Social media is about listening and engaging with your consumer base, whether that’s in a business to business or business to consumer sense, to learn ways that you can improve pretty much every aspect of your business. We spend our days listening to each other, engaging, building relationships and can get lost in a sea of replies, DMs, posts, likes, views and countless other metrics and terms that roll off all of tongues easier than the ABC’s. How many of us out there know what all of these metrics we talk about every day can add up to? Honestly ask yourself, how many of those 3 letter acronyms like ROI, ROE and KPI could you define in clear, concise way AND explain why they are important or even what they do at the end of the day? A few stumped faces? Well that’s okay!

There are some great industry experts out there who are helping to lead the way in this space and let’s face it numbers and analysis aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but one thing that we all do need to work together on understanding is their value overall. By working together as a community to help explore this analytics space a little more, it will mean that we’ll be able to put value behind our engagements, working towards things like the cost savings of online support or how much does tweeting a customer bring to a company in direct sales?

This month we are going to tackle this topic of analytics and measurement. The reason that our ebook for the month is titled “The Future of Analytics” is because while we will touch on the building blocks of social media measurement and analysis, we also want to challenge everyone out there to go beyond what we currently know and accept about analytics in our space. We need to start not just talking about what these metrics give us, but as a community talk about how we’re building these metrics, what works & what doesn’t and touch on the big issue of Standardization across our industry so we can move further down the path of defining our industry through the numbers.

So whether you are a social media analyst, community manager or just interested in knowing more about all the metrics you hear talked about throughout your day, join us this month as we start to dig deeper into the ROI, ROE, KPI, and all the other 3 letter acronyms we can find,  to talk about the why, the how and the future of social media analytics.

What stumps you when it comes “Analytics”? What have you been or trying to track within your company? What would you love to be able to show in hard fast numbers?

Tags: EBook, engagement, KPI, Radian6 ebooks, ROE, Social Media, social media analysis, social media metrics, social media ROI, The Future of Analytics