Understanding Why Social Media Changes Analytics

Understanding Why Social Media Changes Analytics
Social media is a significant tool that can help you build your business. If not used the right way, this tool can bring
about a lot of negative repercussions. It has become much more than just a website that people use to stay
connected with their friends. From big businesses to independent business owners, everyone is using some form
of social media marketing plan in their day to day lives. To understand customer behavior, most businesses use the
measure of web clicks and page views, and this has been the trend since the advent of the internet. There are lot
of free applications and tools like Omniture, Coremetrics, WebTrends and Google Analytics that are used to
measure these behaviors. But these tools are not sufficient for tracking social media efforts.
Why Social Media Changes Analytics
There are a number of reasons why marketers need to think differently about next generation analytic
requirements, as there is a rapid growth in social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. Traditional web
analytics tools concentrate on structured transactions like clicks and sessions, which can be logged into an activity
database for analytics. In typical social media data streams, you will get an activity stream for what a user does and
all this becomes very significant to gauge and evaluate the right metrics to derive value from social data. Also in
most business decisions like customer behavior analysis, it becomes essential to evaluate the user connections or
interactions across all the properties.
Companies need to know quickly how their latest Facebook campaign is performing, beyond collecting customer
data. They need to know what people are saying about their brand and they also need to know the performance of
their latest iPhone app. There is tremendous pressure on IT resources as there is a great level of insight in near
real-time as possible. Speed, affordability, simplicity and low maintenance need to be balanced and new
approaches to managing this cascade of data becomes highly essential.
To really recognize the various influences of website traffic and engagement metrics could take a lot of dedication
to the art of web analytics. By understanding how each of the social media levers affects traffic and analytics data,
it is possible to use the data to engage your audience. With the help of social media analytics, it is possible to find
out what your audience is looking for. Social media analytics offers a completely new model for measuring
interactive marketing by integrating, analyzing and enabling organizations to act on intelligence.
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