How To Measure Your Social Media Success

As you may already know, social media plays an integral role in the daily lives of PR professionals. It is a way for brands, companies and PR professionals to reach out and connect with their consumers and audiences. Now that you have learned How to Effectively Manage Your Online Brand with Hootsuite, you might be wondering, How can I figure out exactly how influential my social media strategies are? 

By logging onto the following websites, you can see exactly how effective your social media strategies are.

1. Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a free program that analyzes influence by allowing users to enter the links of one or more of their websites. It measures your influence by showing the number of daily visits to your site, how users got to your site, the demographics of your users, how long they stay, and the popularity of the content on your page. Using this tool will help you track how you can keep your users coming back.

1. Klout: Klout defines their site as “your ability to drive action on social networks” and their mission is to identify who has influence on the Web, how much of it they have and on what topics. Once you sync your accounts, Klout does all the work for you. By tracking activity on ten different social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, YouTube, Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, and Last.fm, Klout can get an understanding of a user’s online profile. They graph your influence and pick out several key data points including:
   • Klout Score: A measurement of your overall online influence
   • Network Influence: The influence of level of your engaged audience
   • Amplification Probability: The likelihood that your content will promote actions (likes, comments, retweets, hashtags etc.)
   • True Reach: The size of your engaged audience and is based on your followers and friends who interact with you consistently

3. Twylah: This is a new Twitter service users can request an invite to that allows users to create a custom brand page for your tweets, creating a whole new experience with Twitter. Twylah “brings your brand message into focus, extends the life of your tweets and helps you get discovered beyond Twitter,” all essential points in tracking social media influence. For example, Twylah will automatically organize your user activity by your trending topics, giving others a quick look at who you are. Once you’ve started using Twylah for a while, the service will update you by letting you know which topics are important to your followers. This helpful feature gives you insight into exactly what your network of followers wants to read so you can target content for them.

This list is only a handful of the tools that I am partial to for gauging social media influence. Some may find one better than the other; each site has its own system.  Finding one that can provide the most useful analysis to help your benchmark your social influence is key. By using these sites, or one of the many others out there, you will be able to witness what is successful with your online platforms, and what strategies could use some revisiting.  Some sites even offer recommendations on how you can improve your social media strategy as a whole. Which one will you use?