The Social Media Analytics Showdown: What You Can Track and How Analysis is the key to getting the results you had in mind when you created all that compelling content.
By Hiral Rana Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You need three things to create good campaigns and engage with fans on social media: good content, a steady stream of good content, content intelligence.
Every minute, we see a heavy downpour of social media messages, like millions of construction workers pouring concrete down the cement mixer, but instead of it being constructive, we find messy roads and a lot of noise. Even if you are churning out good content steadily, you need to have knowledge or insights about this content, which is where social media analytics come into the picture.
There are several social media analytics tools on the market today but not all of them are created equal or with similar intent. While most of the tools allow you to listen into customer conversations, monitor campaign results or gain insights on data, there are certain key features and USPs that make all of them special in their own way.
So let's attack the nitty-gritties of social media analytics.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is one of the most comprehensive and powerful tools for social media analytics. It offers the most extensive coverage in terms of geographic spread, language and media, as well as time. Their global coverage spans 247 countries and 187 languages. So whether your customer is sitting in Dubai or Dublin, speaking Arabic or Chinese, you can listen in and reach out to him or her.
Talkwalker also offers insights on print, social, online and even broadcast media, and allows you to identify key influencers as well as the emotions associated with your brand or products. What's more, you can get insights on two years of historical data, so even if you are a late adopter, you get to see into the past. You can export and combine these insights with other data to create strong visuals to see patterns that help decision making.
What can you track?
- Mentions of your brand in owned and earned media.
- Performance of own and competitor social media channels.
- Full coverage of major social networks and 150 million websites.
- Data from print media and TV/radio broadcasts.
Who uses this tool and how?
Some of the most prominent clients of Talkwalker include Volkswagen, Microsoft, Greenpeace, Best Western, Ogilvy and Peppercomm. These clients use it to listen to their audience, use social insights to inform business strategy, predict social trends and create comprehensive social data intelligence reports. You can get a taste of their paid platform by signing up for a free demo.
In a nutshell: Comprehensive 360-degree social media intelligence.
SumAll
SumAll is a cross-platform tool that gains insights from social media, ecommerce websites, sales and web. This platform was essentially built to make data analytics accessible and affordable for small business. SumAll has partnered with Shopify, PayPal, Magento, eBay and Amazon, so users can plug and use data from everywhere. SumAll breaks down social media and ecommerce metrics into simple and beautiful charts, which makes it easy to understand for all kinds of users.
What can you track?
- Ecommerce data
- Social media data
- Google Analytics data
Who uses this tool and how?
SumAll is essentially meant for small-to-medium ecommerce companies. Users can get a bird's eye view of data from Google, their website and social media pages to understand their audience and make simple decisions such as when to give out discounts or offer free shipping.
In a nutshell: Simple social media analytics for quick decision-making
Cyfe
One of the key features of Cyfe is its All-In-One Dashboard that offers insights on all aspects of your business from social media, marketing, sales, support through to infrastructure. So in a sense, it is not a through-and-through social media analytics tool but a jack-of-all-SaaS-analytics tool. While this might mean lot less advanced features, like filters and search and detailed analysis, it also means a far better overview of how each marketing channel integrates with the others as well as overall operations.
What can you track?
- Signups and subscriptions
- Social media analytics
- SEO and SEM analytics
- Web analytics
- Sales and finance analytics
- IT network and server monitoring
Who uses this tool and how?
Some of the important Cyfe users are Vodafone, Citrix, Groupon and Marriott. From tracking new signups to monitoring networks through to managing projects, Cyfe can be used for varied reasons. Plus, they're always adding new widgets that help customize your dashboard.
In a nutshell: All-in-one sales and marketing analytics tool
Social Report
Social Report is a social analytics plus publishing and automation tool. It allows you to tune into your social media insights, schedule your posts, syndicate content and automate replies, follow/unfollow, likes, etc. Basically, it takes care of all your social needs.
What can you track?
- Cross channel engagement
- World reach
- Audience growth rate
- Demographics
- Channel activity
Who uses this tool and how?
Some highflying users of Social Report include Warner Bros, The Economist, HGTV and Samsung. The most common uses of this tool are analytics and reporting, social media monitoring, publishing, automating responses and content backup and archiving.
In a nutshell: Integration of social and publishing analytics
All the tools described here help you gain intelligence on data pouring in from all directions; all of them have their own strengths, weaknesses and USPs. You just need to find the one that suits your needs the best and use it in your business.
