Many businesses out there sink a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and money into social media marketing only to have generated a negative ROI. It’s sad but true that most social media websites don’t provide sufficient data or analytics to allow website managers and businesses to even be able to generate comprehensive reports on the effects of their campaigns.
But all the hype about social media marketing isn’t bunk: there’s a lot of money to be made in marketing effectively and dramatic, positive ROI numbers are a real possibility. But analytics is the glue of all marketing, not just social marketing, and we’ve hunted down some of the top providers of social media management toolsto help marketing experts and website owners nail down the data which can help them make informed decisions.
Followerwonk
Though this social media tool is only for Twitter accounts, it can provide valuable insights to help you expand your brand’s reach and influence. Not only does it recommend connections, but it allows you to geo-locate your followers, learn when they’re active on Twitter (so you can optimize posting times), and gives suggestions on the types of content most likely to be popular in your niche. All in all, those are some strong services… which might be ideal for someone who isn’t interested in Facebook or other social sites.
Sysomos
Sysomos is a monitoring and analytics service which operates in over 180 languages and is even optimized to recognize slang. For webmasters and marketers who engage internationally, there’s almost nothing more important. Sysomos also brings a great administrative backend to the table; and is optimized to identify social media influencers, potential leads, and users who represent the ideal client.
This is ideal when optimizing a content campaign strategy. As many experts have explained before, content marketing is a pitfall if content isn’t ‘speaking to your audience’, or lacking proper scheduling and timeliness of content delivery, with focused attention to those super users that come back time and time again to share your content with their spheres of influence.
To boot, Sysomos can even pinpoint users dissatisfied with competitors or who might be actively searching for a brand like yours. And unlike many tools, it can plug in to Google Analytics, and accesses up to two years of data.
Buffer
If you’re a novice to social media marketing, Buffer might be a great tool to help you get your feet wet without overwhelming you with data and options. It allows you to pre-write and schedule posts to different social media outlets and profiles, automatically shortens links, and tracks social media engagement so that you can generate a soft ROI. Certainly not the tool for organizations who already manage massive campaigns and want to dig deep on data, but substantially more helpful than the raw information which most social media websites provide to marketers.
Quintly
Quintly can help marketers who are more interested in generating reports and calculating ROI, as it tracks and compares performance and has several easy reporting tools. You can set your benchmarks to your competitor’s performance, industry best practices, and it allows you to easily add your own reporting widgets. Unlike some social media analytics providers, it breaks down kinds of engagement into an hourly format which is easy to digest, and recommends key users. It syncs relatively easily with all the major social media outlets, and allows users to customize their dashboards.
SumAll
Initially free, their service doesn’t just give you access to social media analytics, but can also link in your FitBit or bank account widgets. A great multipurpose tool for the freelancing marketer or someone who’s promoting their own brand, it shows a simple and streamlined chart or pull-down which shows how much engagement posts are getting, what’s trending… and what is not. Fascinatingly, it also allows you to set up alerts, which inform you when certain benchmarks have not been met. Best of all, SumAll has an incredibly user-friendly mobile app which summarizes desktop reports.
