounts.
- There is a basic free subscription available, with reasonable paid service subscriptions. Highly recommended!
Equally useful measurement tools are the free social Reports as part of Google Analytics. We will assume Google Analytics is installed to measure traffic of your website. Comprehensive social reports are a recent introduction, part of standard reporting running on the left dashboard, and shouldn’t be missed.
- Social reports measure the impact social media has on business goals and conversions, including number of visitors clicking through from Twitter, their web behavior such as time on site and completed forms, and much more.
- It’s easy to see the initial paths that visitors from social networks took through your site. The report also shows engagement and conversion metrics for each social network.
- You’ll see which networks drive traffic to any specific page, and most importantly, you can see what web content is most popular with social visitors. Comparison charts display all traffic and traffic from social sources.
3) TwitterCounter
http://twittercounter.com/
- While not as comprehensive as the two tools above, TwitterCounter tracks the basics like Twitter follower growth, Twitter volume, historical trends, and even a follower prediction.
- The free service is extremely basic, but a paid subscription gets you stats from a longer historical time frame.
- An interesting tidbit is that Twittercounter acquired former measurement apps Quitter and Twitaholic.
Once you start clicking around, you’ll see a plethora of additional Twitter measurement tools. You can’t lose by focusing your efforts on the three options outlined above.
What measurement tools do you find most useful? Please post your ideas below.
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About Julie Rogier:
Julie Rogier is principal of Rogier Communications and a marketing communications and PR specialist for business-to-business organizations. Follow Julie on twitter.com/jrogier
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