Social Media Analytics : Transforming the Way Businesses Function

In a recent article in The Guardian on Social media Analytics, Danny Bradbury rightly said that,” Social media isn’t just about collecting Facebook ‘Likes’ anymore. The smart money is extracting intelligence from the network.”

Indeed social media has not only transformed our lives but it has also changed the way businesses function. Today marketers, from small and big businesses alike are increasingly relying on social media to gain valuable insights about their customers and competitors. Data thus gathered can be used to positively impact profits by increasing revenues, decreasing costs and improving customer service levels.

Capitalizing on the social media craze, several companies have launched some mean tools to help you analyze, monitor, interpret and create reports about your social media initiatives. And the good news is that many of them are free. Here are our pick of some of the most useful, free social media analytic tools available in the market today:

Back tweets

A tool that gives you insights into who all are talking about you, their numbers and what they are saying. Essentially you can search through a tweet archive of sorts for URLs sent through twitter.

Facebook Insights

This inbuilt Facebook tool helps businesses monitor and analyze their content. It will help you understand usage patterns and demographic trends which will help you improve your business and social media strategy.

Google Alerts 

An excellent tool that gives you email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your queries.

Icerocket 

A useful tool to monitor your brand, it provides varied metrics from the Web, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, all in easy-to-read formats.

Klout 

A really unique tool that helps you find who is interacting with you on social media. It also helps you identify the influencers in your audience enabling you to target and encourage them to use their influence to promote your brand.

Pinpuff 

This tool allows you to measure how people are sharing images about your brand on Pinterest.

Pinterest Web Analytics 

This built-in analytics tool gives you information about who is interacting with pins that originate from your websites as well as insights into the kind of pins that are most popular.

Social Mention 

A real-time social media analysis tool that gives you a complete single stream insight from multiple social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg and Google.

Though social media analytics can provide your business with some really awesome insights, here’s a word of caution. Don’t rely on them solely. They will be of much more value and immensely more effective if you integrate them with other valuable insights that you have garnered from other divisions and other analytic tools. By bringing together all the information you have gathered from across your business, you will be able to bring to the management insights and solutions that will positively impact the bottom line.