Management, aggregators, analytics, tracking (alerts, URL shorteners, etc.), etc.
Social Media has become so important in business that community managers are now using tons of different management tools to track, measure and manage their social media platforms. This is extremely helpful because with so much money and time being spent on social media, brands need to be able to measure the usage so they know if certain strategies are working or not.
Something that has become pretty widely used in the past few years is link-shorteners. If you've ever seen bit.ly or tinyurl in a link, then the link has been shortened. There are tons of link shorteners out there, but those two are the most common. One good thing about a link shortener is that it cleans up any post, especially tweets.
What looks better?
http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2864306235701033867#editor/target=post;postID=5049591820560910424
or
http://tinyurl.com/a2hgcs6
The answer is pretty obvious, the second link looks a lot less stressful.
Another great thing about link shorteners are that they can now be linked with analytics. A brand can buy its own link shortener through bit.ly and shorten links through this custom shortener which allows the social media manager to check analytics on that one link. They are able to track how many clicks the link has received and where they are from.
According to FastCompany, social media tracking is forecasted to be a huge trend in 2013. "This coming year we will see the emergence of new software tools to do just that. Using new wave social media command centers capable of tracking stats in real-time, from tweets and likes to customer sentiment, companies will radically be able to improve customer service and predict future buying patters. Not to mention streamline internal communication and increase productivity."
readings:
http://mediafunnel.com/social-media/link-analytics-url-shorteners/
http://www.fastcompany.com/3003473/cant-miss-social-media-trends-2013
Love the blog Jenna! You did a great job on this #socmeddiscuss, it was great to learn more about tinyurls, I love them..with the exception that you can't always see what it's linking to.
ReplyDeleteI like shortened urls. They looks much cleaner as you pointed. I have heard a few people complain about them though, because they look like spam links and you don't know what page you are being sent to. Great blog.
ReplyDeleteGreat job! The shortened urls are fantastic. I think it looks 100 times better.
ReplyDeleteGreat post and very useful. I am learning more and more about social media and what you do with it. The link shortner is something I will have to incorporate in my tweets and such. That is a very useful tool, thanks for sharing that.
ReplyDeleteI like to use goo.gl because anything run by Google gets my vote as being awesome. I agree that social stats/analysis will continue to be a huge part of the industry and will keep growing.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with alex! Great job!
ReplyDelete