302 - Social Networking Management for a Business Learning Outcome 5

5.1 Define the term social media measurement and monitoring Social media measurement/monitoring is the active monitoring of social media channels for information. This information is usually related to how social media channels are growing and progressing, however the information can be as simple or much more detailed than that.

5.2 Identify social networking measurement and monitoring tools 5.3 Explain the potential uses of social networking measurement and monitoring tools There several types of social measurement and monitoring tools that are useful for a business to monitor their social media channels or those of others. Facebook and Twitter have free and automatic measurement and monitoring tools attached to each page created, which gives the user access to information about their growth rates, post reach and engagement rates. You can also use manual tools on these sights that allow you to run reports for certain information over a specific date range. These tools allow you to see peak times of engagement, the age, gender and nationality of your followers, the busiest times and days in regards to individual accounts visiting your page and more. There are also free external tools that can consolidate your social media accounts into one place where you can monitor the same information about all of your social media channels at once. Examples of these include Tweet Deck and Hoot Suite. There are also social media measurement and monitoring tools that can be paid for that give a greater range of information in more detail. Examples of these include Trackur and Sprout Social, however there are many others to chose from. A list of highly recommended ones here: https://www.lifewire.com/best-paid-social-media-monitoring-tools-2373175. Some features of these more advanced tools include the ability to use keyword searches to identify what words are most popular amongst your followers, the ability to find business related customers to further help focus on a target audience and the ability to see more detailed follower demographics than what could be found on a free tool.

5.4 Explain the limitations of social networking measurment and monitoring tools Amongst the most common complaints of social networking and monitoring tools online is the lack of qualitative information in comparison to quantitative information. Numbers in terms of engagement and growth rates are commonly seen on most social network measurement and monitoring tools, but more detailed information is harder to gain en masse. For example monitoring what other kinds of pages a follower has 'liked' on Facebook would tell you a lot about the shared interests of your target market, so being able to do that with your whole demographic would give you an extra piece of information to help you plan future marketing on social media. Another weakness in many social media measurement and monitoring tools is that the cources of informtation that the tools takes from can be limited. The monitoring/measurement tools might not be programmed to take information from certain parts of social networking websites. Many of these tools also struggle to percieve trends in specific locations that could be important to varying sizes of businesses when analysing data. On social networking sites it is not uncommon for individuals outside of the area from which a business works to follow that business on social media regardless. When taking the information from their sources, the measurement and monitoring tools used may not be able to be as specific as needed when it comes to customer locations and the extra information brought by the non-local customers could dilute the useful information acquired.

5.5 Measure the amount of engagement and amplification on social networking for a business 5.7 Recommend improvements to social networking for a business Instead of analysing the 'Careers Peterlee' Facebook page that I manage, I've decided to analyse it's sister page 'Tees Careers,' managed by another office in the company. Almost all of the posts uploaded by Tees Careers are engaged with in some way. Most are simply 'liked' howeber many have a mix of likes, comments and shares, which shows a good overall engagement level for the page.

The above image shows the engagements for a post that congratulated the Tees abd East Durham teams on a collaboration award. This post brought in a higher than average number of likes for a post from this page.

The above image shows engagements on a post that advertised a vacancy in the tees valley area. This post shows a good range of types of engagement. For improvements I would recommend that the Tees Careers page encourages friendly discussion or feedback from their followers to increase engagement levels. They could also add an insentive for their followers to like, share and comment on their posts. For example they could offer free advice and guidance sessions or a highstreet voucher, and for their followers to win they would simply have to like the post, comment their name and share it with their friends.

5.6 Analyse changes in sentiment to social networking for a business The National Careers Service has recently had controvertial changes made to it's website. The website has been integrated with the .GOV website and removed much of it's content. This caused the sentiment behind customer interactions with the facebook page to go from positive to negative. Before the website was modified, customers interacted with the National careers service facebook page primarily with an interest in the content. The sentiment behind these interactions were peaceful and positive...

After the controversial changes were made to the website, most of the comments and interactions of the National Careers Service Facebook page were extremely negative, particularly about the new website.