Are You Leveraging Analytics Tools in Social Media?

Tiffany Weimar - January 19, 2011

With the rise in use for social media for business, there is a great amount of discussion around how organizations quantify its success.  Is it through the number of followers, likes, mentions, or retweets…?  Although you may have not seen a direct correlation between user engagement and revenue in the past, social media has truly become a force to reckon with.  Companies are now adding lead generation forms to their social media company pages and are actively collecting prospects’ contact information through their regular “social media-only” promotions.

Aside from collecting actual measureable leads, analytics is very useful in understanding the value of social media. Over time, social media outlets have rolled out analytics data within their platforms to help companies start to quantify their investment in social media. Facebook for instance, has “Insights” available as their form of analytics, viewable only to administrators of the company page. Admins are able to select a date range to view the number of “likes” and “post views” within the desired timeframe.  This data, previously only collected by individuals manually, is now readily available. 

LinkedIn, now allows you to view statistics on different companies’ growth, number of employees (on LinkedIn), job function composition, etc.. In the future, I anticipate that all social media outlets will launch some sort of analytics for their users.  It will be interesting to see the additional analytics tools that are added and the value added as a result.

Although these tools will most definitely help businesses get insight on the success of their pages, I would definitely suggest accessing Google Analytics data to get a better understanding of the amount of “referring traffic” being driven to your company website.  You can also track the number of leads as a result of that traffic.