Social media measurement refers to the tracking of various social media content such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards, and user-generated content in general as a way for marketers to determine the volume and sentiment around a brand or topic in social media.[1]
There are both entry level free tools[2] and enterprise platforms available for use by digital marketers and PR professionals.
As of August 2011, almost three-quarters of marketing executives use some kind of tool to monitor social media.[3]
Contents |
There are currently several ideologies around social media quantification. Major players such as Klout or PeerIndex attempt to measure your influence by taking into account the size of your voice and the depth of your reach; while other players such as SplashMedia try to quantify your effectiveness in social media with their own suite of social media tools. In this approach they measure coefficients between activity (inputs) and results (outputs). Fundamentally both approaches have strengths and weaknesses. The flaw with measuring someones influence by the size of their voice (e.g. Klout, PeerIndex) is to say that Gandhi or Teddy Roosevelt weren't very influential; and that Charlie Scheen is one of the most influential people on the internet. On the other hand, measuring social media by 'effectiveness' means that a local barber could in theory be as 'effective' as Pepsi or Old Spice even though their reach is 1/1000 of their counterpart.
In addition to its extensive use by digital marketers and public relations professionals, there are also other fields of application of social media quantification. Using different tools like Gephi, Weka, and RapidMiner, it is possible to create network visualizations, measure the aggregated sentiments of online publics, and train machine learning algorithms to classify online contents in terms of their specific attributes.