Social Media Metrics, Tools & Analytics

In recent years the use of Social Media has increased to hundreds of millions of users all around the world who are participating in the "Social computing revolution" by using social networking sites, micro-blogging and photo sharing websites, location-based and cloud services. A direct consequence of the social media revolution is the rapid increase in social data. The emerging field of Social Media Analytics is concerned with making social data meaningful and actionable for various brands and enterprises. When used properly, social media can be a great tool to help businesses reach out to the new potential customers and engage with the existing customers to promote, facilitate, and support participation, collaboration and co- creation.

Social Media Analytics is a fairly new field. Thus, there are bound to be a lot of theories floating around. Theories that are applied in this domain are from various fields like Psychology, Sociology, Business Analytics, Data Intelligence and Communications too. Since the Social Media dimension is new and is still evolving, there is no defined set of rules to follow to get the best out of the social channels in organizational settings. As such, many operational issues and managerial challenges exist for social media in organizational settings. Social Media Analytics is a new field that seeks to address the operational issues and managerial challenges by providing metrics, techniques and tools for gaining insights from social data.

Given the dominance of Facebook globally, this paper will present a selective review of Social Media Analytics tools for Facebook.