Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®

Reader Poll: Social Media Marketing Analytics Tools

reader poll

With our involvement in the PR, search and direct marketing industries through consulting and speaking at conferences, we’ve seen a huge boost in resources allocated to understanding and implementing various social media marketing tactics.

Despite that, the meaning of social media as a marketing/PR channel doesn’t seem to extend outside personal universes of interest. ie, search marketers often look at social media as using tools like Digg or StumbleUpon to drive web site traffic. PR practitioners often see social media as a branding tool using sites like YouTube & Facebook.

Regardless of the intent, social media marketing efforts are moot unless methods of measurement are in place. Which leads me to the Reader Poll Question:

What tools do you use to measure social media marketing efforts?

  • Standard Web Analytics (WebTrends, Hitbox, Google Analytics, etc) (51%, 41 Votes)
  • Several Different Apps (Feedburner, Subscription to RSS Queries, Compete, Technorati, Socialmeter, etc) (30%, 24 Votes)
  • Social Media Monitoring (BuzzMetrics, Relevant Noise, Cymphony, etc) (10%, 8 Votes)
  • Other - see comments (5%, 4 Votes)
  • A home grown solution (4%, 3 Votes)

Total Voters: 80

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I wanted to keep the actual poll options brief and am really looking forward to seeing specific tools and their context of use mentioned in the comments. Our reviews of BuzzLogic, Collective Intellect and Radian6 are overdue but will be posting soon. They will be followed by reviews of several other tools related to social media metrics and a roundup of resources related to the topic.

Lee Odden

About Lee Odden

@LeeOdden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing and editor of Online Marketing Blog. Cited for his expertise by The Economist, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal, he's the author of the book Optimize and presents internationally on B2B marketing topics including content, search, social media and influencer marketing. When not at conferences, consulting, or working with his talented team, he's likely running, traveling or cooking up something new.

Comments

  3. AvatarJason Falls says

    Great poll. I’ve recently vetted measurement firms and the whole process led me to believe there’s no one good solution. A combination of traditional free methods, in-depth using a service and even anectodal input should all be used, but based on the goals and objectives of the client or brand.

  4. AvatarAndy Beard says

    I use a mixture of most of the above, depending on what I am trying to achieve with a particular piece of content.

    When you write an article and 90% of your subscribers open it you might look on that as being a hit, but the article only generated one 3rd party comment, very little traffic, and 2 links.
    Compare that to articles on PageRank recently which though they might not have had the open rate in feeds generated 100s of links and comments, and brought in new subscribers.

    I think it is important to balance these things in some way such that as many different metrics grow over time.

    I am still looking for an email solution that will allow daily scheduled RSS > Email suitable for marketing purposes (Aweber / Getresponse type features)
    Measuring the rate at which someone clicks a subscription button for RSS subscription currently for my blogs isn’t worth it, because the numbers are too small to mean anything, and only a small percentage use the buttons.

  8. AvatarOlivier Amar says

    We use Clicktracks. The ability to segment and label anything you want and then dissect it all the way down to IP in a matter of moments is something that’s become very valuable to us.