It’s the first of the month, it’s getting late, and once again I’m still at my desk staring at a spreadsheet, trying to put together all the pieces of my company’s social media footprint.
In Excel? In this day and age? Isn’t there a better way to for B2B social marketers to collect, aggregate and analyze key performance metrics?
All I’m asking for is a tool that helps me create a unified framework for displaying and analyzing:
- Activity by members of our company’s branded community, built on the Jive Software platform. I currently have to export available report data from the Jive system into Excel, add page view and source data from Google Analytics, then format it and produce graphs.
- Engagement around content from our main Twitter account, plus the small but growing number of smaller Twitter accounts for different geographical regions. We mainly use HootSuite to post tweets, but even its enterprise version doesn’t include much in the way of content management or editorial calendar tools.
- Engagement around our LinkedIn content, both on the company page (the page insights and follower insights) and in a variety of groups. LinkedIn doesn’t appear to provide a way to export data, so for now I’ve had to manually recreate it in Excel. Even then, there’s no way to track which pieces of content are generating the most shares and clicks – crucial information for a marketer looking to optimize the effectiveness of this social channel.
- Engagement data from Facebook, Google+, SlideShare, and YouTube – and sooner or later, though we sell enterprise data storage arrays, we may even need to use and monitor performance on Pinterest.
I’ve looked at a number of social marketing management tools, but so far I haven’t identified anything that would help solve this kind of reporting and analytics problem. Is there something I’m missing that would help me call it a night and get some sleep?