Social media marketing is full of metrics that can impress clients such as follower count, but until they are put in context they mean absolutely nothing. If your Twitter account has 1000 followers that may seem good, but when you some research and find that all of your competitors have at least 3,000 followers, the sheen wears off.

These numbers are used to agencies to show their work as being successful. It’s largely a runoff from the social media industry being co-opted by the PR world, obsessed with hollow figures such as opportunities to see. They see the number of followers a brand has a direct translation to opportunity to see brand messages. They promise that they can get a Facebook fan page X number of followers in X amount of time, and because it’s relatively easy to do so, they can deliver. And so they give the impression they’ve been successful because they’ve delivered what they told you they would. This does not mean that it’s been a successful social media campaign though, far from it.

If they aren’t engaging with users, having conversations, learning what consumers think and want then ultimately it’s a failure. So what if every time you put out a message 1000 people have the opportunity to see it, if no one cares about, understands or wants to see the message, then it’s pointless. Just as pointless (and potentially dangerous) as getting PR coverage about a new burger in a vegetarian magazine would be.

Social media isn’t just about reach, it’s about engagement. Until you start putting follower numbers into context, and showing the value of these followers then they’re just meaningless numbers.

Tim Aidlin and Karsten Januszewski of Mix Online have produced a tool that allows you to pull in tweets from a specified hashtag and store them for later analysis. The great thing is that when you first run the tool it will pull in as many mentions as it can find, but if you then leave it running ti will auto refresh every ten minutes. Not only does it produce pretty graphs itself but it also allows you to export to Excel for more in depth analysis.

This tool is very useful to a great number of people for many different reasons. I manage a number of brands on a day to day basis, and being able to track certain hashtags is incredibly useful, especially when we run campaigns using a specific hashtag. And just a few days ago I attended a conference where the use of a hashtag was prolific, using this tool @Jas was able to pull in all the tweets and store them for later reference. Incredibly useful, something I expect to be on a fairly regular basis. Thanks go to @Jas for pointing me in the direction of this great tool!