Having worked at a web analytics company, I love analytics and the trends they reveal. To me, Google Analytics is like cat nip.

I’ve found another analytics toy that I’m nearly as fond of. It’s called ViralHeat, a cost-effective social media monitoring and analytics tool that does a nice job of tracking our social media activity and engagement across Twitter, Google Buzz and Facebook, as well video views and web site mentions. It’s a clean, easy-to-use tool that has become a key part of our internal reporting for VoxOx, a free desktop software that combines voice, video, text, chat, social networking, faxing, file sharing and more into a single interface. I wanted to share five reports we use to help us measure and analyze our social media efforts, specifically on Twitter.

1. Mentions Over Time — Late last year, we made a concerted effort to be more on Twitter where our target audience lives. But how to measure our impact, beyond a simple increase in followers? We began using ViralHeat and now routinely track mentions by day, week and month. This comes in particularly handy following product launches, where we can essentially track our “reach” into the “Twitter-sphere” based on total mentions. This simple report has helped us quantify our social media efforts to executive management.
2. Share of Voice — It’s great that you receive hundreds or thousands of mentions per month on Twitter, but how does that compare to the competition? Using ViralHeat profiles, I can easily calculate the number of mentions we get over time against that of our fiercest competitors to come up with social media share of voice (for Twitter). This is an extremely valuable statistic that let’s us know how we are doing against the competition. Read the rest of this entry »

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Many people tend to think of using social media monitoring to either affirm positive conversations, or turn around negative ones.

But there is a middle layer that companies are beginning to focus on: the “white space.”

The “white space,” as Blake Cahill calls it, is neutral comments within social media. These comments neither disparage a brand, nor compliment it. They may just mention the brand or its products.

Blake Cahill

Such innocuous comments account for between 65 percent and 80 percent of all social media conversations, according to Cahill, SVP of Marketing for Visible Technologies, a social media management vendor that is able to parse sentiment within conversations. Read the rest of this entry »

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