If you’ve yet to dip your toe in the social media ‘pond’ it might be because you think it is unreliable and hard to evaluate. True, there’s no ‘one size fits all’ solution. And you might be thinking: “For my company, how fab is Facebook? Is Twitter just witter?”

But in truth it is by far the most trackable type of promotion.

There are free social media analytic tools for Facebook business pages, YouTube accounts, blogs and websites. And if these aren’t enough, you can choose from an array of paid services and tools offering even more data. Basically, visitors leave tracks whatever they do on your website or social media profile. The real challenge is making sense of all this data.

A visitor’s interaction with an online brand is just like dating.

To understand how popular your brand is, it is worth knowing which one of your friends hooked you up (referral traffic & recommendations), what made the visitors fall for your brand (seen in levels of engagement, virality, time spent per page and returning traffic).

On the other hand and probably most important, you want to understand what makes users ditch your brand. The early signs that the online identity is becoming less appealing on the eye are high bounce rates, low traffic levels and declining SEO.

Making sense of graphs, numbers and lists and turning them into stories is a fiddly activity but, to our aid, the usual marketing research tactics apply in social media’s case too. It is basically the same thing, just with free, probably more genuine data.

The whole evaluation process resembles putting together an ever changing puzzle and most brands lack the knowledge or time to do this properly as there isn’t a textbook approach to analysing social media. It’s as customised and special as your brand.

Article first published on Seal PR.