According to SocialMediaToday.com, 93 percent of marketers are using social media for business. The influence of social media is no longer restricted to personal and social relationships alone. Many online marketers are using social media effectively to promote their products and services, and connecting with their target audiences more closely.

Evaluating Social Influence

Every social media campaign may not bring the desired results. It is important to measure the influence of the campaign and determine whether it really helps boost the prospects of your healthcare practice. Influence on social media is no longer just measured in terms of the number of followers and fans that you have managed to gather. The quality or value of the followers, in terms of their localized presence and their demographic profile makes a key difference.

Measuring Impact

The volume of likes, shares, comments, retweets, repins, and endorsements on various social media channels reveals how interactive your social media campaign may be. A few sophisticated tools are also available to measure the impact that your social media efforts may be having.

Klout

Klout can be an excellent measurement tool for doctors and dentists on social media. It performs an automated analysis of social media interactions over the past three months and assigns of score from one to hundred. The score of 40 is usually considered to be average, and anything above 60 may indicate that a campaign is successful in creating influence. Klout measures hundreds of variables to compute influence across social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram.

Topsy

Topsy evaluates impact by determing the amount of attention and support that the user’s social media content is receiving. It does not provide a quantitative score like Klout, but it enables the user to search for the most influential conversations and messages taking place in real time around a particular topic. For instance, a doctor or a dentist may like to know what is being said about their practice, their service or their brand on social media within a specified period of time ranging between the last one hour and the last one month.

Other useful social media influence measurement tools include Kred, PeerIndex, TwentyFeet, CrowdBooster, and Sprout Social.