There is no question, your funeral home should have a social media presence.  Not sure where to get started? In a recent blog, 33 Ways to Use Social Media to Build Relationships With Families, we outlined actionable tactics to help you focus your efforts and highlighted the benefits that social media offers:

• for connecting and building relationships with client families
• for providing a service for them (via a social memorial website, for example)
• and for promoting your funeral home.

Done right, social media can also help improve your search engine ranking so more people can find you, can put the human face to your funeral business and can build trust.

But there’s more to being effective on social media than just setting up a profile page for your funeral home and counting the growing numbers of fans and followers. To truly understand your social media impact and to know if you are achieving the results you need, you need to measure it. There are a number of different tools that help you to do this. Here’s a snapshot of 12 of them.

On-Site Social Media Analytics Tools

Let’s start with the measurement and analytics tools already built into some of the main social media sites.

1. Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights got a makeover last year and now provides more in-depth analytics on how people are interacting with your content. Click on the big insights box near the top of the page and it’s easy to see any increases in the number of likes, in the audience reached and engagement via comments, shares and clicks. You can also see similar data for individual posts. If you have a Facebook page then it’s a no-brainer to check the stats regularly.

2. Google+ Ripples

Google+ allows you to measure how your posts are being shared on that site . Through its Ripples tool you can see public shares of content, which influencers are sharing it and interesting statistics about how many times a piece of content is shared in each hour. With this data you can follow links to the names of sharers and connect with them further.

3. Pinterest Analytics

If you have a Pinterest for Business profile (if you started on Pinterest before they were available it’s easy to convert) then you also have access to analytics. You can see how your website is performing on Pinterest and find out what’s been shared by whom, as well as the comments and tags they add. If you don’t have a Pinterest for Business account, then the Tailwind app tracks basic metrics for your profile and boards for free, with additional functionality available in a number of tiered packages.

4. Twitter Analytics

Twitter has an analytics tool intended for developers, publishers and advertisers, which you can access this by signing up for Twitter cards. But if that seems way too technical, there are other ways to get insight into your Twitter activity. I’ll mention a few of these later in the post, but one of my current faves is SumAll which also tracks many other social media sites. With simple filtering tools, you can get an at-a-glance view of your social media interaction.

Other Social Media Analytics Tools

Beyond the tools supplied on the social media sites, third party web and mobile applications also let you track  your social media analytics. Here are three to consider:

5. Buffer

Buffer is a social media sharing app which includes analytics on the content you share. The free version lets you see the number of retweets, favorites, mentions and clicks of as well as the potential reach. You can get even more data with a business plan.

6. Hootsuite

HootSuite is also a social sharing tool. It provides a number of free reports such as an overview of activity on your Twitter and Facebook profiles and a summary of clicks on the links you share via that tool. Some reports are only available to Pro users, but the free reports are enough for an overview.

7. Google Analytics

If you’re thinking about social media analytics, you can’t ignore Google Analytics which also has the great advantage of being free. You’re probably already using this for measuring your website so all you need to do is click on the social reports section to see how your content is being shared. In addition to this, Google makes other data on social sharing available through its Webmaster Tools site.

Social Influence Trackers

Tracking what’s happening is one thing, but what about impact? If you want to be a thought leader among funeral homes, then the following tools can help assess combined reach and influence across multiple social media sites.

8. Klout

Klout is perhaps one of the best-known of these tools. It takes the data from all your authorized social media applications and helps measure your impact, providing an influence score that goes up to 100 (though not many people get there). The higher it is the more influential you are perceived to be. The score comes from your social media activity so if you’re active it will shift. Klout has also recently started allowing you to create and schedule content, stepping on the toes of tools like Buffer and HootSuite.

9. PeerIndex

Through its My PeerIndex tool, PeerIndex allows you to assess how your social media activity stacks up against eight benchmark topics, and you can see how influential you are in each area. There’s also a list of your top five topics – it’s worth looking to see that this reflects how you want client families to see you.

10. Kred

Kred can be used to measure outreach (your social media activity) and social influence (other people’s activity relating to you). The two give you a Kred score. One of the great things about Kred is that it shows how it reaches your score by tracking actions that lead to points.

Social Sentiment Tools

Social sentiment tools allow you to look beyond the figures to see how people feel about the content you post and their interactions with you. There are several of these tools, some focusing on a single site, but let’s look briefly at two multi-purpose tools.

11. Social Mention

Social Mention is a search engine for brand mentions across social media and web platforms. It assesess positive, negative and neutral mentions. This provides some real-time analysis which can be useful if you happen to be running a social media promotion campaign or outreach program.

12. Social Searcher

Social Searcher is another brand mentions search engine which allows you to monitor recent activity on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Along with that you also get analytics showing you positive, negative and neutral mentions; types of posts that match your search terms and popular posts related to your search term.

The point of using all of these tools is to make your social media presence more effective and connect more deeply with families. You’d better believe that they will check you out when deciding where to go for funeral services, so it’s a good idea to get there first and understand the impact you’re making.

Want to get even more social and serve your families at the same time? Provide a social memorial website via our f1Connect Website Platform. Click here to get started.

Rochelle Rietow

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