Social media analytics

Last week I wrote a post about free sites that help you measure your social media activity. These tools are great, but there’s still a big black hole when it comes to measuring the ROI of social media or the effectiveness of your content, and that is – what happens on these sites themselves? We are still left in the dark when it comes to the analytics of social networks, such as how many people visited your Facebook page, how many people clicked onto your Twitter profile etc.. This is a huge gap in the market that needs addressing and I don’t think it will be long before we see social networks starting to offer this, at the very least as a premium service.

Facebook is just starting to move in the right direction. Last week they announced analytics for individual post impressions. This basically means that you’ll be able to see how many times a post was rendered online, whether through a direct view, on a live/news feed, or through a fanbox widget. They’ve also introduced a feedback % quote, which tells you the number of comments and likes as a percentage of impressions. This is an excellent addition by Facebook that will provide some much needed answers often asked by the client. The only problem is that it’s only available to authenticated pages with a minimum of 10,000 fans. This is still a fairly high barrier to entry and I’d hope that, similar to the vanity url, this is soon lowered.

There are more sites that are addressing the need for people to analyse social media activity. There is a danger though, of this descending into analytics for analytic’s sake. Tweetstats grabbed my attention recently and I looked forward to a tool that would feed back various measurements on my Twitter account that could be extended for clients. What I got back was an aggregation of my tweets by day and hour, who I retweeted the most and who I replied to the most. It didn’t give me any information which would actually be of use and I didn’t feel this added anything that would enhance my existing reports on Twitter use.

Social media analytics is still massively untapped. When you can already use such clever services to add metrics to social media, such as bit.ly I would expect that this is something that would change soon. The benefits of geolocation are huge here. More and more I want to be able to easily find localised content. This is starting to be addressed, though it hasn’t been cracked quite yet. Foller.me is a site that shows great potential. It graphs your Twitter followers on a world map so you can track their location. Unfortunately, there seems to be a few bugs on the site at the moment. This does show the potential for social media analytics to feed back increasingly useful information that shows the real benefit of your activity and to demonstrate that you really are reaching a targeted audience.

Your community’s community

This is something that I’ve been interested in for quite some time. We all know that social media activity doesn’t end with the one person that you’ve reached. If you’ve got through to someone through a simple tweet for example, how many people are seeing that retweet of theirs, even if they don’t click on it? We need a level of analytics that shows us the size of someone’s community to get an accurate portrayal of just how many people you’re reaching. I know one guy in the UK that counted (manually) how many friends each of his Facebook fans had, to see just how many people they were potentially broadcasting to. These are the kind of metrics we need to give intelligent analysis to a campaign. Given how active consumers are across so many sites, it would be incredibly valuable to track this. Imagine if you could see if the person who left a comment on your blog also has a Friendfeed account this is feeding back to, or if you could automatically see how many times a blog post of yours has been shared on Google Reader?

This is the level of analytics that we need to start seeing, although this is a double edged sword that needs to be treated carefully. By supplying this level of insight into the ‘numbers’ of social media, you are getting away from the real benefit of the message and the quality of the community you’re creating. I’m aware that 100 fans who interact regularly are more valuable than 1,000 fans who don’t engage with your content. The trick is knowing what is worth measuring. Something like the Facebook analytics option for fan pages is incredibly important. I’d even go so far as to say that it could be a game changer when it comes to demonstrating the value of social media marketing. Yet there are many areas of social network analysis that you can get drawn into and won’t really tell you much. There are many services for example that will draw up tag clouds of brand mentions, but unless you’re actually digging down into the real conversations, these are largely meaningless.

The area of social analytics is growing rapidly and with it, we need to grow our knowledge and apply it to determine which are the right measures or metrics to be feeding back. If, as I hope, we are going to see more and more analytics from within social networks themselves we still have to disseminate this information and give it meaning. Social media will never just be a case of passing on the numbers.