Knowing what to measure and how to measure social media are well and good, but you’ll need tools to both capture and make sense of the information.To help you with the tools available today, I’m covering the 5th of 7 crucial elements of social media return on investment for churches: “Empower Every Ministry With Tools and Training”. Before I share a list of tools for social media measurement, let the words of Australian writer and critic, Robert Hughes, give needed perspective:
“A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.” – Robert Hughes
Your determination and focused effort with even a few freely available tools will help you gain more insight than a casual use of the venerable juggernaut software tools for measuring social media ROI.
Free Social Media Measurement & Analytic Tools
For many churches, the two main social media platforms used are Facebook and Twitter, which both include some level of built-in tools for understanding your interaction with others and how/when your content is viewed and shared. Facebook includes Insights, a simple dashboard view that shows some surprisingly helpful information about Fan Pages.
Facebook Demographics from a Fan Page
As the example above demonstrates, it’s helpful to know which demographic groups are interacting with your site and which are not. From this, you can decide how you want to alter your content to reach the demographic user groups you desire. Facebook has a page about Insights (just type in Facebook Insights on the Facebook search) that helps get new users up-to-speed quickly, and is written in a conversational tone, making it easy to understand.
“When you create compelling content, people may choose to interact with the material by commenting, liking, or writing on your Wall. These people help to spread your content virally throughout Facebook, as their engagement leads to organic stories being published in their friends’ News Feed.”
In addition to demographics information, Facebook Insights also gives you:
- Post views
- Post feedback
- Page content feedback
- Daily story feedback
- Page posts
- Daily page activity
- Page views
- Tab views
- External referrers
- Media consumption stats
Similarly, Twitter provides some basic measurement tools right from the web browser interface.
However, the big Kahuna of metrics is Google, with their freely available Google Analytics. The data, trends, insight and helpful information about any website you own/manage is tremendous! The tricks that Facebook uses to provide up-to-date information and then offer to sell you ads that fit your likes is straight from the Google playbook. While there are many applications that track and look at data in unique and interesting ways from your websites, the obvious starting point should be Google Analytics.
Social Media Metrics & Helpful Tools
As good as Google, Facebook and Twitter are independently from each other, there have been a growing number of specialized apps and web tools built to tie social media analytics into a single interface. If you are serious about getting the best ROM out of Social Media for your church and/or ministries, then you will need to invest time (and probably at least some money) into a robust tool.
Right up front, I want to say that I think there are two broad categories for these social media tools: Social Media Engagement and Social Media Monitoring & Engagement.
Social Media Engagement Tools
Simple and free tools abound for helping users streamline their social media activities. I only have one recommendation here: TweetDeck. What started as a Twitter third-party app has greatly expanded to include multiple accounts across multiple social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Posting or scheduling posts and status updates across multiple networks and even from more than one account is a great value of TweetDeck, making all-in-one updates simple. Additionally, TweetDeck allows for multiple ways to organize the never-ending stream of information and updates. From viewing only replies to a specific account to simple searches for a term, name, tag or phrase, the desktop and mobile versions of this tool are very effective and easy to use. Even better, it’s possible to sync the user information between multiple devices, making for a much more useful tool than separate desktop and mobile installations.
I still use TweetDeck daily, even though I also use some of the tools below. It’s just that good.
Social Media Monitoring & Engagement Tools
From free programs like HootSuite to low-cost subscription services like SproutSocial to high-end, “you-complete-me” tools such as Radian6, there’s no shortage of options for taking a deeper dive into the metrics, analytics and measurement of your social media effort and networks.
Where TweetDeck stops at making it simple or organize and coordinate social media updates, these tools allow for the capture, display and analysis of your social media trends at or near real-time.
I’ve tried quite a few including SproutSocial, MeltWaterBuzz and, what I think is easily king-of-the-hill, Radian6.
SproutSocial provides attractive, easy-to-understand, useful information for most churches to find valuable
A step up in complexity and deeper data mining is Meltwater Buzz (seen below). This is view of some screens taken from crunchbase.com to show the kind of visual data available for analysis.
Meltwater Buzz is a much deeper toolset with not only more data, but helpful tracking and engagement tools
The game changes when you step up to a tool like Meltwater Buzz (shown above) or Radian6 (shown below). Both are very robust tools that help share the workload between a team of social media specialists and have very helpful tools for aggregating and assigning follow-up engagement tasks.
Radian6 provides incredible detail about metrics, measurement, sentiment and analytics reporting
In my opinion, most churches will do just find with Facebook Insights and welcome the additional helpfulness of a tool like SproutSocial. For the minority of churches that are very, very proactive and responsive in their social media activities, the step up to enterprise-grade software is a wise investment. For those with a very wide reach and large influence, as well as the strategic and tactical needs to staff up a social media team, I simply must recommend the top-notch Radian6 software and team. From the top down, this is a very bright and classy group of people.
