People have a tendency of saying “everyone on social media says…”. It’s funny because if you really think about it how can one say that indeed everyone is saying one thing? WIthout the proper monitoring and analytics in place everything is just conjecture and you might end up making wrong decisions because you’re misinformed. This is more evident in traditional media and even bloggers when they cover something that involves Twitter and Facebook. I can’t count how many times I’ve read “Filipinos on Social Media in an uproar” but can you actually quantify that? Without data your guess is as just as good as mine.
When I say “Social Media Analytics”, I don’t mean the Insights section (for admins) on your official Facebook Page. That data is important but it’s inward in nature. You need to have something else in place that will always keep you in the know about what’s being said about your brand and how many people are actually saying them.
Social Media Measurement Tools
With the rapid growth and importance put on the opinon of people who are on social media, it’s imperative that companies come up with social media monitoring and analysis system. There are several tools available that will let you count how many times a particular keyword was tweeted or posted on Facebook updates. Tools that will allow you to filter through the list and see who said what first. You’ll actually know how many mentions there were on a given period of time and you can cross reference that with the total number of users who are actually on Twitter and Facebook. With that data on hand that’s the time you can actually say “x% of Filipinos on Facebook say that _____”.
Here’s post on Social Media Biz listing down some of the top social media monitoring tools available in the market. My personal favorite is Radian6.
To Social Media Managers: fight for this tool. Yes it will cost the company but you can’t really make intelligent recommendations and analyses unless you have both quantitative and qualitative data.
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