If you are an online retailer who has yet to adopt the use of social media as a marketing tool, you are missing out on an opportunity here. Social media has become a catalyst for traffic and sales for many websites over recent years, with numerous ecommerce websites reporting higher conversion rates from those who are referred by social networks.
Although chasing sales should not be the main focus of your social media use, your strategy can certainly be used to aid the often complex path to purchase via the web.
Social networks can provide value at all stages of the purchasing funnel. From heightening brand awareness, helping customers connect with you and building hype about products/services. Social media can fill a gap in your sales cycle in a way that the other digital avenues cannot.
The most important aspect of making the most of social media as part of your marketing strategy is to keep monitoring your campaigns. The only way to do this is to make use of social media analytics tools.
Here are 5 of the best social media analytics tools to aid you in understanding which content and products your audience engages with most, as well as where to find your target demographic:
Social Media Management – HootSuite Free and Sendible
The first stop for social media should be these management suites ideal for retailers of all sizes. Our favourites are both affordable and suitable for all types of businesses too.
HootSuite Free
HootSuite is one of the best management products for keeping on top of your core social networks whilst on a tight budget as it’s completely free to get started with!
Some of the highlights of the system include the keyword search function for Twitter. This means you can keep on top of relevant tweets across the world and find/interact with both existing and potential new customers.
HootSuite can do more than just measure; over a period of time, it can help you gauge how efficient and popular your brand is on social media. It can really help you to understand the reach and overall effectiveness of your online marketing campaigns.
It can also help you keep in touch with your brand evangelist and influencers and maintain important engagement with them.
For the other social networks (Pinterest, Facebook and Google+ etc.) you’ll find that although scheduled updates are possible it's more affordable to access the individual networks analytics (HootSuite’s additional reports can get costly).
Networks supported:
- Google+
- WordPress
- Mixi
- FourSquare
Benefits
HootSuite’s search data is a great way to build Twitter followers by following accounts that are relevant to your business. It’s also a brilliant way to establish exactly what your customer base is saying and how they feel about specific key phrases or competition. The fact that HootSuite is free to use (bar premium extras) is a major plus. You can access a lot of usable data without having to spend out. If you want to start building relationships with your online customer base, HootSuite is a natural starting point.
Sendible
Sendible is a simple social media scheduling and reporting tool but comes with a monthly cost of under £50 as a starting point.
This tool has extensive keyword monitoring capability and supports the image upload function for all major social media sites. This means you can add visuals to your posts and updates with ease, an important tool for social shopping as it helps tell a story about your product. The more exciting and inviting your visuals, the more likely you will be to get customers making a click-through to your product page.
This tool is a nice option for those organisations working to a strict budget, but you will need additional tools to work alongside Sendible too.
Networks supported:
- Google+
- FourSquare
- Plurk
- FriendFeed
- Bebo
Benefits
Social media tools are all about saving you time, Sendible does this with its report function that will provide you with all you need to accurately review your strategy on a monthly basis – helping you increase the likelihood of engaging updates. Anything that can make this task quicker and more effective is a good investment.
Link Shortening and Interaction Tracking: Bitly
There really is only one link shortener that is worth considering at the moment; Bitly is streaks ahead of other link shortening tools, proving trackable links which can provide info on who clicks and shares your links. Data provided includes location, times the link was clicked and where the link was clicked from.
Bitly data is really helpful for online retailers. It will tell you demographics of your online audience, where these people are and what social networks they prefer. Â Take a look at this video from Ms. Ileane to see How to Use Bit.ly To Customize and Track Your Social Media Links
Benefits
Bitly’s data provision allows for actionable insights and a better understanding of your online audience and what content is working for you. It can help with everything from your social media strategies to your email marketing.
You will find that the search term ‘bread recipe’ has increased over the past month, so as a retailer related to bread products we can use this within our next blog post as anchor text and in social media updates alongside #GBBO to increase traffic to a specific product.
It’s that easy!
Internal Network Analysis with Facebook and Google+ Insights
Insights are a great social media tool and both Facebook and Google+ provide them. Although there is some stigma attached to the analytics of Facebook Insights, because the data is limited and ‘clunky'.
However, they are good to use for free social media analytics and can get you useful information in a very short space of time.
Facebook Insights
Since the early 2014 update, Facebook Insights can provide lots more information in a visually pleasing layout.
Benefits
Facebook Insights are available to anyone with a Facebook page, and is free to use. It allows you to track competitor’s growth and weekly reach as well as your own. If you launch a marketing campaign around a specific product or service and want to raise awareness, Facebook Insights show you if your posts are reaching their peak potential.
Google+ Insights
Google+ Insights are quite new, but an overdue feature, to the social network. Their data provides a useful, though limited, overview of how your Google+ brand page is doing. Since the launch of the Google My Business hub, Google+ has placed emphasis on Place Pages and Pages for brands, encouraging interaction and content.
Benefits
Google+ is beneficial for your search engine results, both technically and aesthetically, so spending time here is a good idea if you want to make the most out of your retail web present. Their insights will help you make your Google+ investment in time worthwhile. Posting to the site blindly will not help you sell your products, you need to data to know that what’s working.
Recommended Reading:
- How to Discover Analytics with the Google+ Dashboard Social Media Examiner
- Will the Real You Please Stand Up: Show Up, Be Authentic, and Prosper in Social Media
 Kim Garst
- Optimize Twitter to Maximize Small Business Results Rebekah Radice
Hi Barrie,
Wonderful post indeed. Its very informative as well.
I would say tracking social progress is very important if at all you want it to achieve something . I use bit.ly or google’s link shortener sometimes.
Facebook insights are by far the best insights. They tell you everything you wanted to know about your audience.
Thanks and have a great day 🙂
I was knowing about hoot suite but unaware of sendible. Thanks for sharing.
Can’t speak more highly of the power of bit.ly – not only does it track interactions, but it displays and organizes the information in such a clean and intuitive way
I haven’t used bit.ly for some time. Did you know that .Li is Libya? I know that Bit.ly has servers in the U.S. and Europe, but it is a risk factor to have a service places in unsafe area.
Have you been using Google’s shortening service, Goo.gl, located in Greenland?
I highly recommend Bit.ly, personally I think its a great tool to add to the armoury
How do you trust bit.ly? I think theurl shortener service of Google is better and safer at the moment. It’s awesome that it is possible to connect Analytics to this HootSuite, but does it work 100%?
Nice blog, added to my archive.
I use HootSuite free to manage my Twitter profiles. For auto scheduling I use SocialOomph Tool, where you can save tweets as a draft and use them for later use.
For short URLs I too use Bit.ly, it’s amazing.
I’m thinking to give a shot to Sendible. Thanks for sharing.
bit.ly has to be my fav.
It seems to be the only way to really get your stats. GA, Yoast and jetpack all offer wildly diff stats for me.
I only use free tools for scheduling and tracking social media accounts like Facebook insight. Do you know any free tool to schedule pins on Pinterest?
Hey Barry,
I’ve started using bitly about a year ago but I never knew it had a way to analyze your traffic. What I use to do is create the bitly link and add it as a goal in Google Analytics, which is still a good idea since you can track your marketing funnel through it. But bitly’s analytics is good to know and I just checked the links I’ve created within the past year!
A lot of bloggers have said a lot of great things about Hootsuite. I’m just going to have to look more into it next week when I have more time. I didn’t know the extra features it contained because I thought it was a tool similar to Buffer where you can schedule when to post your blog posts.
This was definitely helpful and it open my eyes more to what’s out there as well as the features each of these tools have! Thanks for sharing and I hope you have a great rest of the week!
I use Hootsuite to manage my twitter account. For url shortner, I use Google URL Shortener.
Nice info about Social Media Analytics tools.. Is there any way to find Facebook web link likes by tool?
Hi Barry,
Social media became so vital in blogging success. If you are not leveraging it, you are losing a lot of money and traffic on the table. Social tracking is the surefire way to increase shares and traffic.
I personally use bit.ly a lot as it gives you the number of clicks along with shorter links! And I also recommend Buffer for beginners to track their tweets. Great share btw!
Like many bloggers even i use bit.ly. I also love Insights though. Thanks for this wonderful post.
Google+ and Facebook work best for me. My users are more engaging than other social sites.
I agree, social media tracking services gives daily information how our company is doing and discover what aspects of our online promotions are needed to improve. But these services are becoming so expensive and unaffordable to beginners like.
Hi Barrie Smith,
How to to track visit on Google Plus Page…..
Thank You.
I am using Facebook and Google insights and they can give you important info about your followers / fans and help to improve your blog’s future and also helps to improve your social media profiles…
I’ve been using HootSuite for a while now but not sure if I would trust Bit.ly for my URL shortening needs, seems a little suspect to me!