Simply put, Social media refers to all the conversation and engagement that happen on networks and sites like facebook, myspace, twitter, blogspehere, youtube, flickle, messageboard, forums etc...
Since these conversations can have a big impact on your brand it becomes critical for a marketer to understand what people are talking about their brand/products etc. so that they can take appropriate action and help in creating and fostering a positive chatter about their brand.
Broadly, Social media measurement comes in two flavors
1. Measuring the conversation about your brand in Social media
2. Measuring the impact your own social media efforts
In this post i will talk about the first point " Measuring what conversation are happening about your brand".
I will have second post to discuss about second post.
1. Measuring the conversation about your brand in Social media.
Social media measurement is very different from measuring your own web site. You own your own website. You can measure interaction of your visitors with your website.
Social media happens with or without your active participation. It mostly happens outside the realms of your website such as conversation on twitter, blogs, forums, facebook etc.
Since you don't have any web analytics tool installed on these places it is hard to find out what's happening. Even if you had a web analytis tool installed you won't know what people are talking about. which is what you would like to know? This sort of information is not available from traditional web analytics tools like Omniture site Catalysts, WebTrends or Google Analytics.
/ Social Media Analytics Tools.
There are new breed of tools that help you monitor the Social buzz, these tools let you 'listen' into the conversation about your brand.
In these tools you specify a set of keywords that define your brand or are associated with your brand and then the tools do the rest.
They crawl the social media networks/sites and find all the mentions of the specified keywords and bring them back to you in nicely formatted reports.
/ What kind of information do these tools provide?
Most of these tools bring some flavor of the following information:
- Brand Mentions- Conversation about your brand/competitor/ industry (as specified by keyword). You get total mentions by day/week/month and also the ability to drill down a specific conversations.
- Brand Sentiment- What is the consumer sentiment towards your brand? are they positve, negative, neutral on your brand.
- Influencers- Who is talking about you? How influential are they and how many times have they talked about your brand.
Some of the Social media Analytics tools
Omniture. Integration with Twitter
-webanalysis(dot)blogspot
