Are your social media monitoring tools giving you the information you need?
Posted by Lauren Potgieter on 11 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: Social Media
For some of us, the end of the month means an overall check and analysis of our sites with our trusty analytics tools in hand in order to see what our website is doing right as well as where we are falling short in certain aspects. By understanding and using these tools we can see where traffic is up as well as what we need to work on in order to attract people to our website and hopefully purchase our product or service. Social media is now an integrated and significant component of brand awareness but many are frustrated with the fact that you cannot monitor your social media traffic as such as much as monitor your social media interest and impact.
There have been numerous articles that I have stumbled upon recently that have been dedicated to the art of social media monitoring and measurement, but what exactly do these tools and applications achieve? They are undoubtedly needed and provide us with analysis of a more brand awareness type insight, but do they transfer into analysis of traffic and effect?
Social media monitoring is imperative as simply implementing social media and not knowing what or why it is or is not working will not let one know what social media direction you are going in and everyone needs direction, right? There are numerous social media monitoring and measurement tools and these will help you see if your social media efforts are impacting the social media scope, which, with so many other integrating social media into their marketing plans, is more important than you think.
Yes, it is great to see how many people “like” your page or how many followers your brand is obtaining on social media networks but how can we see these like and followers turn into purchases and sale of our products and services and will we ever be able to measure social media in this way or will we have to settle with measuring social media only in terms of interest, effect and impact?
Don’t get me wrong, I will be the first one to agree with the fact that companies need a social media presence in order to keep up with the times and I feel that social media has a significant and strong impact but how can we measure this impact in terms of traffic and sales?
It seems that some of us seem to be asking the wrong question. We should be asking ourselves – what do we expect from social media at the end of the day? A perfect little summary is that social will lead to search and search will therefore lead to sales. What do you expect from your social media presence on the web? Are you getting what you expect to receive?
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August 11th, 2010 at 1:15 pm
Great post Lauren.
Social media can be tricky to measure, for both experienced and new users alike. As you mention there is indeed huge value in social media but how does one report this? I fully agree with you, knowing your ultimate goal is key, it will give you clarity of intent but also on a practical level it allows you to configure which ever tools you are using accordingly. As the authorised UK reseller we use Radian6 to not only track and measure but to engage throughout social media.
Personally social media is key because it allows us to easily connect with our community whether this be our customers, prospects or social media experts and enthusiast. There is a whole lot to be learned from the community, whether it is product or industry related. It can be a form of market research if you will, as well as allowing you to increase site traffic through the content you create and potentially generating leads by speaking to people at their point of need, above all though you are making your consumers a part of your brand.
Olivia Landolt
Marketing and Community Manager
@6Consulting | UK authorised Radian6 reseller