Measure for measure, tweet for tweet

If you’ve embraced social media in your business you might not have yet considered how to check to see if your efforts are making a return.

Of course the obvious signs are followers who buy from you or make recommendations about you to others but how do you get to to the point where your network is working for you?

Many who try and become exasperated with social media are under the false impression that success can be achieved in a matter of days or a few weeks.  Of course it doesn’t work like that.  Building an effective and interactive network of trusted contacts takes time. Those “instant network builder” solutions should be ignored in favour of a steady and considered approach to sourcing the network and hopefully followers who can offer mutual benefit.

Most businesses using social media are SME’s and have geographically or sector specific audiences to whom they would like to connect.  The Starbucks or Dell level of followers should not necessarily be the goal unless your business is truly looking to broadcast to a very wide and eclectic audience and expecting them to watch for your every message, probably not very realistic.

Now with that well developed network in place and growing steadily but not exponentially its time to re-assess the true impact of your efforts.  Our recommendation is to check in with apps that can analyse across a number of platforms, one such tool is www.Klout.com . This site can track your impact on twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, FourSquare, YouTube, tumblr, Flickr, Last.FM and now Google+ so leaves very little out.

Klout works out a score based upon three complimentary sets of analytical criteria.

1. True Reach is simply the actual verified number of people who you influence when boadcasting via social media. Spam is filtered out to ensure that the results reflect actual activity. It is the audience who tend to respond when you post a message.

2. Amplification, as it suggests it refers to the increase in your influence through a message being spread via your network. If your content generates a good level of responses it will rank highly on amplification.

3. Network refers to the influence of your network as identified in True Reach.  If you receive responses from and sharing from leading influential accounts it will increase your Network score.

By regularly checking the scores you can identify progress with your social media activity and begin to set this against the more obvious physical responses via the various platforms such as mentions and re-tweets on twitter, comments on Linkedin or “likes” on Facebook.

There are other applications which can help you analyse your social media effectiveness.

Twitalyzer http://www.twitalyzer.com offers useful analysis of your twitter account and ranking in relation to your competitors and peers.

Peer Index  http://www.peerindex.net can provide a very detailed analysis of your account profile.

The key is not to become too wrapped up in the numbers or the multitude of analysis apps as they can often contradict each other.  What is required is an objective assessment of your businesses impact through its use of social media to provide sufficient information to allow you to then take steps to improve effectiveness through connectivity and network interaction.

David Laud, Partner i2i Business Solutions LLP –

author of Social Media Marketing for Law Firms

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