In the growing realm of social media, there are not only a plethora of social platforms to choose from, but a number of tools to monitor these platforms as well. In order for businesses to utilize social media to their fullest advantage, it is important they know what the best tools are to create a social ecosystem around their brand.

So, what do these social media tools do? Most social media monitoring tools seek to do one or more of the following three things:

• Listen or monitor the social sphere.
  These tools aggregate posts based on keywords/feeds you select. They aggregate mentions, giving you a sense of what people are saying about you and where, while providing you with the opportunity to respond. These are extremely helpful for brand management and can help identify both positive and negative trends.
  
  
• Manage publishing and response workflow.
  These tools help companies publish to their social media feeds and respond to posts from the community. Many listening tools also contain a work flow management aspect or have said they plan to build one. These tools (or usually a function of a larger platform/tool) can take identified posts from Facebook, Twitter, and other social media communities and assign them to people. Many also allow you to schedule future posts on your feeds.
  
  
• Provide reporting and analytics.
  Most of the tools that provide listening and work flow management also support some analytics and reporting. There are also smaller, usually platform-specific or proprietary reporting tools at low or no cost. For examples, see: Twitter Counter, Facebook Insights, and YouTube Analytics.

Here are three third-party tools worth a peek:   

Radian 6

If your company can afford it, this a great tool for social media listening and reporting that aggregrates data from all over the web based on your keywords. There are two main features of the tool:  

1. the listening tool, which allows you to monitor and respond to comments made about your brand
2. the reporting dashboard, which you can use to gather and export metrics

While Radian 6 does allow you to respond to posts within its interface, it currently does not schedule content for publishing. As a result, it does not provide the same workflow management as some competing products like HootSuite. (They have said, however, that they plan to release that functionality “very soon.”)

Radian 6 also supports robust reporting on social media, including sentiment analysis. Machines are very literal, so the tool isn’t great at recognizing sarcasm and slang usage, but it works pretty well as a temperature gauge. You can also manually change ratings from negative to positive and vice-versa on specific posts.

Overall, Radian 6 provides some of the most robust analytics and reporting you’ll find. They also have convenient training options, they hold regular webinars, and their customer service team is very responsive.

HootSuite

HootSuite provides great, lower cost options that compete with Radian 6. I’ve found it works great as a workflow management tool as well as a way to aggregate the most common social media platforms — Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook — under one roof. Unlike Radian 6, it currently supports both the ability to respond within the tool’s interface to community comments, as well as the ability to schedule posts across multiple platforms to publish at a later date.

A couple cons: it does not offer the social media listening functionality that Radian 6 provides, and I’ve (personally) found their reporting to be spotty, especially in regards to Facebook. It glitches out sometimes for long lengths of time, and getting the issue resolved via their online customer service forums is not always easy. That said, I’ve found HootSuite does report very reliably on Twitter. I have only worked with their lower-tiered options, and admittedly, their more expensive, enterprise-level solution may provide more reliable reporting and more responsive customer service, though at that higher price point, it’s no doubt worth looking into Radian 6.

If you’re not using a reporting or workflow management tool today, then I would toss this up for sure — even just the free option! It’ll help you manage your brands across your feeds under one view and password while you get started on a strategy for workflow management and platform-based content optimization.

FlipTop

Valuation and ROI on advertising in general, especially on social media, is a tricky thing. (See this great Copyblogger article which argues that measuring ROI on advertising, including social media, is the wrong mindset when it comes to measurement and valuation.) In the meantime, when it comes to third-party valuation and reporting tools, I’m super curious about FlipTop — a new company out of San Francisco.

FlipTop is a social media reporting and profile mapping tool. They have pricing tiers and pay-per-match solutions that will match emails with social media identities. Basically, you can take your email databases and then map them to people’s Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in, and other profiles, helping you understand where your purchasing community is, how much on average those different parties purchase, and where you should be focusing your social media and paid advertising time and dollars. Neat! (And totally creepy...) 

 

For the second installation of our Innovation in Austin series, we talked to Mark McClain, CEO and Founder of SailPoint, about innovation versus invention, the legacy of Steve Jobs and Apple, and examples of innovation in Austin—including the local food trailer scene.

Different channels are better at reaching different members of your community, and based on an ad’s primary call-to-action, will perform differently. Before you determine market spend for a particular campaign, be sure to identify specific goals, order them by importance, and then establish how your ads will support those. For example, do you hope your campaign (and by extension your ads) will…

• Sell more of a specific product?
• Expand your social network? (Gain Twitter followers or Facebook fans?)
• Produce fresh, indexable (maybe user-generated) content for your Web site?
• Strengthen the bond between your community and brand — maybe via a contest, festival, or through a guest speaking, training, or webinar opportunity?

Once you identify your primary goal(s), think about your avenues and which ones will work best. Try to divide your market spend accordingly, but as soon as your ads launch: stop guessing! Systematically optimize your ads real-time according to traffic quantity and quality. Document your findings, and then use those to incrementally improve your ads right out of the gate next time.

Here are two examples of how; the first using Facebook’s proprietary “Insights” Tool, which provides data points similar to those provided by most publishers and e-mail service providers, and the second using vanity URLs in Google Analytics, which work similarly to vanity URLs in most analytics packages.

Sweet Leaf Tea: Granny’s Almanac Summer Promotion 2011

 

Springbox uses targeted Facebook ads to drive traffic to Sweet Leaf Tea’s site and contest-based microsites. This summer, we ran five such ads to promote their Granny Almanac summer promotion, which featured coupon and concert ticket giveaways, as well as the opportunity to write the next “grannyism” (which refers to the sayings under the caps of Sweet Leaf Tea.) By monitoring daily click-through rates, we not only killed poorly performing image-copy combinations, we also took note of the best performing copy and images, enabling real-time optimization.

The first set of ads we ran generated CTRs from .016%-.021%, which was average for ads Sweet Leaf had seen in the past.

Based on the performance of those ads, we combined the highest performing image with the highest performing copy.

• This optimized ad had a CTR more than double the previous average at 0.058%, which is also the highest Sweet Leaf Tea saw to date and just slightly above Webtrends’ reported 2010 Facebook average.

Central Market Hatch Chile Festival 2010

But ad optimization is about quality too. In addition to working to procure more traffic, we also work to procure better traffic. Using vanity URLs, which, if you use Google Analytics, you can generate using Google’s URL Builder Tool, we’re able to see what actions people from specific sources take — for example, different ads from Facebook.

In 2010 Central Market ran a campaign to collect Hatch Chile recipes for a recipe contest. They also ran a concurrent contest for opportunities to judge those entries. We ran Facebook ads to support their efforts — one with a CTA to enter to judge and one with a CTA to enter a recipe. We pulled the recipe contest ad and funneled that budget into the judge ad after noticing two things:

• The recipe ad was averaging a CTR of .016% while the judge ad was averaging a CTR of .024% — which spoke to quantity of traffic.

• The traffic from the Facebook recipe ad to the Central Market site didn’t enter the contest as often as the judge-based traffic entered to judge. (“Goal completion” for judge entries was higher than for recipe entries.) Judge traffic had a submission rate of 5.89% (entries/visits from judge ad), while the traffic from the recipe submission ad had a submit rate of just 1.56% (entries/visits from recipe ad) — this speaks to quality of traffic.

Not only was the judge ad sending more traffic, but it was better qualified according to its primary call-to-action. In the end, the Facebook judge ad accounted for over a quarter of the total judge submissions. Interestingly, their newsletter saw the opposite effect. Their newsletter procured more and better qualified recipe contest entries, which further supports the importance of optimizing by source and by call-to-action.

Document lessons over time and use them to incrementally improve your campaign spend year-over-year. For example, we’ve been tracking Central Market’s Facebook ads for over a year now. Their most recent campaign, Brewtopia 2011, produced the highest CTR to date at .130%.

We recently were privileged to have a conversation with Sam Decker, CEO and Co-Founder of Mass Relevance. This video is the first installment in our Innovation in Austin series, which explores thought leadership and trends in the city we call home.

Recently Ad Age Digital published an article discussing the difficulty but importance of mobile measurement — both from a strategic and technical standpoint — asking the questions:

1. What should you measure?
2. How should you do it?

We’ve looked at the percent of users hitting our clients’ sites via mobile devices, and across the board it increases month-over-month. But Ad Age is right — mobile is tricky. Here’s a blog we collaborated on with one of our developers that will get you started on mobile tagging from a technical standpoint. Once you’re comfortable with the “how,” there are lots of ways you can use it to answer business and design questions — but those questions should drive what you choose to measure. For example, you could assess the value of QR codes. You could also use mobile and standard tagging together to inform and then assess the success of mobile site design, as we did last summer for Central Market.

Last summer Central Market partnered with Springbox to assess the likelihood that their community would appreciate a mobile Web presence optimized for quick access on the go. We found then a trend that continued right up until their mobile site launched in late October: the percent of total visits hitting their site via mobile devices steadily increased over the course of 2010 — starting at just 4.67% in January 2010 and nearly doubling to 9.20% in October 2010. We quickly set to work researching what content to feature and for what devices to optimize.

 
To help ensure the success of Central Market’s mobile site, we leveraged data from the standard site’s mobile visitor demographic. Based on the types of devices hitting the main site and the most commonly accessed content, we chose to focus creative development on store locations, hours, specials, pre-made dinner menus, and event info. We also included functionality unique to the mobile Web, including:

• Direct social media sharing via Facebook and Twitter.
• Check-in options through Gowalla, Facebook, and Foursquare.
• Single-button navigation.
• Single-button customer service and catering department calling.

These special features further engage Central Market’s community, while the single-button ordering and navigation functionalities decrease the steps in an otherwise non-e-commerce purchase cycle. We built all this on top of the existing site’s CMS — making the mobile jump and subsequent site updates easy! Central Market can now make key updates to both its mobile and standard sites in one location.

One month after the mobile site launched, we checked back to see how the community responded. We first looked at how often people clicked the “View Full-Site” button, hoping to see it rarely used. Next we looked at the use of the mobile-specific functionalities — the single-button navigation and direct calling options — since they offer a unique experience from the standard site and indicate the strongest intent-to-buy. We found that:

• The “View Full-Site” button was the second-least popular button, accounting for only 1.50% of the site’s total clicks. (Only the “Privacy Policy” button received fewer clicks.) This suggests that most visitors found what they needed on the mobile site.
• Overall, the “Call” button (to general customer service) was most popular, accounting for 31.92% of all clicks on site.
• The “Directions” button, which provides navigation to a selected store, was the second most popular, accounting for 31.21% of total clicks.
• The “Call Catering” button accounted for 4.39%.

Hoping to get the most pertinent information to each user and streamline navigation and calling features, we asked first-time visitors to “Select a Store.” We then set their landing pages to the stores they selected so they would see information for their trafficked stores only. To measure the success of this design feature, we tagged the “Change Store” buttons to see how frequently visitors used them — hoping, as with the “View Full-Site button,” for sparse usage. We found that:

• The “Change Store” button was the site’s third-least popular. Only “Privacy Policy” and “View Full-Site” were clicked fewer times.
• The “Change Store” accounted for only 1.58% of total button clicks on the site.

This mirrors the data related to the content pages. As measured by total site pageviews, people favored time-sensitive, store-specific information: in particular, the weekly specials and nightly dinner-for-two options. Keeping the site tailored to a selected store delivers this customized information more quickly, while informing marketing spend by geographic region and enabling further site optimization opportunities.