Understanding Your Social Media Impact

Before you get too caught up in the social media craze you will want to understand your social media impact through analytics tracking.There are so many different social media platforms you can choose to focus your energies on and it can be quite confusing. Do not worry about which one is right for you to the point of paralysis. Do a little research and choose the one that feels like the best fit. Once you become familiar enough with this platform and have developed a consistency you can add another platform to your marketing strategy.

However before you get too far into your social media campaign you will want to track the impact you are making. First, you will want to determine what you want to track. Do you want to determine how many people are clicking on your links? Do you want to find out how many people are visiting your website through your individual social media platforms? Or do you want to measure specific marketing campaigns? The answers to these questions will determine what data you want to track and how often you want to track it.

Before we begin tracking the impact of your social media efforts, you will want to know what your goals are. For example, you might want to increase your social media engagement by 25% or increase the number of visitors to your website via social medial by 40%. You might also want to increase the number of sales of a product or service from social media by a certain percentage.

You will want to create an excel spreadsheet that will help you track and analyze your data. If you do not use excel, just make a table in another program that will let you easily keep track of the data you collect. You can find a lot of the data you will be looking for in Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and Klout.

Another thing you might want to do is create your links using bit.ly. This website allows you to easily shorten your links for free but best of all it will allow you to go back and review your statistics. You can see how many people have clicked on your link and where they came from. For example, you can see how many clicked on the link from your email provider, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ or Pinterest.
You might be asking how often you should be checking the impact of your social media campaigns through analytic tracking. This answer will be different for everyone.

However, my suggestion would be to analyze your data monthly if you can or quarterly if you are only posting a few times a week to one or two social media platforms. However, if you are running an active social media campaign that is targeting a desired result such as the sale of a big ticket item you may want to keep an eye on your data weekly.

Managing your social media campaign can be difficult and you may still be wondering which platforms are right for you or how often you should post and what type of content should you be posting. If you would like answers to these questions and if you would like to get a step-by-step template on how to track and manage the impact of your social media campaigns then check out our webinar on Social Media Made Easy that is part of a FREE 3 Week Mini Series we are offering for a limited time.