Executing a complete in-depth analysis of the performance of a social media campaign requires quantitative performance metrics for use in data analytics processes.

There is no one single ideal Social Media Marketing Campaign Monitoring, Measurement & Analytics tool. Though the sheer number of competing programs is immense, most of them do the same job of indexing and finding your brand in the discussions.  But the ones you really want to use will do a good job of teasing value out of those analytics data, and putting things in perspective.

You can experiment—mixing and matching to make use of the best of the best.

Just keep in mind that the selection of the right tool to use in gauging the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns depends on your intended goals.

Tracking social media website engagement requires a focus on traffic statistics.  For tracking a wider campaign, Twitter response and positive comments might be a more appropriate metric.

Software like Google Analytics is used to track website data such as traffic, visitors, pages per visitor, and traffic sources. But since Google Analytics isn’t designed to track social media data, plug-ins like Social Media Metrics can add a social media information layer to it, providing information on Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious bookmarks, and more for each individual page.  Greasemonkey is a Mozilla Firefox add-on that allow users to change different elements on a website through Javascript.  Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin allows you to observe social media as well as link statistics for your specific pages.

Most analytics software has custom campaigns to make it easy to track specific events. You can track a specific Twitter traffic campaign or DiggBar URL with campaigns.

MM&A

By now, most Internet marketers (and savvy business owners) seeking the answer to the question “How do I measure my investment in Social Media?” are familiar with the terms Monitoring, Measurement & Analytics (MM&A).

Social Media is about communication and discussion in their most dynamic forms, so the challenge is to track this information on a daily basis, even though the “buzz” of a campaign (or brand or event) is measured not by days but in some cases by hours.

To hit this often moving target, a plethora of software (and Software as a Service) companies have emerged in response to growing demand.

Here’s a list of MM&A tools that mostly focus on the numbers, with some attention paid to brand perceptions and engagement ratios.

Leading the list are brand monitoring services (e.g., Radian6, Visible Technologies, Nielsen BuzzMetrics) monitor online dialogues.

Radian6, recently acquired by Salesforce.com, tops most monitoring lists (though it features analytics capabilities as well).  Radian6 helps companies monitor the Social Web (Facebook, Twitter, blogs, YouTube, forums and so on) in order to provide actionable insights in real-time and thus enable its clients to effectively join conversations with customers and prospects.  Radian6 helps you track numerous signals and get insights into your brand’s performance on various social media channels. It provides detailed analytics reports and charts for any important presentation.

MONITORING

Alterian Social Media Monitoring Tools—Alterian’s SM2 social media monitoring tool provides advanced user-behavior statistics, measures and analyzes daily volume, demographics, location, positive or negative content tone, themes, and trending topics for your brand/product.  Often a little too much detail, but a good tool nevertheless. Cost: Pricing is based on volume of results and ranges from $500/month to $15,000/month. “Freemium” trial plan allows for five keyword or phrase searches and a total of 1,000 results. Alterian also provides additional custom solutions.

Attensity360—Actionable insights.  Attensity360 operates on four key principles: listen, analyze, relate, act.  Attensity360 will help monitor trending topics, influencers and the reach of your brand while recommending ways to join the conversation. Attensity Analyze applies text analytics to unstructured text to extract meaning and uncover trends. Attensity Respond helps automate the routing of incoming social media mentions into user-defined queues. Cost: $399/month for one license. Free 15-day trial.

Attentio – Social Media Trends / Analytics Tool—Collects information from all social media channels related to brands and products, assimilate and study it to give you structured data. Its advantage is that its multilingual and has more of a brand-centric focus.  Attentio tracks global conversations taking place across social media (blogs, forums, social networks, Twitter, YouTube) and online news sites. The multilingual service offers brand reputation management, campaign/ product release impact, sales opportunity tracking and sentiment analysis along with a dashboard to track media in real time. Cost: Pricing starts at $775 per month for a one-year subscription.

Bit.ly—When you use a URL shortener, it’s always a good idea to use one that has analytics information, as Bit.ly does. This will track information such as number of clicks, traffic sources and even at what time clicks occur.

Brands Eye – Web based Social Media Measuring Tool—Picks up signals  from social media mentions and puts them into a different perspective unlike others.  It finds you details about reputation, media origin and sentiments associated to your brand.

Brandwatch—Focuses on brand mentions, trawls the Internet looking at news, blogs, forums, wikis and social networking sites and finding mentions of brands, companies, products and people. Clients define keywords (brands, topics, people names, products) and receive reports and brand summaries that they can take action on. Cost: Pricing, based on a monthly subscription, starts at about $300/month.

Buzzcapture—Insights into market buzz. Provides insight to organizations on the buzz in their market.  Can track companies, products, product families, business lines, difficult or complex brands, topics, competitors, influencers, evangelists, critics and campaigns. All the information collected is analyzed and presented into understandable reports and entered into your dashboard. Cost: Typical price range is $13,000 to $91,000 for each research topic or group of products, with a standard license costing $39,000.

Next week:

Part II: More Social Media Campaign Measurement & Analytic Tools

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Manage your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: P: (949) 900-3017; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.