Your social media monitoring platform must be flexible.
I’ve been more heavily involved in training our clients on our social media and web monitoring platform recently and it’s been really interesting to see their reactions to the wide array of functions and web analytics at their fingertips.
Even for marketers who realize the value in monitoring online content for brands and companies, it’s pretty overwhelming at first.
If anything, it has reinforced the idea that there is no ‘magic bullet’ for social media.
Perhaps more importantly, though, it helped me solidify an analogy that can help clients match the proper tools with their social media strategy:
This is great news. It means you can quantify your results depending on your objectives.
For one campaign, it may be useful to compare web traffic between your company and your competitors. You may want to further slice up the data according to sentiment and see how your respective companies matched up during similar campaigns.
Maybe there is a corollary between a certain site type, such as a rise in blogs and social sites during a specific date range. Were those the targets you were trying to reach?
For another campaign, you may be tracking the spread of a brand message. You might have set a goal to reach a certain depth of linkages between web pages. Did you meet your goal? How many people linked up to the message? How far did the message spread? Who influenced the spread the most? Were they ‘activated’ or engaged by the company beforehand? If not, they should be.
These are all questions that can be answered through web monitoring.
Tomorrow I’ll offer some tips and tricks for measuring your web monitoring and social media data. It may get you pointed in the right direction of all the different applications that web information can be used for.
