Social Media Analytics is becoming an important part of digital marketing. Every social media team consists of a social media analyst whose job is to measure the success of the campaigns and generate insightful reports with recommendations. Without social media analyst the team would not be able to improve its performance. Social Media Analyst acts like a senses to the entire social media team – listening, analysing and providing feedback to the team.
The role of social media analyst is not just restricted to understanding social media data, but also web data where every digital action of customers are creating new data points. Your traffic data is as important as your social data. The combination of these two types of understanding will create a strong social media marketing team.
Below are the selected 10 best blogs to follow on web, which every social media analyst must be following. The list includes some blogs which are mix of both social media analytics and web analytics.
It was difficult to find 10 dedicated and popular social media analytics blog, hence I have put a mix of blogs, professionals and influencers. If you think any more is there, please feel free to share in our comment below.
1. Danzarrella
Dan Zarrella is one of the pioneer in social media analyst, who first started publishing insightful reports on Twitter trends. He is also an author of four books: “The Science of Marketing,” “Zarrella’s Hierarchy of Contagiousness,” “The Social Media Marketing Book” andThe Facebook Marketing Book.
Blog Link: http://danzarrella.com/
2. Kluriganalytics
Kluriganalytics is a dedicated social media data mining and research agency. They generally use advanced form of analytics methods to show the importance of the social media analytics. There articles are quite different from other general social media blogs, they are quite unique and provides an interesting perspective on the field of social data analytics.
Blog Link: http://kluriganalytics.com/about/
3. Kaushik
Avinash Kaushik is a well known name is the field of web analytics. With major focus on Google Analytics, his blogs are rich sources of knowledge and methods, which every analyst must adhere to. In addition to web analytics, his many recent posts includes insights into social data and how a business can use them to measure the performance of various social media channels.
Blog Link: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/
4. Google Analytics
Google is not to be missed from this list, they have written more about the analytics than Twitter and Facebook. Further, they have been experimenting with new social metrics in their web analytics tools. Their blog is more than just a resources, it contains many fundaments of web analytics combined with the emerging trend in social media analytics.
Blog Link: http://analytics.blogspot.in/
5. Kenburbary
Ken Burbary, Chief Digital Officer for Campbell Ewald. Over the past 18 years, Ken has served in various Digital leadership roles in the digital advertising and marketing industry, providing strategic and business counsel to fortune 500 brands in the areas of digital strategy, emerging media technologies, analytics and measurement, social business and mobile marketing. He has also co-Author of Digital Marketing Analytics: Making Sense of Consumer Data in a Digital World.
Blog Link: http://www.kenburbary.com/
6. Chuck Hemann
Chuck Hemann is currently Group Director of Analytics for WCG. Over the last eight years, Chuck has provided strategic counsel to clients on a variety of topics including digital analytics, measurement, online reputation, social media, investor relations and crisis communications. Prior to joining WCG Digital, Chuck was VP of Digital Analytics for Edelman Digital. Before that VP of Digital Strategy and Analytics for Ogilvy Public Relations.
He has also co-Author of Digital Marketing Analytics: Making Sense of Consumer Data in a Digital World.
He writes at Edelman blog which are resources to any social media analytics.
Blog Link: http://www.edelmandigital.com/author/chuck-hemann/
7. Lisaarthur
Lisa Arthur is CMO at Teradata_Apps and Author of “Big Data Marketing.” She is frequent speaker at events and writer in various main media like The Economist, Forbes, Globetrotter etc. Below are two places where you can find here articles on using data to drive your digital marketing.
Blog Link: http://www.forbes.com/sites/lisaarthur/ Blog BLogLink: http://socialmediatoday.com/posts/published/user/109164
8. Moz
Moz is a established brand in the field of Search Engine Marketing. The great thing about Moz is they have list of professional writers in their blog who write about web and social media marketing. As the landscape of SEO is changing, social component is becoming more important day by day. Hence in their blog, you can find list of useful articles related to social media analytics.
Blog Link: http://moz.com/ugc/category/analytics
9. Business2community
Business2community is one of the most popular social media blogs. They also have a dedicated section of social media analytics posts, under a segment social data.
10. Smartdatacollective
Smartdatacollective is a part of Socialmediatoday which is a popular blog on social media. Smartdatacollective is a dedicated blog focused towards data analytics written by influencers and experts in the field.
Blog Link: http://smartdatacollective.com/
BONUS: ALLTOP
Alltop is an aggregator of all the important sites on the web. It has sites categorised from entertainment, design, web, business and many more. But the one section which is interesting and a must for every social media analyst to look at is the section called – data visualisation. Analytics is useless with out proper visualization. Visualization is in itself a separate field which includes design and communication. But the list of blogs in this can inspire you to be better social media analyst.
Blog Link: http://data-visualization.alltop.com/