Social Media Metrics for Travel Marketers: More Tools for Measuring Awareness

Tracking your connections beyond Facebook

You’re probably saying to yourself, there’s more out there than just Facebook and Twitter. It’s hard to stay on top of your presence in different social networks. In this post – the third in this series – I’ll review some outside tools that you can use to track your presence and determine how social media may be helping your business.

Google Analytics

This tool will always be a favorite of mine. Under ‘Traffic Sources,’ there is a tab for referring sites. If you’re posting content on Twitter, LinkedIn, or other social networks, you’ll be able to see in a little more detail what they’re doing when they get to your site: how much time they are spending on it; if they are new or repeat visitors; and how many pages they’re looking at. You can also use the Google URL builder tool if you’d like to track specific posts (for instance, if you are running a special deal) to see how those links are performing.  

The ‘Goals’ area of Google Analytics is a good way to gauge sales that may be coming from your social network. You can create up to 20 goals for your Analytics account. Assign a price tag to the end goal. It could be a specific sale amount, say $79 for a weeknight room, or you could just assign a dollar amount to signing up for your weekly emails. 

Samepoint

Samepoint is an interesting site to track social network conversations and shared media. You enter your search term, and then it scans a multitude of sites, from Wikipedia to Trip Advisor to Facebook and Twitter. You can choose to look at posts in real time, see videos or photos that people have posted about your destination, or read what people are posting in microblogs. It’s a neat tool, and it’s free. 

Social Mention

Social Mention is another site that’s not only free, but can give you some interesting insights into your destination’s social network presence. Some of the insights this tool provides are:

• Strength - what is the likelihood that your brand is being discussed?
• Passion - is your destination mentioned repeatedly?
• Sentiment - what is the positive-to-negative comment ratio?
• Reach - measure your range of influence. 

On top of all that, you can view the top keywords people are posting when talking about your destination, the top users (maybe you’d like to reward them somehow?), and the top social network sources.

Ice Rocket

Ice Rocket is a more basic look at social networks which allows you to view your destination’s presence by category (blog, web, Twitter, MySpace, news and images).  They also have a “Big Buzz” feature which gives you a snapshot on one page of your search results. 

Choose the best tools for your social network searches

These are just a sampling of the tools that you can use to monitor your social network presence and the influence of your content.There are many others, some free and many paid. It’s up to you to decide what will work best. Hopefully this gives you a good, running start. Thanks for “listening.” Your social network will be glad you did.