By adaptive - December 4th, 2013

Choosing the right social media management tools will deliver the ability to track all social media campaigns and show analyse ROI

Over the past few weeks we’ve looked at how to determine the return on investment of social media campaigns. Throughout, it has become clear that the engaged consumer is more likely to interact with your brand, which in turn will deliver the expected ROI.

However, there is also a need for reliable metrics and tools by which to measure the impact of a social media campaign and to provide a clearer view on how to adapt or manage it for greater reach and impact.

Where is the ROI?

According to a report recently produced by the Managing Partners’ Forum and Elephant Creative entitled “Exploring management attitudes towards digital and social technologies”, 67% of firms use Google Analytics followed by 23% on Hootsuite. Also, 85% of firms use key performance indicators to measure the success of their use of digital and social technologies, with the most popular as follows:

 

Website traffic

73%

Reach (likes, followers or subscribers, etc)

61%

Engagement (comments, retweets, views, etc)

60%

New clients

40%

Inbound links

37%

New work from existing clients

28%

Says Richard Chaplin, Founder and CEO of the Managing Partners’ Forum, “Digital tools permit extensive analysis across a wide range of metrics such as traffic, reach, engagement and links. 85% of firms are collecting and analysing this external data, with some combining it with internal metrics such as new work into sophisticated dashboards. However, collecting and analysing data is a fairly pointless exercise unless insights are being formally shared in an appropriate way with those that need to know.”

Research undertaken in mid-2012 by the Altimeter Group, showed that there were six ways of measuring the revenue impact of social media, as outlined in the infographic below, and that the most effective blended both the top-down and bottom-up methods for a more holistic overview.

Dominic Sparkes, CEO and co-founder of Tempero, says, “A good social customer service tool can provide a central, localised hub of all customer engagement and brand activity across multiple channels. Tools help listen, monitor, track and identify issues and allows you to collate, track and utilise other metrics such as sentiment and, of course, ROI is key.”

The tools that drive

Many organisations utilise the free tools that are on offer such as Google Analytics. These provide a solid base from which any business can build a successful social media campaign as they can often be tweaked and adapted to really suit an organisation’s specific needs.

“First of all you need to decide where your audience is and understand what insight each channel offers,” says, Christer Holloman, author of The Social Media MBA in Practice, “Each individual channel will not give you a holistic view if you’re using multiple channels, so you might then want to invest in a tool. There are free tools like Google Analytics and Hootsuite, or more sophisticated tools like Salesforce.”

For Lynsey Sweales, Social Media and Online Marketing expert at SocialB [www.socialb.co.uk], tools such as Hootsuite, Tweetdeck, Tweetreach and Google Analytics have proven invaluable as they allow her to measure the key objectives that the business wants to achieve. She also points out that the social media platforms themselves will soon be vastly improved in terms of providing analytics and measurements.

“Facebook is working hard to constantly improve their insights, their latest is pretty much as good as you could get on any of the other social media tools,” says Sweales, “Twitter is currently lagging behind, but with tools like Sprout Social you do have a workaround. LinkedIn is playing catch-up as well – their stats have improved, but they still have a way to go. Will there ever be an ultimate social media measurement tool? I don’t think so, social media is such an evolving beast.”

A case study of a recent social media campaign by T.M Lewin examined how their use of a tool called Silverpop Engage allowed them to centralise all customer and contact data so the marketing teams could segment this data and use it for their own needs. Throughout their campaign, T.M. Lewin saw a 4% increase in Twitter activity, 45% increase in Facebook Likes and a rise in average Facebook engagement from 3% to 37% throughout.

Guillaume Brocart, Digital Marketing Manager for T.M.Lewin in the UK commented: “Using Silverpop allows us to combine the power of email with the buzz of social media to help us engage our customer base and increase revenue.”

For T.M. Lewin, it was this blend of email and social delivered by Silverpop that worked for their specific business needs. However, each business has a different set of KPI’s and different tools provide different results. If you want to get beyond the Likes or the Follows and look at what social media is carrying to your corporate door, then Google Analytics is a strong suitor. Sprout Social offers scheduling and demographic measurements and stays on top of mentions and social presence and Radian6 is a comprehensive business solution that offers a plethora of tools and analytics that can be tailored to fit.

Nick Imrie, Managing Director of What Users Do says, “It is quite clear to us that there are a number of metrics that we need to measure to ensure that social is delivering the right amount of engagement and we use standard social media monitoring software like Sprout Social to do this.”

Best of breed

With so many different social media tools available, how does the business select the right one? In many cases it is about matching the feature-sets on offer with the KPIs of the organisation. There is no one size fits all when it comes to ROI, so each business needs to select the tool that will best suit their own structure.

“It is important that the different purposes and desired outcomes are not confused, and that a realistic view of what can be achieved is taken,” says Managing Partners’ Forum’s Richard Chaplin. “If brand awareness is a major purpose of a strategy, then it too must be measured directly.”

There are many tools that come with hefty reputations – such as those mentioned above – and proven performance indicators. Google Analytics has shown its worth time and time again, and the only barrier to entry is the learning curve.

Others provide very simple user interfaces that can instantly be managed in-house, but will cost resources to implement and maintain. Ultimately the tools that your business uses will likely be those that match your unique ROI criteria. There is no clear best of breed, but there are the usual suspects and these are such because they have systematically delivered to spec and can be tweaked for concise reporting. There is no ultimate solution, but there are enough tools to provide the organisation with the ability to create their own system that works.

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