How Social Media Works: Using Web Analytics

Abstract

This study is intended to provide marketing practitioners with an overview of web analytics to explore the issue of how to define and measure the effectiveness of social media through analyzing the various activities of current/potential consumers as well as provide a comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of digital content marketing using social media. These analytics answer broad questions about which types of social media metrics are best at referring traffic, about conversations at the organization’s website, and about comparing different social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter in this study. These analytics employ time series analysis to specifically address activities in SNSs that effectively drive traffic to a website and accomplish business goals. This study is one of the first empirical investigations in the marketing communication field related to measuring social media’s effectiveness. The major goal of this study is to demonstrate the value of businesses’ efforts and to optimize their digital/social marketing strategy using web analytics. Based on this goal three research questions were identified: (1) can the model identify social media performance variables that are related to audience response which can be represented by website traffic?; (2) which social media sties are driving traffic to a firm’s website, specifically in B2B environment?; and (3) can the model provide insight into the importance of those variables? The results of the analysis are encouraging and suggest the model as specified was able to identify the social media variables that were significantly related to the companies’ website traffic. This finding implies that the traditional media variables of reach and frequency are still important in the social media space. As expected, the engagement variables are also a critical part of the social media experience. From a media strategy perspective, all three components – the number of messages and the size of the audience appear to work with active audience participation to produce effective communication in the social media environment.