Measuring social web audience

(assignment post)

It is not news to anyone how much social media has grown over the last few years. A rapid growth in the number of posts, tweets or updates resulting in overwhelming data. What used to be random data from virtual users about their social life has become valuable information for many businesses and organizations. Marketers and PR practitioners are seeing the importance of paying attention, listening and reacting to communities in the social web. However, with over billions of posts and tweets thrown on to these platforms how are marketers or PR professionals understanding their audience? Also, how are they cutting out the noise of the social web and extracting the most valuable data?

Measurement tools for social media are imperative for successful communications, campaigns for products, and relationship building. There are plenty of tools to measure data on social media platforms. Here we explore some free tools and a paid tool.

Facebook Insights is a built-in analytic tool for organizations who have created a Facebook fan page. Facebook Insights reports metric on the content of the fan page. Some of the metrics are insight on fan growth, demographics, number of "likes", page views an many more. This tools is value to organizations with Facebook fan pages because Facebook is the most popular social media platform. Being able to measure audience engagement without paying for the data is saving the company from investing money into a measurement tool and still gain insight to useful data. Facebook insights provide a good view of who is on their fan page and the company is able to monitor their audience's interaction on the fan page as well.

bit.ly offers the ability to shorten URL links to allow maximum space for messaging. It also offers real time link tracking. This is useful for social media because the organization is able to see how many clicks they are getting by posting their website link on to a social media platform. They can see which platform is more successful than the other and will understand which platform they need to invest more time on. This tool is great for quick messaging and for organization who have the goal of getting online users directly on to their website.

Hootsuite is one of the best free measurement tool out there. This tool allows the organization to add all social media profiles on to one deck. This is a valuable tool because the social media specialist of an organization can manage all profiles on one simple deck cutting down time spent on separate sites and allowing the ability to update all profiles at once. Hootsuite also provides an analytic tool which measures engagement on all social platforms. Here you can see data under the same reports or side by side.

For more information on how to use measurement tools, this article suggests ways to measure with free tools successfully. Here is a list of other useful free measurement tools for social media: Ten tools for social media

Although free tools are great ways to gain insight on your audience, they are usually limited in functionality. The quality of data may not be in its true form and may not capture a true representation of your audience. Companies and organizations that are serious about understanding their customers should invest in paid analytic tools. The return on investment is always high due to the quality of information these powerful tools can produce. A very good analytic tool in the market is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics measures online interactions, conversions, investments in advertising and social networking. Particularly in social media, Google Analytics provides conversion reports which shows quantifiable data that can be analyzed. Basically, this report can present how social interaction on the web leads to the end sale or goal for a business organization.

This tools also tracks the path of users of social media towards the organization website. It also shows engagement and conversion for each social platform

Lastly, the tool tracks how users are sharing information about the organization and where they are sharing it, tracking the activity of users.

Measuring social web data is critical for business development and increasing brand reputation. Using measurement tools allows more efficient and effective ways to gather valuable data, resulting in positive return on investment.