Social media marketing can be a winning strategy, but the true ROI of campaigns can be tricky to measure. One Canadian company says it can help connect the dots.
Swix Inc., an Ottawa firm that specializes in reporting and analytics on social media channels, has created a new Web-based company called Source Metrics, which its says will fill a gap in current technology. While there are tools out there that can look at metrics individually, the platform can draw correlations across them, says Scott Lake, CEO of Source Metrics.
Essentially, social marketing optimization products do three things, he says: publish on social media, manage campaigns, and “listen and engage.”
“HootSuite does great publishing, Bit.ly does great campaigns, Radian6 would do some great listening,” he said. “We’ve actually created an integrated platform that does all three of those things.”
In the past, when the three were treated as separate entities, the data gathered from monitoring social networks, for example, couldn’t be fully understood, Lake says.
“You wouldn’t know if that listening was the result of the publishing, the campaign or something else that’s happening on the Internet.”
By integrating metrics and analytics into a single service, the company is able to determine where relationships, and ultimately, causal effects, may exist. This is particularly important for larger companies that are investing big money into their marketing campaigns and need to dig deep into what kind of returns they are getting, says Lake.
“We can now start to pull all sorts of data around how does your publishing affect your campaigns, which social properties are performing better with which landing pages, which publishing campaigns are more successful than others,” he says.
The platform can currently perform analytics on about 20 different social networks, but the company has to be ready to evolve constantly, adds Lake. “Some of the tools that we’re tracking now, Tumblr, Pinterest, Klout—a year ago they weren’t even really in the social marketing toolset.”
Source Metrics is among a growing number of Canadian companies, such as Radian6 and HootSuite, working in the social media optimization field. But ironically, says Lake, many of them have had to work hard on getting U.S. customers before making a name for themselves back home.
“The one unique thing about Canada is that it produces an amazing amount of social media analytics and social media publishing companies,” he said. “These are all very unique analytics, social marketing and social listening companies. So, you’d think that people would have figured out that in Canada we’re leading the world in this.”