How to Track Your Social Media Activities

As marketers, we’re all preoccupied with creating content plans and implementing strategies to take our businesses forward. One thing we often overlook is checking what’s happening on social media. It’s not only necessary to communicate with your audience – you also need to focus on social media key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement, reach, brand mentions, sentiments, and conversions. Tracking the performance of your competition also matters.

When you make social listening on top of your priority list, you’ll be able to use the data you gather to create new and more effective strategies that will help you strengthen your online authority. For example, knowing what your fans are saying about you in their conversations enables you to prevent situations that may harm your reputation. You can immediately respond to negative feedback – or even thank fans who appreciate what you do.

In this article, we will be sharing simple yet effective strategies you can implement today to track your social media activities. Let’s get started.

Identify Your Most Important Goals

Before start any social listening activity, you need to figure out your end goals. What do you want to achieve as results? Are you aiming to run more targeted campaigns? Do you want to create a more engaged community?

Being able to identify your social media goals will help you know which social metrics to focus on. If your goal is to grow your engagement, then you would track KPIs including comments, likes, shares, and clicks for your social media posts.

Research Where Your Target Audience Hangs Out

For you to get the best results out of tracking social media activities, you should be able to pinpoint where your customers are spending most of their time on. The first step is to craft an audience persona. Ask yourself who your target customer is. Are most of your customers comprised of males or females? To what age group do they belong?

Matching your industry or niche with a potential social media platform also helps. If your business involves photography or visuals, it would make sense for your customers to be on Pinterest or YouTube. If your niche is online marketing, expect your audience to be on Twitter or Facebook.

Use Google Analytics

If you have multiple social media pages, it’s also important to know where your visitors are coming from. This is your referral traffic. A practical resource that enables you to get vital information about your audience is Google Analytics. To get knowledge about your traffic source, simply go to Acquisition > All Traffic.

Also, you’ll be able to monitor the number of conversions that social media has helped you with.  You can further break it down to see the monetary amount of those conversions based on your traffic referrals. By checking which social media platform brings in the most results, you can now start concentrating most of your efforts on a specific platform.

Use an All-in-One Dashboard

Google Analytics already presents you with a lot of data you can leverage to run effective campaigns. But to conquer social media, you need to keep track of all your essential metrics using an all-in-one dashboard. These metrics reveal much about your performance and your prospects – your number of likes relevant to a specific post, top Twitter influencers, brand mentions about you and your competitors, and more.

Conclusion

With the growth of social media, measuring your performance across platforms and identifying who your key customers enable you to gain competitive advantage. Whether it’s analyzing your traffic or listening to your audience in real-time, you can benefit from the best strategies that will set you up for success.