Building a compelling Facebook fan page is one thing. Creating consistent engagement is a whole other skill.

In this post, my intent is to bring to light several areas you may be overlooking that are causing your fan page to either plateau or not get off the ground much at all.  To know more about Facebook engagement, check out this two-part post here and here.

The News Feed

Many businesses set up a Facebook fan page and look to their fan growth rate as the primary success metric. But number of fans isn’t really the full story. You need to track and measure how much your fans are actually consuming, engaging with and sharing your content.

Some studies show that a whopping 90% of Facebook users don’t return to a fan page once they click the Like button. They only see and interact with your content in their news feed. So your job is to ensure you’re consistently posting relevant content that gets seen in the news feed of your fans and inspires lots of engagement with comments, likes, shares and @ tags.

To access your metrics, go to facebook.com/insights or click “View Insights” in the Admin panel at top right of your fan page. Insights are available on all fan pages with more than 30 fans, so if you just launched a new page, you’ll need to get your first 30+ fans before you can begin tracking metrics.

Monitor Your Per-Post Insights

This is a handy three-part metric that’s clearly displayed right on your fan page wall next to every post you create approximately 24 hours after publishing. The three parts are:

1. What you posted
2. The number of impressions
3. The percent feedback

To clarify, impressions is the number of times your content was “rendered in the stream,” which means that your content was displayed on your fan page wall, shown in the news feed of fans, commented on or Liked.

Note that the impressions metric does not equate to an exact number of actual Facebook users; your content may be further down on the news feed while a fan is viewing other content. To see a more accurate number of actual views, go to Insights > Interactions > Post Views and that number is the total number of times your content has been viewed by fans and non-fans.

The percent feedback is calculated by taking the total number of comments plus Likes divided by the number of impressions. In the example below, I posted a photograph of the latest version of my social media business cards with an added QR code. The post was made on a Thursday at 5:10 pm PT—which is not my normal “high-traffic window” (typically 8:00 am – 12:30 pm PT). However, this particular post was very well-received, as it a) was a photo, which tends to get the highest weight in the news feed, b) contained exciting new information my fans wanted to know about and c) included actionable tips with links.

Example Facebook fan page Per-Post Insights

If you take 277 Likes + 156 comments = 433 / 70,941 impressions, the percent is 0.61%.

I recommend that you focus on the percent feedback number—you want that to increase. The number of impressions can be misleading. Sure, it’s great to think tens of thousands of Facebook users are seeing your content. But you want them to engage with your content.

Monitor Your Daily Story Feedback

This metric also consists of three components, plus I added a fourth:

1.  Total number of Likes on all of your content for any given day
2.  Total number of comments on all of your content for any given day
3.  Total number of “Unsubscribes” on any given day
4.  Total number of “Unlikes” on any given day

The first two numbers are self-explanatory. However, Unsubscribes is a metric that’s frequently overlooked by most Facebook fan page owners. When a fan chooses to hide your content from showing up in their news feed, this is considered an “Unsubscribe.” Remember, your fans are viewing your content primarily in their news feed.

In the screenshot below, you can see the news feed options for a post made by a fan page I’ve Liked: Hide the post, Hide everything by the page, Unlike the page or Mark as spam.

Here's how a fan can hide your updates.

The top two reasons that fans choose to hide your posts are 1) posting too frequently (meaning your posts are dominating their news feed and they can’t see much of their friends’ activity or other pages that they’ve Liked) and 2) posting content that’s not relevant.

You can’t see exactly which fans have hidden your posts from their news feed, nor can you necessarily tell exactly which piece of content caused fans to Unsubscribe (or Unlike). You can only see a total number for the day. It’s vital to keep a watchful eye on this one metric alone. You may see your fan count growing nicely and maybe there’s a decent amount of engagement happening. But you may be just treading water—as new fans join, others may be hiding your content.

You’ll find your Daily Story Feedback under Insights > Interactions.

Facebook Insights —Daily Story Feedback

The fourth metric is the number of fans who have chosen to leave your fan page altogether. At least with the Unsubscribes, they’re still fans and can post and engage on your wall. Facebook users may choose to Unlike fan pages for the same two reasons they hide posts—too frequent or not relevant. Fans can easily hover over any content in their news feed and select Hide or Unlike, as shown in the screenshot above with the Black Eyed Peas (just as an example!).

You’ll find your Unlikes under Insights > Users > third graph down = New Likes and Unlikes.

There are many other metrics you can track and monitor via your Facebook Insights, such as Page Views; Daily, Weekly and Monthly Active Users; Daily Page Activity; Demographics; Media Consumption and more. But we’ll save those for future blog posts!

For now, by monitoring your Unsubscribes (Hides) and Unlikes against what content you are posting each day and how much engagement (post comments and Likes) you’re creating, you’ll be better equipped to fine-tune variables such as the topics you post about, the type of content you post (photo, video, link, status update) and the time of day you post. Over time, you’ll identify your own sweet spot for maximum engagement.

You might consider creating your own Excel spreadsheet as a dashboard. My coauthor, Chris Treadaway, and I recommend this practice in our book Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day. In fact, I like to take the dashboard concept one step further and create a blend of an editorial calendar with retroactive tracking. That way you can plan what you’re going to post and fine-tune along the way as you watch your daily engagement rates.

What do you think?  What do you measure on your own fan page? Let us know in the comments below if this post was of value to you.

But new social media management tools are popping up like weeds and a couple of them might end up being roses. One new such tool is SproutSocial.com.

Here are the 7 ways to tell if you’re ready to graduate from TweetDeck.

#1: Social media monitoring is eating up a lot of your time

Time is money, as they say, and although TweetDeck is handy, its functionality is limited to the few things it does well.

SproutSocial was launched last November and represents a big step up in terms of performance for a modest monthly fee of $9/month—a fee you may or may not be ready to pay.

Among the many things I like about SproutSocial, an elegantly designed browser-based “social media management” tool, is its ability to save you time on multiple fronts:

• Providing an inbox that combines your multiple social streams and then allows you to respond or flag messages for follow-up
• Making it easy to automatically post your RSS feed from your blog to your Twitter accounts
• Helping you to remember the names of the people you follow by auto-suggesting their handles after you type the @ sign
• Scheduling recurring messages easily but without being annoying

Creating a recurring message on SproutSocial is quick and easy.

#2: Social media has become a good source of competitive data

Let’s assume you’ve decided to track a number of keywords and phrases via individual TweetDeck columns. At some point, you’ll end up adding too many columns to view them all with ease on one screen.

With SproutSocial, you can aggregate your searches into one data stream, allowing you to see who’s tweeting about you, your competition and your category. You can also search by company name, which allows you to find which of your competitors are tweeting and the size of their following.

This shows an aggregated stream of tweets by individual keywords and phrases selected by the user.

#3: You want to know when is the best time to tweet your particular topic

Though TweetDeck can help you schedule tweets for a later time, it isn’t much help figuring out the ideal time to do so.

Using SproutSocial’s keyword search frequency analyzer, I noticed, for example, that one of my topics of interest, “social media expert,” was mentioned most on Sunday, suggesting that some prospects were in planning mode on the weekends.

You can analyze keyword frequency by time of day and by day of the week.

I also noticed that my other key topics bunched up during the business hours of 12-6pm, suggesting this might be the best time to engage. SproutSocial also helps you assess frequency of tweets by people and by business—another bit of knowledge that could improve the efficiency of your efforts.

#4: You’re wondering how you’re doing compared to others

TweetDeck is like a nifty broadcast center, making it easy to send messages to all your social channels. But among its many shortcomings is its inability to assess how your social program is performing relative to current best practices.

This is one of the areas in which SproutSocial shines, providing scores for both engagement and influence right on your dashboard. Better yet, by following up with items in your inbox, you can watch your engagement numbers improve, making you even more confident that your social media time is well spent.

The SproutSocial dashboard provides a score for both engagement and influence, which gives you a sense of how you're doing relative to others.

#5: You’re managing multiple accounts across multiple channels

If you’re a TweetDeck user, you already know the advantages of being able to direct the same message to multiple accounts on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. But wouldn’t it be great if you could also get a snapshot of how you’re doing across these platforms and toggle back and forth between various accounts?

This is one of my favorite features of SproutSocial, which makes it very easy to add Twitter accounts and then link these to Facebook fan pages and LinkedIn accounts. By bringing these accounts to one place, you can also look at your incoming message streams from each platform, again saving valuable time.

Your inbox on SproutSocial allows you to monitor your feeds from multiple sources, which you can also do on the Chrome browser version of TweetDeck, but not the desktop application that most people use.

#6: You’d like to share progress reports with someone else

Manual reporting is the bane of any of social media manager and TweetDeck offers no relief from this grind. SproutSocial, on the other hand, makes the creation of dazzling reports almost embarrassingly easy.

Starting with your dashboard, you’ll find an instant snapshot of your progress, with six widgets covering things like Twitter stats, most recent clicks and your social scorecard. All of these reports can be turned into PDFs that are easily shared.

The only widget that didn’t work for me was the demographic, which SproutSocial CEO Justyn Howard called a “work in progress [that] will get more reliable in the next few weeks.”

Fully customizable by time frame, this report examines my progress on Twitter over a 30-day period, looking at engagement, influence and message type.

#7: You’ve decided you really want to get leads from Twitter

While TweetDeck makes it easy to add a follower from your topic searches, it offers little help when it comes to identifying the titles of the folks who make up your best leads. This is one of the areas that SproutSocial truly shines.

Because many people put their job title into their public profile on Twitter, using SproutSocial’s “People Search” tool allows you to select the titles of your best prospects. You can also add additional contact info to the leads you track, making following up on those leads that much easier.

SproutSocial makes it easy to find potential leads by searching profiles by particular title. This shows the results of my search for "senior marketers" on Twitter.

Final Note:

Just so you don’t think this is an ad for SproutSocial, let me assure you I have no relationship with this company in any way. I also looked at a bunch of other tools like MarketMeSuite, which got good reviews from others but I found it to be so poorly designed that I simply gave up after a couple of hours.

After using SproutSocial for six weeks, I can assure you that there’s still plenty of room for improvement. “We’ll be adding more in-depth analytics, team workflow and white label offerings in the near future,” Howard explained. The good news is that they seem to understand the importance of customer service and responded to my emails and online inquiries with remarkable speed.

Howard also noted that most of his prospects are using free tools and like you, are currently weighing the potential benefits of “business-specific tools to enhance their efforts.” Which begs the question, would you be willing to pay $9 per month to substantially improve and easily track the performance of your social media efforts? Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

You can also check out the Top 5 Most Indispensable Twitter Tools for Marketers here.

Do you use free social media monitoring tools? What are your thoughts on TweetDeck and SproutSocial? Please leave your comments in the box below.

Amber shares why social media monitoring is so important and what you need to monitor to get the most value out of your social media activities.

You’ll find out why social media is the new phone and what this means to your business. Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to find out what people are saying, what your competition is doing and what’s happening in your industry
• How to tie your monitoring back to metrics to measure social media results to improve awareness, sales and loyalty
• What the Red Cross does right in social media
• How blogging and social media impact your metrics
• Whether controversy is a good idea on your blog
• Where to learn how to integrate social media into your business

Read the book Amber co-authored with Jay Baer, The Now Revolution, to find out how to be a social company and how to engineer social from the inside out.  And connect with Amber on Twitter @ambercadabra, at Radian6 and on her blog, Brass Tack Thinking.

How do you measure your social media activities? What tips do you have to share on creating a social business? Please leave them below.

If you’re looking for a social media monitoring tool, you’ve probably noticed that it’s quickly becoming a confusing landscape. For those who are new to social media and looking for tools to manage their presence, it’s difficult to know how to compare one vendor to the next. Here’s the skinny on where Radian6 fits into the picture.

Where does Radian6 fit into the social media measurement landscape?

Radian6 helps brands ensure that no post is missed.

We offer unequalled coverage of the social web and provide metrics to measure what is being said, and by whom. —David Alston, CMO Radian6.

Primarily, Radian6 is a monitoring tool. It can help you monitor brand mentions across the social landscape and the new Engagement Console offers you an end-to-end presence management tool.

Radian6 Dashboards

For consideration: Think about how much “noise” you have in your space. In order for monitoring to be actionable you want to keep in mind that for industries and brands that are targets for spammers it can take a considerable amount of work to filter and find the “meaningful” conversations. I experienced this problem myself, as CareOne and the entire debt relief industry are hounded by spammers and it required intervention from Radian6 to get it in line.

Tip: Many people start by putting in keywords that are used in SEO and paid search. To narrow your results, sort them by comment count. Because comments indicate more engagement, it’s more likely that the conversations are meaningful. Look for other words that are used frequently with your keywords and add them as modifiers to narrow your results to conversations, rather than spam bots.

The Engagement Console is a real-time social web client—more complete than Twitter.

What are Radian6′s greatest strengths?

“Radian6 offers users comprehensive coverage of discussions on the social web, covering hundreds of millions of blogs, comments, the public Facebook API and the full Twitter firehose. In addition to this coverage, Radian6 is scalable within an enterprise, allowing online comments to be assigned within the business, to customer service, sales, marketing and so forth. Radian6 also integrates with other enterprise applications like Salesforce.com and analytics like Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics.” —David Alston

You can scour more than 150 million public sites and sources including blogs and comments, forums, mainstream online news publications, public photos and videos.

In the landscape of monitoring tools, while competitors are on the rise, Radian6 has had a very comfortable and secure position in the market. I think this is because of two things. First, they entered the market early and got popular social media bloggers to test them out and recommend them. Second, they quickly gained popularity among enterprise organizations with big brand names as being the go-to choice.

For consideration: Radian6 is a very comprehensive tool that gives you a one-stop shop for engaging on your social channels. The workflow aspect is a key consideration for enterprise-level organizations. However, for smaller businesses or teams with one or two people it may be overkill. Additionally, their pricing model can get expensive quickly for larger teams. It starts at $1k+ per month.

Tip: Take advantage of the free tools out there for a while. See what you like best about them and see what they’re lacking. Create a list of absolute must-haves and nice-to-haves. When you’re looking at different providers you can use this checklist to make sure they have what you need. Anything they’re offering that isn’t on your absolute must-have or nice-to-have lists will likely end up being an unused feature.

If Radian6 is integrated with Salesforce, Webtrends, Omniture and Google Analytics, can they provide ROI data?

The short answer is no. Based on the integration David described to me, there’s no way to follow the conversation back to the revenue. The integration was mostly done from a customer service perspective.

“For Salesforce, it’s designed in such a way that, for example, if you find a customer service issue in Radian6, you can link the record of what you find in Radian6 back to the customer record. In terms of Google Analytics, Webtrends or Omniture, you can create an XML report of the 10 terms that get captured in Webtrends that you want to import into Radian6. You can then overlay the Webtrend data on those keywords with the information inside Radian6 and do kind of a pivot to sort by items like time on site.” —David Alston

For consideration: The level of conversion tracking was described by Alston as items like lead forms that are set up as goals within your web tracking software. In my experience, this type of conversion data is nice but unless it was an online sale it doesn’t attach to revenue.

Tip: While Radian6 doesn’t provide ROI data within its interface, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get to it through other channels. You may need to work with a consultant who can help you quickly identify where to connect the pieces to get to revenue.

What are Radian6′s biggest weaknesses?

There are a several things that I think Radian6 could do better.

Up-front Effort for Workflow Features

From a workflow perspective, it’s great to be able to assign tasks and tags to posts; however, to be effective, you need to create a system of tagging up front or you’ll end up with a large clean-up effort later. It was a great improvement when they released the Engagement Console which allows you to write macros. This cuts down significantly on the number of clicks it takes to assign a post and tag it. But it does take a lot of forethought and setup to get that working well.

David acknowledges that this can be a challenge.

“Because the Engagement Console was designed to optimize usage in a team environment, it requires users to think through the tagging, classification and macro systems they would like to use in advance. This takes an investment to create (we call it a “playbook”), but it’s definitely worth it once it has been set up. The latest addition of administrative functionality in the Engagement Console means a single super-user can help pull this all together for the team, thus saving more time.”

Two Interfaces

As a user you’ll find that there are two interfaces for you to use. The Engagement Console is where you manage your social media channels, tag posts, assign them and so on. I liken it to your HootSuite or TweetDeck interface on steroids. This is what you’ll likely use every day. Then you have the Radian6 dashboard which aggregates all of your stats into pretty little charts and you can get data based on specific timeframes.

I found it awkward that the Radian6 dashboard is web-based and the Engagement Console is a desktop app. I would have preferred to have them both as web apps.

No Smart Phone App

For those who manage their presence on the go, there’s one big missing piece of the puzzle. You can’t use Radian6 on a smart phone because there is no app. I asked David about this and he said to “stay tuned” but I’ve been hearing that for over a year now so I’m becoming a little skeptical on their ability to make it happen in the short-term. If I were at Radian6, this would be my top priority. For users, it creates a disconnect from presence management and forces us to use other tools on our phones.

I’d rather look for all of my stats on my smart phone, and using the Engagement Console means I have to get reporting in two locations, which is not my preference.

Pricing

There are three fees. One is a per-seat license. The second is a per–topic profile fee. A topic profile is where you tell it what data you want to pull in. If you want to separate data, there is only so much you can do within one topic profile. An agency managing multiple clients would need at least one topic profile per client and it’s the most expensive item on the list. The third fee is based upon the volume of posts that come into your topic profile.

While the initial volume range that comes with your topic profile is reasonably high, you’d be surprised at how quickly you can exceed it. You can use keyword refinement to bring this down. These are all monthly fees that make up your core price. While I think Radian6 is certainly the Cadillac in the space and their price indicates that, it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth the money.

Summary

Radian6 is a great platform that’s equipped with a lot of bells and whistles. From my perspective, it was clear the company is dedicated to continual innovation of the tools. To decide if it’s right for you, you’ll need to look at your list of absolute must-have and nice-to-have features and see if buying the “whole farm” makes sense for your organization. My feeling is that for most one- or two-person operations it may be a little overkill and pricey, but for corporate marketing teams I think it’s a reasonable choice.

Read these posts for more on measuring social media and its impact on brand awareness, looking to track social media metrics and 5 ways to use social data to grow your business.

What do you think? Are you a Radian6 user? If so, what would you add to the list of strengths? How about weaknesses? Did you switch from Radian6 to another tool? If so, which one did you pick and why? Please join the conversation and leave a comment in the box below.

Social media allows you to match data generated by social interactions with individual’s preferences and general interests. This creates useful profiles that give marketers insight into how to tailor future offers and products to their customer base.

In this article I’ll show you five ways to use the data generated by your social network profiles—and those of your competitors—to expand your reach and sales.

#1: Listening Data

Nearly every social media plan tells you to begin by “listening,” but what are you listening for? Monitoring news related to your local business environment and industry can give you a sense of the conversation around your products or services, but social listening allows you to expand this information and make it more relevant.

Specifically, you can gather data about the reactions to your products and campaigns as measured by interactions with messages on Facebook, retweets, mentions on Twitter and comments on your blog.

Measuring the volume, sentiment and relevance of these interactions—and tracking this data over time—will allow you to determine how new products, services and/or offers are received by your customers.

Here’s a view inside Gatorade’s mission control, where the brand reviews insights from social data to drive marketing improvements.

Tools like Google Alerts and HootSuite allow you to monitor basic volume of interactions. If the volume grows to the point where manual tracking is not feasible, there are a few paid products like Radian 6, Meltwater Buzz and Scout Labs that allow you to track data in a more automated fashion.

Some large-scale examples of using listening data for product development and service improvement include Dell’s new Social Media Listening Command Center and Gatorade’s Mission Control. How can you model your listening campaign on these examples?

#2: Benchmarking Data

In the past, it was difficult or even impossible for business owners to know how their efforts and branding stacked up against their competition, aside from observing the general performance of the competitors’ businesses and anecdotal information. Social media data allows you to understand your performance relative to your competitors, because so much of it is publicly accessible.

Once you gather the listening data based on your own company profiles, compare it to that of your competitors to gain perspective on your performance.

Observe the size of your communities relative to your competitors. Also, analyze the relative activity of those communities. Do your fans and followers post more or less frequently than your competitors?

Additionally, you can dig in to see who is following your competition and your own profiles, and compare to see who has more relevant community members for your industry.

Note the relative level of effort required to gain the number of interactions your competitors are driving. If you’re receiving either more or fewer interactions than your competitor, but posting with the same frequency, note the differences in your content and what is driving the disparity in results.

Be sure to account for competitors in each social channel on which you are active, and if possible, benchmark yourself against competitors that are active across multiple channels.

#3: Strategic Forecasting Data

RapLeaf, a social data company, provides insights on customer trends.

While market research groups provided one channel for companies to learn about the interests and perceptions of a few customers, companies like RapLeaf allow you to identify your customer base by revealing key insights and trends about what social networks your customers use, other popular websites for customers, relative location trends and relative demographic trends.

The use of social data allows you to hone your financial performance projections and product development, especially if you produce specific promotions for each social network, and can track revenue and profit from the activities on individual channels. Knowing this kind of information about your consumer base allows for more accurate targeting and the power to personalize campaigns.

#4: Real-time Tracking Data

Traditional advertising channels like radio, television and print were able to provide estimates of effectiveness through quantifying radio ratings, television viewership or magazine sales; however, these ads were effectively impossible to track with any real certainty. Social data allows marketers to view relevant and real-time trends including how campaigns are performing at given time and how alterations to campaigns affect results.

Tools like HootSuite provide real-time tracking of social data to drive business decisions.

Not only do these tracking mechanisms allow businesses to see how a campaign is performing, they allow them to view consumer data at a granular level, identify positive or negative trends and make instant modifications.

This ability, combined with the real-time tracing of consumer sentiment, can mitigate wasteful spending or funding for a campaign that isn’t working as planned.

#5: Reflection and Insight

No matter the level of preparedness a company has in listening, gauging relevance, forecasting and implementing, there’s still a degree of uncertainty in social media. The advantage of robust data tracking services is that you never find yourself guessing why something worked or what caused it not to work. Here is a great post on how to analyze Twitter performance, for instance.

Consumer feedback is usually statistically significant, mostly unsolicited and readily available for companies looking to reformulate their efforts. By understanding a campaign through the targets’ points of view and gaining the ability to quantify their evaluation process, social data can be an invaluable tool for marketers.

How will you use social data in 2011 to grow your business? Is there a particular suggestion that you’ve already implemented and can discuss? We’d love to hear what’s working for your business, so leave your comments in the box below.

HootSuite just announced that they’ve passed their millionth user at the end of November, so it’s time to take a deep dive to see what HootSuite is doing and how it’s going to impact the social media space. Here’s a review of the latest and greatest with HootSuite’s new freemium service model.

Last fall, HootSuite announced that they were changing their business model to offer new “premium” services for business customers. All HootSuite users received a message asking them to choose a plan when they attempted to log in for the first time after the change.

Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite, said, “We designed HootSuite to be a comprehensive dashboard for agencies, enterprises and consultants using social media to monitor brands, manage campaigns and analyze results. We’ve integrated with the leading social networks – including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – and now look forward to adding mash-ups through our API as well as adding more reports which business users seek.”

However, on the HootSuite blog, it clarified that the move wasn’t to cannibalize their customers by suddenly charging for services that used to be free: “We aim to continue providing free service to approximately 95% of our current users.” The big question is whether it’s worth it for business teams to pay for these expanded services. Well, here’s what has changed.

Social Profiles

The free version of HootSuite now allows management of up to five social networks, while the Pro and Enterprise versions offer unlimited networks.

RSS/Atom Feeds

This is the first time I’ve actually explored this option, but I realized how much time it could save me. It allows you to view RSS feeds right within HootSuite. I envision seeing a blog post, reading it and easily sharing the link on all of my networks.

Personally, I wish that it just allowed you to import your Google Reader Feed rather than individual RSS feeds but it’s a step in the right direction. I’ll probably only import a few of the most “important” feeds for now. If you’re on the free version, you get two feeds, and unlimited feeds are available for both the Pro and the Enterprise versions.

Team Members

This part got a little confusing for me when we upgraded our accounts. You get one free team member for the $5.99 per month charge. But if you have additional team members, they’re $15 each per month. I’ll comment on this a little bit later.

Social Insights

In the paid versions, HootSuite gives you a list of other social networks users participate in. I’m not 100% sure where these sites come from or how they’re gathered.

I took a look at Chris Brogan’s profile, as I figured he would have a robust set of sites and was surprised that it didn’t have his LinkedIn profile, his blog or his Delicious account. I’m not sure these are the networks that Chris would want to promote and I don’t see any way that I can control what shows up in my profile.

Influence Scores

This score tells you how much influence HootSuite thinks a user has. It’s a useful tool for trying to understand who your followers are and who you’re following, but is more of an indicator than a hardcore measurement that I would rely on. You can also use it to track your own profiles to show growth in your influence as your network grows.

Overall I think these features are useful for a business user but the only thing that’s worth paying for to me is the team members feature. And this was tough to swallow because our team was used to getting it for free and we can still have that feature for free if we migrate back to TweetDeck.

The one challenge that I had was that we have people in our organization who “monitor” accounts and those who “manage” accounts. It would be nice if there were a “read-only” option for multiple accounts at a lower price point. We had to go through and prioritize our users, which forced us to limit visibility to some individuals who really could benefit from having insight into the conversations. For now, we’re migrating those users back over to TweetDeck.

Analytics

The big thing I’m seeing promoted as the real value in upgrading your account is the analytics packages that are available. I used a fairly new Twitter account for the sake of this review.

I used this account because it’s new and doesn’t have a lot of traffic yet, so it allowed me to look at a limited amount of analytics to digest the feature fully without impacting my own measurement strategy, which does not use the ow.ly URL shortener.

Ow.ly Stat History: The free version will offer 30 days of URL history while the Pro and Enterprise versions offer unlimited history.

This is great for those who use the ow.ly shortener, but if you use another shortener as your favorite, you’ll not have any data available.

For us this is very limiting because we use a proprietary URL shortener for campaign tracking purposes. For the purpose of the test, we did use the ow.ly shortener to see the results.

The stats that are available are daily clicks on a nice chart broken down by clicks by region and clicks from top referrers. You also get a list of your most popular messages and tweets by influencer. And if you want to get really granular, you can get down to the stats by individual message. This really gives you some insight into the social graph of the account and what is and isn’t working. From a management perspective I really appreciate this level of insight at the click of a mouse.

Google Analytics: This could be one of the most powerful features of the HootSuite premium package, and if you ask me, is currently their primary differentiator in the market.

Within the dashboard you can now overlay items like the number of tweets sent over your website traffic to look for trends. Even more powerful, they’ve integrated Google Analytics campaign features so that you can tag a URL with a campaign and track results.

We built a proprietary shortener at my company because there were no tools to do this at the time, but now tweet-level lead generation tracking is available to anyone who has Google Analytics set up on their site.

This is a game-changer for tracking return on investment (ROI). It certainly has its limitations in that you must have some mechanism for conversion on your site that you can use to evaluate sales, whether it’s lead forms or actual online orders.

For service businesses, lead forms will likely be the only way you can measure sales interest using the campaign integration feature, but that’s far better than what we’ve had access to in the past.

Holmes mentioned that they’re working on integration with Omniture as well. This will open the doors for many mid- to large-sized businesses to use the tools, as Adobe-owned Omniture is one of the largest providers of integrated business analytics. Holmes didn’t give an indication of when the Omniture integration will be complete, but personally I’m anxiously waiting for that day because then I’ll be able to use HootSuite for end-to-end measurement. And having one end-to-end solution for management and measurement is huge.

From a cost standpoint, I think HootSuite Pro is reasonable with their $5.99 per month charge, and while I would prefer to have two levels of users to avoid the $15 per month per user charge for all of our users, with a corporate budget it isn’t unreasonable. This is certainly a nice entry point for businesses that are looking to have ROI-level measurement capability without dropping hundreds of thousands of dollars for costly systems integrations and custom development.

Enterprise Options

Behind the curtain, HootSuite has also introduced HootSuite Social 360, the Enterprise version. This is the big daddy and comes with everything including the kitchen sink. It gives you everything in the Pro package, includes 30 team members, a vanity ow.ly URL and 10 seats for their certification program.

They boast “enhanced” analytics, but because I only have access to the Pro version, I’m not sure what that means. At $1,499 per month it’s a hefty big brother to the Pro package, but I was surprised by the limited amount of information that was available. They offer a PDF with a few details and push you to schedule a demo. I suppose at that price point they want the ability to customize your experience and walk you through the system. I was hoping to find beautiful graphics of the expanded analytics that would make my mouth water!

Closing Thoughts

It will be interesting to see how HootSuite will start to impact users of other monitoring tools like Radian 6 and Meltwater Buzz. Monitoring tools have been held up as the Holy Grail for measuring brands since social media started to flood the market. They are very often confused with ROI measurement tools.

But their big weak spot has always been their inability to get to that level of measurement. Quite frankly, HootSuite allows you to do the monitoring and the measuring but there are tradeoffs. You won’t have easy metrics like share of voice across your industry and be able to compare yourself to your competitors with fancy graphs like you can in Radian 6.

But the question will become do you have the budget for both and how much value do mention metrics provide for your organization? With HootSuite boasting over a million members, it means based on their own math that of 5% of users who will be impacted by the changes, there are 50,000 users who are likely potential premium users.

Disclosure: HootSuite provided a 30-day free trial of their Pro model with multiple users so this review could be written. A free 30-day trial is available for all users.

Check these two great articles to learn about 8 Social Media Metrics You Should Be Measuring and 8 Easy Twitter Monitoring Ideas.

What are your thoughts? Have you upgraded your HootSuite account? If so, tell us what you think of the premium features. Are they worth the money? Are you also using monitoring tools like Radian 6 or Attensity? If so, how are the changes impacting your usage of your other monitoring tools? Let’s talk about it! Leave a comment so we can start the discussion.

David explains why you need to become a social business before you can become a social brand. You’ll also find out where to start your social business planning and what to expect in the future.

Be sure to check out the takeaways below after you watch the video.

Here are some of the things you’ll learn in this video:

• How to prepare your business for social media
• Why you should start with small projects on social media
• Why social media ROI is an excuse for inaction
• How to identify more economic metrics other than sales
• What success is for businesses on social media
• Why the ability to create a social experience is critical

Connect with David on his blog Logic + Emotion, on Twitter @armano and check out Edelman Digital.

What are your thoughts on social business? Please leave your comments below.

The truth is there are dozens of viable metrics you can use to gauge the success of your social media efforts. The challenge isn’t measurability; it’s knowing which measures are meaningful.

Here are the 6 undervalued social media success metrics you should be tracking:

#1: Daily Story Feedback

Instead of just counting the number of Facebook “likes” you accrue, which signifies nothing more than digital bumper-stickering, track how often your fans click “like” and comment on the status updates you post.

The more fans who click “like” and comment, the more likely your future updates will be seen in their news feed, dramatically increasing your actual Facebook audience.

If you’re an administrator of a Facebook fan page, you can find the Daily Story Feedback chart at http://facebook.com/insights (look in the Interactions category).

#2: Look at Klout

Rather than paying rapt attention to the number of Twitter followers you’ve corralled, instead look closely at your Klout score.

Klout is an online influence gauge that combines several data points (followers, retweets, clicks on links, etc.) and then applies some fancy algorithmic voodoo to arrive at a unified metric.

The data used to calculate Klout continues to change (they recently added Facebook information), but I’ve found it to be the most reliable influence-tracking metric, because it’s nearly impossible to “game” using automated follow-back programs and other Twitter nefariousness.

Klout’s scoreboard for Social Media Examiner founder Mike Stelzner is 73 (on a 1-100 scale).

#3: PostRank

One of the challenges of writing a blog is knowing how to value the wide variety of reader engagements and behaviors. Should you care more about Digg submission than about comments? Are tweets more important than Facebook shares?

PostRank Analytics solves this problem.

It’s free if you connect with their “influencers” outreach program or $15/month if you don’t. PostRank provides a useful, detailed blogging scoreboard, especially if you connect it with your Google Analytics account.

The best part of PostRank Analytics is the engagement score, which is sort of your Klout score for each blog post. The system looks at total comments, tweets, shares, etc. for each post and applies behavior points and an algorithm to determine the total score. This is a fantastic way to look at your last 25 blog posts to see which type of content you’re publishing generates the most engagement. The image below is a recent post on Convince & Convert .

PostRank Analytics shows “engagement points” broken down by audience action.

#4: Share of Voice

Tracking how often your company and/or its products are mentioned on the social web is a best practice, of course. But without also paying attention to how often your competitors are referenced, it’s difficult to determine whether the chatter about your brand is significant.

To add a reference point to your social mention tracking, create a “share of voice” report.

To do so, determine the number of times your company and its products are mentioned on the social web in a neutral or positive context over a 30-day period. You’ll want to use Radian6, ViralHeat, Social Mention or any of the other social listening tools for this project. Then determine how often your competitors are mentioned (neutral or positive) during the same 30 days.

Add up all mentions for the category (you plus your competitors), and then divide your mentions by the total to calculate your “share of voice”—which is always a percentage. Usually, share of voice reports are formatted as a pie chart, so you can easily see how you fare versus your competition.

#5: Search Volume

Perhaps more than any other marketing metric, the number of people who are searching for your brand on Google serves as a catch-all metric for market awareness.

In many ways, social media and your other marketing efforts create demand, which is then harvested via searches.

The tie between search and social media cannot be overestimated. Perhaps the best study on the subject, from GroupM in 2009, found that consumers exposed to a brand in social media are subsequently 2.8 times more likely to search for that brand than are consumers unexposed within social media.

Use Google Insights to examine whether searches for your company and products are increasing over time, and if your volume is going up, and your competitors’ isn’t – double bonus!

#6: Inbound Links

Without other sites linking to your website, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever crack the Top 10 in Google. Links are the coin of the realm in SEO, and without them all you have is a pile of carefully crafted words.

Social media is one of the best places to accrue links, because we social types are prone to link from our tweets, Facebook updates, blog posts, within blog comments, etc.

Track the number of links pointing to your website and/or blog, and examine the source of new links. How many links do you have, in comparison to your competitors? What sites are linking to them that perhaps you could get to link to you as well?

There are several inbound link-tracking services online. My favorite is Open Site Explorer from SEOmoz. The free version allows you to track and report on up to 1,000 links.

Open Site Explorer shows a total number of links (38,935!!) to Social Media Examiner that are coming from 826 separate websites.

If you’re looking for a magic number that automatically determines your social media prowess, you’re not going to find it. Instead, the secret to tracking social media is tying together disparate data sources and selecting the metrics that make the most sense for your company. And those are never the obvious ones like Facebook fans and Twitter followers. Tracking social media may not always be easy and fast, but it’s absolutely, 100% doable.

If you’re interested in more on this subject, my new book, The NOW Revolution (written with Amber Naslund) has an entire chapter devoted to metrics and how to pick the right ones.

What are your thoughts? Have you employed any of these metrics? Leave your comments in the box below.

The other day I drove past a local convenience store that makes most of its profit from beer, Slush Puppies and beef jerky (not that there’s anything wrong with that). A big sign out front asked passers-by to Like them on Facebook.

“It’s official,” I thought. “Now every business in America has a Facebook page.”

Unfortunately, few businesses actually have a strategy for their Facebook page, or for the rest of their social media activity. They tweet, blog and set up a Facebook business page out of fear of being left behind, rather than as a way to engage their audience.

If your social media engagement is reactive rather than proactive, it’s time to step back, take a deep breath and develop a content strategy that will engage your community.

A content strategy doesn’t end with good signage.

What Is a Content Strategy?

Last year while doing some research into what certification organizations were doing in social media, I interviewed Susan Cato, Senior Director of Web and New Media Strategies at CompTIA, who said,

“You can’t have a social media strategy without a content strategy.”

I thought this was brilliant. She clarified far more effectively and in fewer words what I had been saying. But what does it mean to have a content strategy?

There are three important elements to developing an effective content strategy.

• You need to know what your customers, audience or community want to talk about and be willing to engage in those conversations.
• You need to know where your audience wants to have these conversations; in other words, where they “hang out” online.
• You need to measure the results of your conversations to see which ones catch fire.

Let’s start with what your customers want to talk about.

Knowing Your Audience’s Pain Points

Developing a content strategy often starts with a keyword analysis. Now, you may think of a keyword analysis as a tool for blog posts or blogs for SEO, and you’re right. However, it will also help you uncover the language that your audience or community is using while on the social web.

For example, if you’re a plastic surgeon and you’re putting out some great content about “rhinoplasty” but everyone’s talking about “nose jobs” you’re not reaching anyone. Likewise, if the conversation is about “curb appeal” and you’re talking about “landscaping,” the conversation may pass you by.

A keyword analysis begins with a list of words or phrases that you believe your audience is using to find products or services like yours. There are a number of software tools that you can use to determine how often your phrases and related phrases appear in searches, which provides insight into which you should use in your content strategy.

Some popular keyword analysis tools include:

• Keyword Discovery or WordTracker: two popular paid tools
• Google AdWords: a free tool that uses Google AdWords data to determine what phrases are popular.

Red leather jackets were probably more popular when "Beverly Hills Cop" came out.

A keyword analysis will only start you on the path to a content strategy. Once you’ve identified some of your key phrases, you need to get to work on where your community wants to have these conversations.

Knowing Where Your Audience Hangs Out

Once you have a general sense of what’s important to your audience, you need to determine where to have these conversations. Most businesses, non-profits and individuals would best be served by focusing on one or two platforms… going deep rather than going broad to start.

Where your audience is can depend on their age and gender, as well as your offerings. There are plenty of statistics that break down social media sites by demographics. Flowtown has a great infographic on social media demographics on their site.

LinkedIn can be a powerful tool for B2B (business to business) companies. Facebook does well for B2C (business to consumer) offerings. Blogs and online video-sharing sites like YouTube can work for any audience, but may be blocked by corporate firewalls.

You can also use “listening tools” to see if the conversations are already taking place across social media. There are a number of free and paid tools for listening for specific terms in social media.

• Google Alerts: This free tool will send you daily emails of news, blog posts, tweets and more around any keyword you’re following.
• TweetDeck: With this popular Twitter app you can set up a column to follow the conversation around a specific topic.

You can follow conversations around your key terms by creating a search column in TweetDeck.

• Radian6 and Sprout Social: These are two examples of paid social media monitoring services for companies that need more robust tools.

Here are some ways in which you can begin to implement your content strategy through different social media tools:

Blogs: Blogging is a powerful method for engaging your audience; it has both SEO and social media benefits. Blogging around your keywords is an essential piece of a content strategy.

One of my favorite new tools for developing blog content is the Keyword Questions tool at WordTracker Labs. Enter a key word or phrase and it will return related questions people have asked at partner search engines.

People have questions; now you can blog the answers.

By typing in “BBQ,” you see questions like “how to make BBQ ribs in the slow cooker” and “how to BBQ corn on the cob.” In other words, you have the topics and titles for your next two blog posts.

Note: this technique works equally well for YouTube and SlideShare.

LinkedIn: Try searching through the Answers section in LinkedIn to answer questions around your keywords. For example, an accountant might search for “profitability” or “capital tax issues.”

An HR consultant can answer questions on “employee retention” to establish credibility with her audience.

Facebook: Ask questions on your Facebook business page that build on your content strategy. Of course, this will work better once you’ve built a following on Facebook. Be sure to check out 10 Ways to Grow Your Facebook Page Following and 4 Proven Steps to Facebook Page Success for more on that.

Mint does a great job of asking questions that engage their target audience and start a conversation.

Twitter: Check out Twitter’s search function or the Advanced Twitter Search if you need to filter your phrase to a geographical location or by attitude.

Are you running a Mexican restaurant near Portland, Maine? This is your search.

Measuring the Results

A keyword analysis and some social media demographics will get you started, but you need to measure the impact of your conversations to see if you’re making headway. I recommend—at least at the beginning—to keep this as simple as possible. Some suggestions:

• Track how many comments and Likes your Facebook post gets.
• Track monthly how many followers, retweets and mentions you or your brand gets.
• Measure how many comments your blog posts get and how much traffic they receive.
• Measure social media referral traffic to your website; in other words, how much traffic is sent from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn?

In Google Analytics, check your “referrers” to see which sites are sending you the most traffic.

A note for small businesses: many of the articles you read on social media metrics focus on how often people are talking about your brand on the social web. If you run a specialty grocery store in Bangor, Maine, chances are you’re not going to be trending on Twitter anytime soon. Instead, pay attention to your influence locally, or your depth of engagement with your audience.

Content Strategy Takeaways

Some final thoughts on developing a social media content strategy:

• Listen. Having a content strategy isn’t always about talking. It’s about listening and understanding.
• Be patient. Putting up one tweet with a keyword in it doesn’t make a content strategy. A content strategy is about building trust with your audience, your community or your customers. That takes time.
• Be flexible. A keyword analysis and social media demographics will only take you so far. You’ll need to evolve your content strategy over time, based on what’s going on in your industry, with your audience and in the world around you.

Your Turn!

What strategies or tactics have you used to engage your customers or community with social media? What’s worked and what hasn’t? What platforms have you used that weren’t mentioned above? Leave your comments and suggestions in the box below.

Until they invited customers to post product reviews on their website. Only then did they discover the problem was the bottle – it was too tall to fit in refrigerator doors! They redesigned the bottle and their sales immediately increased.

That’s user-generated content directly leading to an increase in sales. That’s the power of social media marketing.

Are you still sitting on the sidelines when it comes to social media marketing because you know you can’t control the conversations about your company, your products and your services? And because you have no idea how to respond to negative comments?

“Give up control and drop the ego!” says Liana Evans in her book, Social Media Marketing: Strategies for Engaging in Facebook, Twitter & Other Social Media. Compared to traditional marketing, “social media is a totally different ballgame. The people in these social media communities talk about you whenever they want, however they want, and to whomever they want. The conversation goes on with or without you!”

So wouldn’t it be better to actively participate in these conversations? “Consumer-generated content is having wide-ranging effects on both the perception of a company and whether a purchase is eventually made,” writes Evans. “Can your company afford not to participate in the conversation?”

She uses comic books as an example of the difference between traditional Internet advertising and social media marketing. Comic book collectors all over the world began communicating with each other online in the 1990s. They used online bulletin board systems (BBS) and CompuServe and AOL forums.

But when comic book publishers jumped into online advertising, they just created banner ads and other flashy promotional ads. Even if they placed these ads in forums, forum members just ignored them.

Why didn’t the comic book publishers just ask an employee to join the forums and start responding to other members’ messages? “This would have garnered a lot more engagement and interest than a banner advertisement ever could have,” writes Evans.

This Is Not Your Father’s Marketing

And that’s the difference between traditional marketing and social media marketing. In traditional marketing, you throw out a message where it will be seen by millions of people who couldn’t care less.

In social media marketing, you find the people who are already talking about your message and join the conversation. It’s really that simple and that complicated.

It’s complicated because you have to know your audience so well that you know exactly what social media platforms they use regularly. Is it Facebook? Twitter? YouTube? Digg?

Why create a Facebook fan page if your audience never uses Facebook? Why open a Twitter account if they never use Twitter?

As Evans repeatedly emphasizes in her book, understanding your audience is the first step in creating a social media marketing strategy. Here are the rest of the steps:

#2: Define your goals.

#3: Choose your metrics.

#4: Open accounts on the platforms your audience uses.

#5: Listen to what your audience is saying on those platforms.

#6: Respond to their concerns.

#7: Provide content that they value.

#8: Measure the results.

#9: Repeat steps 1 through 8.

Yes, I said “repeat steps 1 through 8.” Because just as real-life communities change, social media communities also change. “If you had included Twitter in your marketing plan in early 2007,” writes Evans, “you would have been very disappointed by its results.”

Follow Your Audience Wherever They Go

Suppose one of the top “influencers” in one online community leaves and joins another community? And what if your audience follows that person? You’d better be prepared to join a brand new platform.

So you must constantly monitor your audience’s participation in various social media communities and learn how to use new platforms.

Yes, it’s a lot of work, but as Zappos and Southwest Airlines have discovered, creating and managing customer relationships using social media can be very profitable. Even Dell overcame its “Dell Hell” reputation using social media.

And Evans strongly recommends that you do all this work in-house. Don’t outsource anything, including blogging and tweeting. “Social media sites can propel a person’s experience with your company across the globe within seconds. Not being active in these social media sites can be detrimental to your company, whether that customer’s experience was good or bad,” she writes.

She even includes tips on how to select a company that develops social media marketing campaigns for its clients.  Ask all prospective consultants the following questions:

• Will you create our website entirely in Flash? (Flash isn’t search-engine friendly.)
• Do you focus on one or two strategies to the exclusion of all others?
• Do you define success as the number of Facebook fans or Twitter followers?
• Do you recommend following a “laundry list” of tactics because everyone else is using them?

If their answer to all those questions is “Yes,” keep looking.

This book will NOT tell you how to create a Facebook fan page, customize your Twitter background or upload a video to YouTube. It doesn’t tell you how to measure anything, how to use Google Analytics or how to SEO your website.

Instead, Evans takes you by the hand and leads you through the entire process of creating and managing a social media marketing campaign. No tech stuff, just solid, practical advice from a professional who “has been active full-time in search marketing and social media since 1999,” according to her bio on the back cover.

The book has 45 chapters, all of which are fewer than 10 pages long. And every chapter has several informative subheadings, so you can quickly zero in on the information you need when you need to know it. Or you can read the entire book from front to back.

If you already know a lot about social media marketing, this book isn’t for you. It’s for those of you who are still standing by the social media pool, wondering if you should jump in.

Come on in, the water’s fine!

Social Media Examiner gives this book a 4-star rating.