The Most Effective Ways to Measure Social Media Analytics for Your Small Business

You're a small business and you've set up your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Gist, LinkedIn and other social media accounts. Now what? You have invested time and resources in being sure to "stay in the loop", but are you really making an impact? Here are some ways to measure your impact and chart some analytics for your organization.

Most likely, you've been approached by a "social media expert", or someone who claims to have the resources and tools to adequately measure what's going on in cyberspace. You could certainly pay this company or individual, but there are several ways you can do your own measuring.

Facebook and MySpace are probably the oldest and most well-known social media sites. When it comes to business, Facebook seems to have pulled ahead (at least for the time being) in being business-friendly and slightly more professional looking. Facebook allows your company to set up a free "fan" page where you can insert your company logo, stump speech, and events quickly and easily. Best of all, when it comes to analytics, Facebook will email you a weekly summary of your total number of fans, activity and specific interactions. For more activity, invite more people and be sure to keep your Facebook fan page new and interesting and the auto-analytics will show how effective your marketing really is.

Twitter is growing quickly and has become very well-known recently thanks to celebrities who have latched on to the Twitter craze. Twitter has carved out it's own niche by essentially providing a 140-character update to all of cyberspace. In other words, a user can write about anything in 140 characters or fewer and that update can be read by everyone (unless the user's account is marked as "private"). This has given companies the option to assign one staff person to man the company Twitter account and update with anything and everything the public might find interesting including news releases, other media items, internal company information, photos, trivia or even recruiting items. It is also easy to find, attract and keep friends because Twitter contains far less personal information than a Facebook account, making privacy less of a concern for many people. When it comes to analytics, I have found cli.gs (www.cli.gs) to work well. Cli.gs allows a user to set up a free account and create shortened URLs that point to anything, and when those links are posted to Twitter and a user clicks on them, their location and the number of clicks are noted.

LinkedIn is well-known by professionals to be the social media network of choice. Taking on more of a white-collar look and feel, LinkedIn appeals to mostly businesspeople, though it is starting to take on with almost every industry. What is interesting about LinkedIn is that it provides slightly more professional offerings than Twitter or even Facebook. Analytics for LinkedIn can be confusing, but it seems to make the most sense to note the interactions that you have with others and be sure to start and contribute to discussions. Virtually introduce yourself to grow your network and make more of an impression.

When it comes to email campaigns, small and medium business alike seem to benefit from the Constant Contact service. This web-based program does require a fee, but the items provided as part of the service seem to be well-worth the cost. Probably the most effective tool Constant Contact offers is a way to send out e-marketing materials to a database. Importing and exporting contacts is easy, and building an email in the program can be as easy as selecting a template or as complicated as creating your own and pasting the HTML in to the "custom" template. Analytics are excellent: Constant Contact tracks exactly how many people (and whom, from your database) open your email, how many times, and how effective each link is. Depending on how many contacts you import, the service costs about $30 a month, but the analytics and online presence seem to be worth it.

When it comes to other items that need to be tracked, Google Analytics can be a very effective tool. Google Analytics offers a wide range of services (some of which are free, some require a nominal fee) and integrate easily and well in to web pages in particular. Google can also help with web page hits and other services that pertain to social media networking and analytics.