If you are serious about social media marketing you will be using multiple channels that may range from Facebook and Twitter to Pinterest and Instagram. In using multiple channels one of your biggest single challenges will be measuring, assessing and demonstrating your performance across these channels.
Simply Measured offers one of the best and most complete monitoring tools on the market to address the challenge of multiple social networks. It allows you to monitor and assess all of your social media activity in one place and to generate both summary and detailed performance reports. We take a detailed look at what Simply Measured has to offer.
Simply Measured Overview
Simply Measured has grown significantly in recent years. It has raised funds of over $30m and now has over 150 staff. The tool is aimed at serious marketers and large companies. The company claim the tool is now used by 40 of the top 100 US brands.
Simply Measured does what it says on the tin, it helps you to measure your social media performance simply. It will help you in a number of ways including:
monitoring owned channel performance
doing competitor benchmarking
undertaking campaign and brand monitoring
The tool is certified by Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.
There are two aspects for me which set the tool apart from other social monitoring tools, namely:
the ability to measure your performance across all networks in a single place
the flexibility and quality of reporting
All of Your Social Metrics in One Place
One of my biggest frustrations with social media tools is when they don't cover all the social networks. They may be great at Twitter and Facebook but you need to use other tools to measure your success on other channels. One of the nice features of Simply Measured is that the tool covers all of the following networks:
Simply Measured provides with an overview of your overall performance as well as detailed reports for each channel. The overview report provides a high level summary of all your accounts as follows.
You can also see overview reports by audience, engagement, content etc. Below is an overview report on engagement as an example.
Flexible Reporting
The flexibility and quality of reporting is the second key factor that sets Simply Measured apart from other tools.
The tool provides much of the same data you can find in other social media monitoring and analytics tools such as numbers of followers, retweets, engagement levels and organic shares. However, Simply Measured provides a unique range of reports which are downloadable in Excel and Powerpoint. These reports are beautifully designed and allow you to further slice and dice the data as you need. Let me give you some examples.
Twitter Engagement
The report below shows you how Simply Measured displays your Twitter data in a clear format which helps provide a clear understanding.
This report is also actually an Excel report which has been nicely designed and which has all of the raw data included.
You can scroll down to get further engagement data showing engagement over time, peak periods and the most engaging tweets.
Competitive Analysis
You can undertake a detailed analysis of your performance against competitors using Simply Measured. You can select and track 10 competitors as standard. Thus you can define your own competitive landscape.
The tool then produces for you a competitive leaderboard as follows.
This provides you with a quick overview of your performance against your competitors. It shows how you perform against the average and the leading competitors.
Facebook Ads/Insights
The Facebook reports integrate organic and paid performance as follows.
The range of report options is extensive including performance by content type such as photos, videos and links. The tool integrates with bitl.ly to pull through click data into your analysis. One of the nice features of the reports is the suggested recommendations. Based on your current performance the tool makes recommendations such as try more pictures on a particular network.
The tool also covers Instagram and allows you to track Instagram hashtags. The tool also tracks where pictures are shared outside of Instagram and the top performing filters on instagram e.g. Mayfair or Walden.
As I mentioned above, you can download all the reports to both Excel and to Powerpoint. The downloadable exports are nicely pre-formatted spreadsheets which you can edit as appropriate for your own reporting purposes. They exports contain all of the raw data for you to work with and slice and dice as you need.
The tool also has integrated google analytics so you can track the social media activity that drove traffic or goal completions. Ultimately this is a key meaure for most social media activity.
Summary
If you use a wide range of social networks and a flexible reporting tool then Simply Measured may be just the tool you are looking for. For me what really stands out is the quality and flexibility of reporting. The ability to download pre-formatted Excel reports is inspired and valuable to anyone who has responsibility for reporting on performance.
Pricing starts at $500 a month and you can get a full demo at www.simplymeasured.com.