Measuring Social Media on the Web

by Nancy Daugherty

Digital communications over the internet have opened, to hospitals and healthcare organizations, a growing trove of marketing channels; particularly those built around search and social networking.   With an opportunity of abundance comes a challenge of control. Using social media marketing to build awareness and affinity around your brand and web presence can be a boon, but trying to understand the complexities of how well your marketing vehicles perform online can seem like an anchor.  A solid digital presence relies on your ability to recognize your reach and influence within the world of the web. Significant resources are often applied to this challenge, but there are free options available that give healthcare managers – marketing or otherwise – access to basic measures of engagement and effectiveness. These tools measure an array of elements; from visitor page counts and tracking, to the ‘hottest’ spots on your site (through analysis of click patterns). These examples cover many of the more popular marketing channels on the web: Google Analytics – gives you a view of the traffic flow into and around your website. It can tell you if visitors arrive through search engines, display advertising, pay-per-click networks, or email marketing.  It also provides data on time spent with your site and the next web destination for visitors. FaceBook Insights – a tool for understanding your followers on Facebook. Demographic info, as well as psychographic clues like activities, comments and wall posts, give a glimpse into the consumer who is most engaged with your social media. Feedburner – if you are blogging or providing other content, know more about your content consumers.  This tool gives you data on where and how your subscribers came to find your RSS feeds. Post Rank – if your site is powered by WordPress, get analytics that identify where and how visitors engage your site, and what they do while visiting.  This tool provides near real-time snapshots, as it refreshes data daily. Twitalyzer – analytics for the Twittersphere.  This tool, provided by Twitter, delivers detailed metrics on engagement and ‘clout’ for individual Twitter accounts. YouTube Insights – view detailed statistics about the videos that you upload to your YouTube site. Understand the number of unique viewers as well as total views, broken-out by geographic regions.  Benchmark your data against all videos in that market over a given time period. Maximizing viewer engagement and optimizing your reach is at the core of success in any digital marketing campaign; and social media marketing on the web is becoming a more and more valuable ‘community communication’ channel for healthcare organizations. Measuring the impact of your campaign on the web should give a much better picture of overall effectiveness. Have you had experience or success with measuring your online impact? If so, how has it impacted your present marketing efforts?

 

 

 

Comments

[Lee McKnight Jr]

Thanks Nancy, a concise list. I just found Twitalyzer recently, for example, and it's been helpful.

Lee

[Healthcare Communication]

Thanks for your concise list of tools for the various flavors of social media. Healthcare communication in specific is in the unique position to use social media for brand, internal day to day communication, and external community awareness. Juggling all these different messages on any number of different channels can be challenging.

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