How do you measure social, and is it measurable at all? These are two of the most debated topics in social media marketing. Marketing “gurus” will tell you absolutely it has to be, and social media “gurus” will tell you well… uh… yes, but not really. Everyone —no matter what their business—has to show growth and progress to keep their jobs. That’s where your analytics come in.

There are free online tools to measure and manage your analytics that are very user friendly and easy to read.

 Facebook

Facebook analytics are the easiest to come by because Facebook conveniently measures them for you on your Fanpage. Facebook Insights provides you with graphs of:

· Daily, weekly, and monthly active users

· New “likes”

· Lifetime likes

· Interaction metrics

The graph is accompanied by both exact numbers and percentages, so it’s easy to track trends over time. Facebook also provides further details regarding fan demographics, such as age, gender, country of residence, and first language.

 Twitter

Twitter Counter is a website that will give you basically the same kind of analytics as Facebook. Simply go to the website, type in your Twitter handle at the top, and get the following analytics:

•  
  • Weekly/monthly tracking of number of followers, following and tweets
  • Total number of followers (percentage up or down)
  • Total number of following (percentage up or down)
  • Where you are on the top 100 Twitter users list
  • A prediction of how many followers you will gain in the next 15 days

 There is also a website called TweetStats that shows you a graph for:

•  
  • Tweet timeline
  • Tweet density
  • Aggregate daily tweet
  • Aggregate hourly tweets
  • Replies to
  • Interface usage
  • Whom you retweet

 Blogs

Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking your blog statistics. Google does a pretty thorough job at tracking and graphing your blog’s progress. It can tell you:

· Daily/weekly/monthly visits

· Page views

· Pages per visit

· Bounce rate

· Demographics

· Average time spent on your site

· Amount of views per page

· The source of your traffic (ie. Facebook, Google, direct traffic etc.)

 LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers a limited amount of statistics, but still offers a few. The free version of LinkedIn will allow you to view a limited list of people who have viewed your profile and the number of times you appear in a search. The professional version gives you the full list of profile views sortable by industry or geography and how they found you.

Unfortunately there are no setups to track your group analytics on LinkedIn, but you can track your Q&A stats.

The Ultimate Analytics Tools

There are tools out there like Radian6, Sysomos and Spiral 16 that will track all of your social media analytics, tell you what your sentiment is, and generate a number of different reports on demographics, buzz, industry trends and all sorts of research that is extremely helpful and time saving. However, if you’re just in it for the analytics, then stick to the basics listed above.

Analytics are important – they show progress. But you need to keep in mind that it is the relationship and loyalty building that is most important. Just because you have 10,000 fans on your page doesn’t mean you have 10,000 loyal customers. So keep analytics and report them every month to your CEOs and marketing managers, but also track your interactions and your community reach – tell them a story or two about how you connected with a client and you will truly get their attention and make them believers in social media! In the end, a story provides more meaning than a number.

 Sources:

HOW TO: Track Social Media Analytics (Mashable)

Infographic: Social Media Analytics (Raven)

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