Some people like to categorize any social profile in the earned category, but we disagree. There is a difference between real “earned media” through word of mouth, buzz, and so on and direct investment in maintaining a brand presence on a social platform. Maintaining a brand presence requires investing time and money on behalf of a brand, which is why we have included social reporting in the owned media category. Many web analytics tools now provide varying degrees of social analytics reports. These channels do not exist in silos but must work together. Converged media is the future. In an effort to measure the specific effect that social activities have on the metrics and goals that matter, we see these tools in the early stages of social attribution. There are indeed limitations now, but they offer the ability to • Identify which social referral sources send the most engaged visitors to your site.
• Learn which brand content social visitors engaged with most and what visitors are sharing most.
• Learn how users engage with your brand content offsite, on websites that are not your own. • Segment and measure the performance of individual social media campaigns.
• Create custom segments for users on individual social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. This is a useful feature because segmentation enables you to truly understand the differences between your user groups and provides you with insight to optimize and personalize the user experience.
• Identify which user-generated content is responsible for amplifying brand content; this contributes to true “earned media.”
These social report integrations for web analytics tools do have some shortcomings. Data quality concerns, reporting inconsistencies, and overall data coverage are issues. For example, Google Analytics currently supports some major social platforms in its tracking, but it excludes others. This creates blind spots and can lead to questionable analyses and decision making, based on a false view of user behavior and the digital landscape. Although an integrated solution containing both web analytics and social analytics is ideal, at this point you are better served by using best-of-breed tools for each. The social analytics landscape is immature, fragmented, and, frankly, a mess. There is too much choice, there are too many redundant tools with little to no differentiation that have created an incredibly frustrating and difficult experience for buyers. The future holds more mergers and acquisitions to reduce these problems, much as it did in the early days of digital with the early web analytics vendors.
Gr8