social media metrics

Social media metrics is the use of data to gauge the impact of social media activity on a company’s revenue. 

Marketers often use social media monitoring software to observe activity on social platforms and gather information about how a brand, product or company-related topic is being perceived. Currently, there is a good deal of debate about which metrics are most useful for understanding the customer's needs and wants. Some marketers prefer to look at traditional user engagement metrics like clickthrough rates, time on page, content shares and comments. Other marketers use text analytics and Search-based applications to keep track of  positive or negative audience sentiment. In both cases, an important reason that marketers gather data  is to document whether or not the time and effort spent on social media marketing is well spent and the company's social media ROI is paying off.  

Because the nature of this social conversation is now dispersed and far-flung, marketers face a challenge in aggregating social conversation and consolidating it in a single, meaningful view. They also struggle with how to make the data meaningful and digestible to business-line executives and how to deal with privacy settings on social media websites like Facebook and Twitter that put roadblocks up and prevent companies from gathering data.. Social media monitoring tool dashboards are making some tasks easier and advances in data visualization, big data analytics and predictive modeling are expected to make it even easier for marketers to turn data into actional items that will benefit the company.