As you seek out social media tools that will best track the success of your business’s digital presence and engagement, you will want a comprehensive solution that will provide you both the proof in numbers as well as the opportunity to perform qualitative analysis to support your conclusions. In short, you want the tool that will help you increase engagement, brand awareness, and perhaps most importantly, sales.
In an effort to provide the best social media listening tool for your business, I propose taking a look between the two social media analytics measurement tools, Facebook Insights and Sprinklr Business Index. Facebook Insights: If choosing to use your Facebook business page’s built-in measuring tools, it’s certainly a convenient way to go rather than outsourcing your metrics analyzing to another app/tool. The main pro of using the Facebook business page/Insights to track quantitative metrics for your organization is that it is *largely* free, unless you decide to use the “boost” feature or incorporate ads. Facebook Insights provides the basics - you can see how many actions took place on your page, page views, page likes, reach, post engagements, page responsiveness (especially useful for businesses that are trying to improve their response time to customers), and page followers. You can filter these types of data to see what kind of activity your page saw over one day, two days, a week or a month. The interface will allow users to see which posts experienced the most engagement, showing more than just the number of likes, but also the type of reaction the post received (a post click versus reactions, comments, and shares) and whether a post’s reach was the result of a organic search or a paid advertisement. Moreover, Facebook Insights allows businesses to see what times are optimal for publishing posts (as you are able to see at what time of day posts experienced the most activity) as well as what regions of the world your followers are located. This allows businesses to cater to their viewers’ interests by making their social media strategies reflect trends and topics their viewers are more likely to tune into. Additionally, Facebook Insights provides useful information like Pages to Watch, so that organizations can see data from similar businesses or competing businesses; net likes, which show how many followers you’ve gained and lost throughout the week; and actions, or how many people followed your call to action to visit your website or call your business’s phone number. One of the cons of using Facebook’s business page to analyze your social media following may have to do with your target audience. If you’re marketing to a generation that does not use Facebook often or does not use it as a their preferred social media platform, Facebook Insights won’t give you an accurate reflection of your customer base. Additionally, you may need to create or increase your advertising budget in order to drive traffic to your Facebook page, especially if your business is in its early growth stages. And of course, having any sort of social media page for your business at all means that your business will need to create a protocol for dealing with negative feedback from your audience. After all, social media is a two-way communication street. And finally, unless you look at the reactions associated with each of your posts, there’s no easily accessible percentage ratio showing positive to negative reactions your posts or page are experiencing. Sprinklr Business Index: Sprinklr Business Index (SBI) prides itself in measuring and analyzing “the breadth of public interactions between brands and consumers across social media.” Like Facebook Insights, SBI tracks a brand’s performance based by measuring audience size, content engagement, and responsiveness of a brand to its customers using publicly available data (i.e. social media posts). SBI will use current data and compare it to a brand’s performance dating back to 2012. What’s more, SBI users can compare the performance of their brands to competitors to identify areas of improvement. SBI calculates a few different categories for a brand’s overall engagement scores. Its Content Score is measured by looking at a brand’s published messages per account and engagements per post. Audience scored is determined by number of followers per account, total mentions, and estimated reach per post. Care Score is determined by the percentage of messages a brand responds to and how long it takes for them to respond. I believe SBI provides some valuable insight that Facebook Business does not, such as overall brand sentiment, popular key words that resonate with audiences, and a comprehensive comparison feature that allows one to see how well their social media strategy is compared to a competing company. The big con is its monthly subscription pricetag, which runs around $100-$250 a month depending on what type of program you purchase. Additionally, the information SBI gives regarding audience insights may not always be accurate, and it may not pick up user insight data from ALL the social media platforms that are out there. The Winner: Because Facebook is the most commonly used social media platform, I am declaring Facebook Business the winner over SBI. If you’re a business, you should have an active Facebook page anyway, which is free. If you tend your garden, you'll grow your social media following over time and have the metrics and insight you need to see where you can improve in your business's social media strategy and increase customer engagement. And, if you can spring a few bucks towards digital advertising, you might reach your social media goals that much faster. However, I also like the SBI platform because it provides some useful components that Facebook Insights does not yet have (top key words, brand sentiment, etc.). But it is certainly the costlier route to go. Because both tools provide *most* of the same data about their audiences (the most important ones are listed in this Hootsuite article by Eddie Shleyner), using Facebook’s business page is the more cost-effective way to go. Don’t spend more than you need to; use the bulk of your funds to do what you do best - providing a product or service to your clientele. According to Kim Lachance Shandrow’s Entrepreneur article “10 Questions to Ask When Measuring Your Social Media ROI,” the easiest way to measure social media success is by looking at the number of conversions or answers to you calls-to action. There’s a wealth of social media measurement tools out there (many of them free). As long as you are able to accurately gauge how well your audience is responding to your content using the basic metrics, celebrate your victories and keep building on you social media strategy before advancing to higher-tier social listening tools.
2 Comments
Stefani
11/14/2018 02:00:34 pm
Caitlin,
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Julia
11/25/2018 06:25:04 pm
Caitlin, you did a nice job in comparing the pros and cons of FB Insights and SBI. It was clear to see that FB Insights has the most benefits.
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