Social Media Analytics Part I

What is Social Media?

There are so many ways people define social media and some even argue that it is not really media. According to Wikipedia, Social media is content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. Simply put, social media refers to all the conversation and engagement that happen on networks and sites like facbook, myspace, twitter, blogspehere, youtube, flicke, messageboard, forums etc..

Since these conversations can have a big impact on your brand it becomes critical for a marketer to understand what people are talking about their brand/products etc. so that they can take appropriate actions and help in creating and fostering a positive chatter (conversation) about their brand. Social Media analytics is about measuring and analyzing Social media (content generated by people throughout the web).

Broadly, Social media measurements comes in two flavors

1. Measuring the conversation about your brand in social media


2. Measuring the impact your own social media efforts (e.g. the facebook widget that you spent tons of money on or links that you posted on twitter etc.)

In this post I will talk about the first point, "Measuring what conversation are happening about your brand". I will have second post to discuss about second post.

Challenge with Social Media Measurement

Social Media measurement is very different from measuring your own web site (this is what most of the web analytics tool measure). You own your own website. You can (should) measure interaction of your visitors with your website. Social Media happens with our without your active participation. It mostly happens outside the realms of your website such as conversation on twitter, blogs, forums, facebook etc. Since you don’t have any web analytics tool installed on these places it is hard to find out what’s happening. Even if you had a web analytics tool installed you won’t know what people are talking about. Which is what you would like to know? This sort of information is not available from traditional web analytics tools like Omniture Site Catalysts, WebTrends or Google Analytics.

Social Media Analytics Tools

There are new breed of tools that help you monitor the social buzz. These tools let you “listen” into the conversation about your brand
In these tools you specify a set of keywords that define your brand or are associated with your brand and then the tools do the rest. They crawl the social media networks/sites and find all the mentions of the specified keywords and bring them back to you in nicely formatted reports.
The setup in most of these tools is a very manual process. Once the data is back you will needs a human to go through and analyze the data (not any different from your web analytics tool).

What kind of information do these tools provide?

Most of these tools bring some flavor of the following information (and much more)

• Brand Mentions - Conversation about your brand/competitor/industry (as specified by keywords). You get total mentions by day/week/month and also the ability to drill down to a specific conversations.


• Brand Sentiment – What is the consumer sentiment towards your brand? Are they positive, negative, neutral on your brand?


• Influencers - Who is talking about you? How influential are they and how many times have they talked about your brand.

Some of the Social Media Analytics Tools

• Radian6


• WebTrends - Powered by Radian6


• Techrigy - SM2


• Omniture - Integration with Twitter


• Visible Technologies


• Nielsen BuzzMetrics


• Biz360 Community Insights


• Dow Jones Insights


• Sentiment Metrics


• JD Power Web Intelligence

Below are the screen shots from Radian6 and SM2. Representatives from both these companies were very helpful in responding to my tweet and providing me the screenshot of their tools (see below).


Radian6


SM2


In part II I will talk about how you can measure the impact your own social media efforts (e.g. the facebook widget that you spent tons of money on or links that you posted on twitter etc.).

I might also write reviews of some of the tools mentioned above, if you are a vendor of social media analytics tool and would like me to do a review please contact me.

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Search for a Mertics to Compare Web Sites

Steve Rubel wrote:
"The page view is on life support. It fails to capture all of the myriad of ways consumers engage in online activities without ever leaving a web page. To get a feel for this, spend some time playing with Yourminis. So what will replace it and when will that happen? Let's handicap the field." On his blog What Will Replace the Almighty Page View and he thinks it willbe events or time spent.

Eric Peterson voiced his opinions on this subject on his blog
Worried about page views dying? Don't be.

I however, have a different opinion than Steve and Eric. I think Unique Users make the most sense of all the different metrics that are discussed in these two articles. I also think that maybe we should not just rely on a single metrics such as page views, unique users, no. of events, sessions etc? Maybe it is time to find a new metrics combining some (or all) of these above metrics to compare web sites?

I am going to list my reasons why I think, time spent, event, pages views and session by themselves don’t make sense as measure to rank one site against another.

Time Spent on Site: I am not going to go into detail on this one, you can read my blog article that explains why I am not a big fan of "Time Spent on Site".

Page Views:

Page views were not the right metrics to compare web properties to begin with. Why? Because they can be manipulated very easily. Say it t takes 2+ pages on site A to do anything compared to 1 page on site B, is site A really doing better than site B? Additionally you can split your content in as many pages as you want, there is no min standard page size, thus inflating page views.

Events: I think events will have the same issues as page views, plus everything in flash or AJAX interaction could be an event, where do you draw the line? What count’s as a valid event?

Session: I agree with Eric that this is a relatively stable metrics and agree with all the things he listed out for session. However, I don’t think sessions (alone) make sense as measure of measuring relative value of web properties.
I agree that Unique users have issues but those issues affect every web property, most likely in similar fashion. For example, if I delete my cookies, most likely I will delete for both myspace and yahoo.

Here is an example to make my point:
I go to myspace and read 2 pages in 1 min, wait 31 mins and then go back and read 2 more pages in 1 min. So here is what the web analytics reports will look like

2 sessions (visits)
1 unique users
4 page views
2 mins.

Now I go to yahoo spend 2 mins reading 4 pages in 1 session. Here is what the web analytics report will look like
1 session
1 unique users
4 page views
2 mins

What about the following scenario

Which property is number 1? Aren’t they both the same? If you use Session myspace appear to be number 1. But if you look at Unique Users and rest everything too, they both are equal.

What about the following scenario

I go to myspace site and read 2 pages in 1 min, wait 31 mins and then go back and read 2 more pages in 1 min then come back after 2 hours and read 2 more pages for 1 min. So here is what the web analytics report will look like

3 sessions
1 unique users
6 page views
3 mins.

Now I go to Yahoo spend 2 mins reading 4 pages in 1 session. My friend goes and reads 2 pages in 1 mins in one session. Here is what report will look like

2 sessions
2 unique users
6 page views
3 mins

Which property is number 1? Session will say myspace, even tough yahoo is getting more users?.

Will an advertiser be happy by showing same ad 10 times to one user in (more session but only 1 user) or they will be happier by showing the 5 times to 2 users (fewer sessions but more users)? So shouldn’t yahoo be number one in this scenario?

Let’s face it, it is about unique users. But other metrics do play a role in determining the value of a website

So do you agree that it is time to find a new metrics combining some (or all) of these above metrics? Comments/Thoughts?