Social Media Analytics for Small Business Ecommerce Sites

Small business ecommerce site owners know there is value in social mediamarketing. However, make sure you can determine whether your efforts have a positive impact. If you can't measure results of your Twitter or Facebook campaign, it's virtually impossible to manage social media marketing.

The best way to track your campaigns is with a social media analytics tool. Any small business ecommerce site that uses social media can use this type of tool to track how successful you are in meeting campaign goals.

One tool you can consider is SWIX (Social Web Index).  SWIX is a social media analytics tool that helps you track, monitor and analyze your account data from more than twenty different social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many other popular platforms.

Creating a SWIX Account for Social Media Analytics

As with most Web-based tools, SWIX offers a free trial account so you can try the service to see if it is right for your small business ecommerce site before upgrading to a paid account. Just register on the SWIX website for a free account, verify your account through an email link and you are ready to start tracking and analyzing your social media profiles.

 When you log in to SWIX for the first time, you need to add “Tracking Pods" to your account. These Pods are your profiles and accounts on any of the SWIX-supported social sites that you want to start tracking.  As you add each Pod you will need to give permission for SWIX to access -- or connect -- with your social media account to access data for reports.

Each Tracking Pod offers options to customize the specific data (the metrics) you want included in the social media analytics report.  For example, after you connect your Facebook Profile in SWIX, you can choose to add Friends or Wall posts to your reports. For Twitter accounts, SWIX allows you to add Followers, Friends, and Statuses to your reports for tracking.

Once you have selected all possible Tracking Pods and the metrics for reporting, SWIX will begin tracking and analyzing your social profiles. You can go in to the “Tracking” tool at any time to add or delete social media accounts.  SWIX gathers your visitor and usage data on a daily basis and graphs it over time.

Useful and Unique Social Analytics Features

SWIX offers small business ecommerce site owners a number of tools to better manage social media tactics through analytics and reporting. One tool that many will find helpful is the Worksheet -- an overview of all your social media campaigns in one screen. To use the worksheet you provide your own production costs (e.g. for YouTube you might have paid to have a video designed) and SWIX will automatically calculate your unit costs and growth.

One unique feature of SWIX includes a return on investment (ROI) tool. This tool lets you enter monetary values to social media metrics, such as Facebookfans or YouTube views.  You can then add your own marketing costs to see estimated ROI of your social accounts.

Another thing we liked about SWIX is that it is easy to create, manage, and track results of social media campaigns. Campaigns in SWIX are used to organize social media accounts based on the advertising campaigns that they fall under.  To create a campaign you group together Tracking Pods so you can collect specific information.  With SWIX you can create and manage multiple campaigns and track the success of each one separately.

SWIX makes it easy for small business ecommerce sites to see detailed social media analytics and reports -- and also the value of your social media marketing tasks in an easy-to-use interface.

Pricing and Availability

SWIX is free for the first 30-day. After this, you will need to upgrade to a paid plan, or cancel your account.  Paid accounts are billed at $9/month per each active campaign associated with your account.  The SWIX website indicates that you can add and remove subsequent campaigns and SWIX will pro-rate the monthly charges accordingly.