Christopher Wallace

COM 6630 Assignment #5

As social media continues to evolve, it is important for analysists of companies to understand their engagement and how their actions can affect a company’s success. A brand should learn how to track, analyze, and manipulate social information that it takes in on its social engagement. Brands will need to master social listening and social media monitoring. These are ideas that are used to help a company engage and respond better to its audience.

When managing social media and engagements, there are two sides to it. There is the numerical and metrics tracking side and side in which reading your audience and engaging with them is needed. We call ideas such as these social media monitoring and social listening. Social media monitoring is geared toward analyzing and collecting data and metrics of social media engagement. This is a study of brand mentions, relevant hashtags, competitor mentions, and industry trends. The idea is to monitor these areas of data to offer an effective response to the audience for success in brand sells and social engagement. Brands may get Hits on their media which are interactions that are then sent to analytics and can enact Events. Events are a type of hit used to track user interactions with content. One should also look at the pageview (how often a page was reloaded) and sessions which are how long a user has been active on the site. Lastly, keep track of your source/medium. This tracks the origin of your traffic to make accurate estimates of engagements to the website.

Social media metrics also help track the more meaningful engagements such as impressions, post engagement rate, reach, share of voice, and referrals. Impressions are how many times a post shows up. Post engagement rate is the number of engagements divided by impressions or reach. Reach is the potential unique viewers a post could have (usually your follower count plus accounts that shared the post’s follower counts). Share of voice indicates how much of the online sphere your brand takes up. Referrals are typically how a user approaches your website. All of these terms contribute to successful tracking of data for analysis.

Social media listening is a little different. “Social listening is when you track your social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to your brand. Then you analyze them for insights to discover opportunities to act” (https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-listening-business/). This is done through a two-step process. First, you must monitor social media brands, competitors, products, and keywords related to your business. The next step is to figure out how you will put the information you’ve gathered into practice. There is no limit to what you can do in this way. This could be responding to a comment from a customer or changing the mission of the brand. This is where the idea of Conversion comes into play. Conversion is a completed activity, online or offline, that is important to the success of your business. Examples include a completed sign-up for your email newsletter (a Goal conversion) and a purchase (a transaction, sometimes called an Ecommerce conversion).

If you are a brand seeking to improve your social media, it is important to understand your consumer and competition. This means creating an “audit” of your plan of engagement.

References

1.     https://support.google.com/analytics/topic/6083659?hl=en&ref_topic=3544906

2.     https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-metrics/

3.     https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-listening-business/

4.     https://hbr.org/2015/11/conducting-a-social-media-audit (Links to an external site.)