Getting Your Feet Wet with Social Media Part 5: Tracking Your Results

graphThere are millions of posts, articles, and blogs dedicated to social media. But it’s hard to find many references on how to track and evaluate your efforts. As budgets tighten and the economic pressures continue, the need to track social media results becomes more and more important. There are two main categories to consider when it comes to tracking:  website traffic and the conversations taking place.

Tracking your results for social media is not like tracking your other marketing initiatives. It’s not about return on investment (ROI). It’s much more than that. It’s about evaluating the amount, quality, and importance of the conversations that you are engaging in.

Measuring Web Traffic
Determining what social media sites are driving the most traffic to your website is a good place to start. By inserting a tracking code on your site you can gain a wealth of knowledge including how many people are visiting your site, what social media sites are referring the most visitors, how long users are staying on your site, what pages they visit, and more.

To accomplish this there are numerous web analytic tools available, both free and subscription-based depending on your experience level and how much time you’d like to invest in sifting through the data. Google offers a free, very detailed version called Google Analytics which can be overwhelming if you don’t have much experiencing interpreting the data. A cleaner, simpler tool called StatsAdvisor gives busy marketers a quick, easy way to display the data they need to know.

Tracking the Conversation

Keeping tabs on the conversations that are taking place is also very important. This all goes back to listening, which I talked about in part 1 of this series. The best way to know how and where to move forward in your social media strategy, is by listening to what is taking place already. Here are some sites that will help you get a pulse on what’s going on.

  • Digg.com, Technorati.com, and Reddit.com: Use these sites to search for sites or blogs that link to you
  • Co.mments.com: Watch what people are saying about you in blog comment posts
  • keotag.com: Will notify you if the tags you are selected are used in a blog post
  • Twittersearch.com: Search for tweets that correspond to your company, product, or competitors
  • Boardtracker.com: Monitor forums and message boards
  • Facebook.com/lexicon: Monitors wall posts for specific keywords
  • Google.com/alerts: Will email you when your keyword appears in the news, on a blog, or a website

back