I’ve been dredging all the social media accounts I’m responsible for, trying to make hide or hair of the numbers. For how amazing and progressive this new industry is, Facebook seems like the only player that has its act together.
Some people complain about having to compare apples to oranges – at least you’ve got something to compare in that case. Twitter and LinkedIn have as of yet to present anything close to an analytical dashboard like Facebook Insights. If someone knows of a secret, back-end system, please let me know.
Try to find out how many times your followers viewed your tweets. Try to see how many times your Group Discussions were viewed in LinkedIn. These are critical awareness metrics that are totally unavailable at this time. These are only the most obvious, tip-of-the-iceberg type metrics. There’s a whole world that’s hidden in there.
Personally, I doubt Twitter ever could produce those metrics at the drop of a hat. Why? Because the “Fail Whale” shows up too often, indicating twitter is having a hard time keeping up with its user’s expectations. Adding another feature to their overtaxed servers, logging what tweets each user views would be as complex and resource demanding as serving the tweets in the first place. Unless twitter makes a dedicated effort to devote an enormous portion of their resources to view tracking, don’t expect it any time soon.
Please comment on this post and let me know about your experiences with social media analysis.
