February 13, 2013 by akhilendra

Twitter & Facebook – Social Media Analytics

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Twitter & Facebook – Social Media Analytics, sounds like made for each other, isn’t it?

If you think NOT, then think again.

If you are a blogger or a small business then you just cannot afford to ignore social media analytics especially Twitter Analytics and Facebook Analytics. Social Media is the buzzword and you need to attend it the way it is required rather than ignoring it till your business vanishes away.

Why Social Media Analytics?

social media analytics – Twitter & Facebook

Tracking and monitoring is an integral part of managing any kind of business and social media marketing campaigns are not any exception.

Social Media Marketing is not only the current but also, the future of world. With growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin and Pinterest, it is evident that this trend is here to stay. Facebook has got more than 1 billion users and everyday millions indulge themselves on Twitter, Google+ and other social networking sites.

Social media marketing forms the integral part of search engine optimization process.

Traditional Way of building backlinks and ranking on search engines are a matter of past. Search engines like Google now give more importance to social signals like social shares on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Webmasters have acknowledged this part and have been focusing hard on social media marketing but still, the primary focus remain on creating fan page or getting followers on Twitter. Probably because;

Social media marketing not only helps in SEO, but also gets you free referral traffic from these sites.

We are living in a world of viral marketing where you don’t even need search engines if you can come up with a successful campaign on Facebook or Twitter. These sites are more than enough efficient to deliver millions of users to your sites or business.

But it’s easy said than done. As social sites are so important, they have got the attention of everybody and anybody. It has caused a traffic jam and therefore it is not easy to generate substantial amount of traffic from these sites especially for bloggers and small businesses.

If you are not successful with your Facebook or Linkedin campaigns then you can tryout some specifically designed course like FBInfluence or Linkedinfluence because social media marketing is essential for any kind of success in today’s world.

It is getting exceedingly difficult for bloggers and smaller businesses as they are directly competing with large corporations who are investing millions of dollars in their social media campaigns to generate traffic. They have resources to arrange for a dedicated team of experts who, not only drive traffic but also, improve their short comings in order to improve them.

And that’s the key.

Social media marketing campaigns are formed by two components;

1. Driving traffic from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+.
2. Social media analytics which include data mining where they look at the current trends and keywords which are working for them. They use that data to drive their campaign in appropriate direction to extract maximum out of it.

Social Media Marketing is all about;

1. Listen
2. Interact
3. Respond
4. Anticipate

Your first step is driven by social trends and all other steps are influenced by other aspects of social media analytics. So it won’t be unfair to say that social media analytics is the nucleus of social media marketing.

Unless until you listen to the world out there, you cannot plan your next move especially if you are looking for material results.

Social Media is the lock and Social Media Analytics is the Key.

Twitter & Facebook – Social Media

Twitter and Facebook are the most important social sites for bloggers and businesses.

Social media analytics is one of the most important part of social media campaign but yet, often ignored by bloggers and small businesses.

Process of social media analytics revolve around gathering data from social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, Pinterest and using them to make sound & informed business decisions. These decisions basically drive your marketing strategy so that your blog or business gets maximum exposure on these sites. Don’t get confused by terms like Twitter analytics and Facebook analytics as they are simply addressing a particular social sites whereas social media analytics is to address all the social sites which includes blogs also.

Now social media analytics done by large corporation is different where they use SAS or IBM’s product to analyse variety of things but for a blogger, you can achieve more than better results just by following few simple tricks & tools.

Their investment is huge whereas you can manage to get required data for you in a very minute investment. But it is important to do whatever you can in order to understand social metrics and trigger points.

If you don’t know the impact of your social media campaign then how are you going to improve the result?

You need to perform business analytics and data mining in order to come with a report which can guide you in the world of social media analytics.

A intelligent social media analytics plan will focus on variety of aspects but as far as bloggers and small businesses are concerned, you should focus on;

• Current social media trends
• Usage of hash tags.
• Keywords getting you likes, retweets, mentions and clicks.
• Links which are returning you the maximum visits to your blogs and business sites.

These points are extremely crucial in your social media campaign. It is important to understand the social trends.

If people are talking about something and you are talking about something else, then nobody is going to listen to you. Social media analytics can fill that gap and help you in establishing better communication. Twitter analytics can provide great insight into current trend on Twitter and they are extremely helpful in establishing yourself on Twitter.

So first you need to listen to them. That is why you need to look at social trends to figure out what are they talking about.

Then you need to align your Facebook shares, Twitter Tweets and activities on other sites in order to grab maximum eyeballs.

For a common blogger with no background in business analysis or data mining, it could be a pain to go through these kinds of activities. In fact, initially there were hardly any tools available for bloggers and small businesses within their reach to perform overall social media analytics, forget about specially Twitter Analytics or Facebook Analytics.

But in the last couple of years, lot of affordable tools has come for bloggers and business houses to perform social media analytic.

Social Media Analytics Tools

As mentioned earlier it could be hard for an average guy to take out data in a spreadsheet, add formulas and then extract information out of it.

Luckily now there are many social media tools which offer comprehensive services in affordable price range which help you in improving your business prospects.

As mentioned earlier, social media tools are integral part of any successful business strategy and if you are not using them then even if you have got some success today, you won’t be able to maintain that in coming days, Period.

Now let’s go through some of the social media analytics tools (free & paid) which can help you in increasing your business.

1. Google Analytics– it is a free tool which have been used by webmasters for ages to gather and analyze information related to their website’s traffic. They have made few updates to it and now you can use it for analyzing social metrics also. You can learn more about it at Google Analytics. It is one of the best social media analytics and traffic tracking tool available and best part is, it’s free.
2. Hootsuite – hootsuite is available in free and paid variant. They allow limited accounts and functionality in their free version and advance features in paid version. It is a social media dashboard which can be used to manage multiple social media accounts from one place. So you can manage multiple Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Linkedin accounts along with other social media sites from one place. So now you don’t have to login to separate accounts and sites to share same post from your blog on these sites. You can simply login to hootsuite account and share your content on multiple sites from one place. You can create social metrics reports using hootsuite which will provide you exact and precise information about your social media activities. So you can see which share got you maximum clicks, likes, shares, mentions and above all, traffic. You can also get the list of countries from which you are getting traffic and links which are driving things.  hootsuite is one of the best tool available for social media analytics to bloggers and businesses. Hootsuite generate comprehensive analytics reports including Twitter analytics and Facebook analytics reports. This is a sample report generated by Hootsuite. This report is based on Twitter analytics.

Hootsuite Report

1. Social Metric pro – it is a premium wordpress plugin which is best in class. I am not aware of many good wordpress plugins for social metrics. So if you are using this plugin, you don’t even have to more outside your admin dashboard to know the social happenings related your site. It creates all kind of reports to help you in making informed decisions.  It is a wonderful plugin for wordpress users to understand the performance of their content on social networking sites including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Digg and LinkedIn. It uses attractive colors to indicate the performance of the content. These reports are extremely easy to read and understand doesn’t require ANY additional skills. It is affordable so even smaller bloggers can afford it. So whether it’s Facebook Analytics or Twitter Analytics, social metric pro provides all kind of social media analytics.
2. Bottlenose – as mentioned earlier, social trends are important part of social intelligence. Bottlenose provides not only social trends but also, a search engine to check the happening around keywords. So if you are running a blog or online store, then you can see “how people are sharing content related to that keywords” and “how they are performing”. It is a very good tool and just like Hootsuite, you can use it to manage multiple accounts. Trending topics feature of bottlenose is a real winner as far as social media analytics is concerned.

Twitter Analytics

You cannot afford to ignore a practice which is the most important factor in branding today. Whether you are a blog or business, you need to have a brand in order to acquire and retain business and make money, specifically in online world.

These tools are assets rather than liabilities so you just cannot manage your business without them. These tools mentioned here are either free or affordable so there is no reason for you to say no. So don’t get panicked with words like Twitter Analytics, Facebook Analytics or Social media analytics and use these easy tools to pave way for your success.

Please let me know you feedback and opinion about social media analytics and don’t forget to share it on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Linkedin.

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