We’re super excited to introduce “Tasks” to all Campalyst users today! Now, if you don’t know how to respond to a Twitter mention or Facebook comment that gets into your Inbox, or if the response requires an attention of a senior person on your team (all of us get tough questions from time to time!), you can easily assign it to anyone with the “Community Manager” or “Group Owner” role. Here’s how it works:

Each message in the Inbox, has an “Assign to” drop down menu:

Expanding the drop down will show the list of all your colleagues with the “Community Manager” or “Group Owner” role:

Select the name of the person you want to assign the Inbox item to and that’s it! Simple, right? Now, the person to whom the Inbox item was assigned to will see it under the “Tasks” section accessible from the left hand side menu.

You can also access your Tasks directly from My Groups section:

Hope this will help you collaborate better and sell more through social media! Don’t forget, you can always request product demo, if you’re not a Campalyst user yet.

Sincerely,

Campalyst Team

As mentioned in the previous blog post, we will be releasing new functionality that will help our customers understand better the ROI of their social media activities. This time we are excited to release a new analytics perspective: Campalyst now allows capturing a more comprehensive view of social media contribution to online revenues by measuring “indirect” or “assisted” conversions.

We would all agree that the path to conversion is rarely as simple as “click on the link in a tweet -> website visit -> purchase”. In most cases, the path to conversion would represent as series of visits from social media, organic or paid search and direct visits, which is spread out over a period of time.

Therefore, in order to understand the total contribution of social media to online revenues, it is important to go beyond measuring the last click conversions. “Assisted” or “indirect” conversion represents a case where a social media channel was not the last referrer of the conversion, but nevertheless, participated in the conversion journey. For instance, a person followed a brand on Facebook and regularly visited the website, but never converted. However, after seeing a promotion on Twitter the person followed the link and made a purchase. In this case, both the Facebook Page and Twitter account should get a credit for the eventual conversion.

So let’s jump into the new report and see how Campalyst helps marketers understand the total contribution of their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts in generating revenue!

As you can see on the screenshot above, Campalyst now measures both “direct” or “last-click” revenue, as well as “assisted” revenue coming from Facebook pages and Twitter accounts. In the above case, the Facebook page directly generated (or was the last referrer) $32,196 in revenue, and “assisted” (or participated in the conversion journey) in generating additional $16,799. Thus, the Facebook page should be credited to generate $48,955 in online revenue.

Another important metric, is what we called “Conversion Multiplier” (see above). It represents the ratio between “assisted” and “last-click” revenue generated by a given Facebook page. In other words, this Facebook page participated in generating 52 cents for each dollar of the last-click revenue.

Finally, the new report allows comparing Conversion Multipliers across multiple channels. For instance, in the above case Paid Search, Twitter and Facebook drive most “assisted” revenue then any other channels. We believe it can serve in two cases: 1) understanding which role social media plays in the conversion journey (awareness, consideration or conversion), and 2) optimizing allocation of advertising dollars into the channels that have the highest combined revenue.

The above functionality was made possible due to the release of Multi-Channel Funnels API by Google Analytics team and we are extremely thankful for all the support and guidance during the development process!

That’s all for today and stay tuned for the future updates! As always, you are welcome to try the new reports for yourself by login in to your existing Campalyst account or signing up for a free trial!

We have been heads down during the summer building new functionality that our awesome clients asked for. In the course of the coming weeks we will be announcing the new features that make Campalyst even more powerful Social Media Dashboard, and today we start with the launch of Inbox for social mentions.

Inbox allows you to monitor and respond to Facebook comments, wall posts or direct messages, as well as Twitter mentions and DMs…all from a single message feed! Even more, you can monitor and respond to mentions using Project Inbox that aggregates social mentions for all social media accounts associated with a particular project.

In order to use the new functionality, login to Campalyst and proceed to “My Projects” page. You can access the Inbox for a particular social media account by clicking Inbox icon next to it, or you can access Project Inbox by clicking the respective icon on top right of the project summary.

“My Projects” page now also provides the information about the number of new messages in the Inbox for each connected social media account. This allows you to quickly scan through your projects and see, which accounts require your attention.

You can easily switch between Inboxes by selecting from the top left menu either a particular social media account or a particular project.

The main advantage of using the Inbox is that you can monitor and respond to all Facebook and Twitter mentions from a single feed. You can also select to see only a particular type of messages (i.e. wall posts on your Facebook Page).

Each message in the Inbox contains information about a) the type of message (i.e. Twitter mention) and the time when the message was received, as well as b) the social media account it was addressed to.

Finally, you can respond to the message (type of the response options depends on the type of the message, i.e. “reply” and “retweet” for Twitter mentions) or archive it to hide from the Inbox (not all messages need response, right?).

That’s it for today, but stay tuned for the new updates! You are welcome to try Inbox for yourself by login in to your existing Campalyst account or signing up for a free trial!

Social media is a key source of traffic for many websites and blogs, so it is becoming increasingly important to understand who are the people driving this traffic. In order to help you answer this question, we used Campalyst tracking technology and developed a new service – Brandfluencers.com – which we are introducing today!

Brandfluencers.com plugs into Google Analytics of a website and identifies the top Twitter users who refer the most visits and pageviews to a website, blog, or a landing page. The marketer or website owner can then engage with them directly and start a conversation. Alternatively, he or she can use Brandfluencers.com to create a campaign – which will publish the top 5 Twitter influencers, offer a prize to them, and ultimately encourage more viral sharing.

An example of such campaign is here: http://brandfluencers.com/brandfluencers.com (yes, you can also win a book on influence! :) ).

We developed Brandfluencers.com to showcase the capabilities of Campalyst technology – so it is complimentary to use for your websites, blogs, businesses, and landing pages! You can try it now at www.brandfluencers.com – and let us know if you find any surprising influencers for your website!

Over the course of the last 12 months we’ve met over 150 social media marketers with the aim to understand what challenges and problems they face while building social media presence for their companies and clients. We have spoken to marketers in different industries from retail to professional services, we’ve spoken to global brands and local practices and we’ve spoken to the brands just starting out in social media, as well as well established.

Processing the feedback, we have put together a simple framework highlighting the 3 stages each brand, small or large, goes through while building their presence in social media. Our main takeaway was the understanding of why the question of measuring social media ROI has been getting escalating attention recently. Namely, the question of ROI comes into play only at the moment when the investment in social media reaches a tipping point. Therefore, we’ve decided to share the framework to get your thoughts and feedback.

1. Growing: The branded Facebook page is created and the Twitter account is set up. However, no one’s rushing to “like” or “follow”. At this stage the key objective of the marketer is to grow the number of fans and followers either by using the paid advertising (such as Facebook Ads) or by running the contests and sweepstakes that facilitate viral growth. This task is especially challenging as you want to build a community of engaged fans that care about the brand, rather than just boost the count by giving away iPads.

As the community is still small, the technological requirements are simple and straight forward: native Facebook and Twitter interface satisfy the needs for publishing and managing the responses and Facebook Insights allow tracking the fan growth.

2.  Managing: As the community growth to tens of thousands of fans and followers or more, managing the community becomes the key challenge. Instead of using email or help line, people prefer the Facebook page to leave feedback, complain about the service and ask questions about the offerings.

Native publishing and management tools fail at this point, as neither Facebook nor Twitter provide a convenient interface for handling thousands of comments or mentions and a professional social CRM becomes a must. Moreover, the social media team within the organisation grows; thus, requiring robust ways to manage the roles with respect to publishing updates and tweets, approval process and managing negative sentiment.

3. Monetizing: As the brand’s presence in social media continues to grow (and so does the investment) and the problem with managing large community of engaged followers is addressed with the use of enterprise-level social CRM, the question of measuring and maximizing ROI comes into play.

Again, the social media team faces the fact that neither native tools, such as Facebook Insights, nor the analytics functionality of the chosen CRM allow measuring ROI. In the best case scenario, the properly set up web analytics suite might provide some insights about the incremental sales generated through social media, but in most cases social media teams would be left with engagement metrics only. At this point the social media team goes on the search for the technological solution to the problem.

As mentioned before, this framework allows understanding better why the interest in social media ROI measurement has been escalating in the press and brands’ minds over the past months. Namely, more and more brands have passed the first two stages and are looking for the way to measure and justify their investment in social media.

We hope that this framework will help crystalize your thoughts on when a brand should start caring about measuring social media ROI and we’re looking forward for comments and feedback to build on top and improve the framework!