How to Track Your Social Media Efforts (And Why You Should)

Many solopreneurs who use social media think that it’s about cranking out as much content as possible. Smart solopreneurs, however, take the time to track social media success. They know that you can use what you learn as the foundation of your future marketing and product creation decisions.

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Focus your efforts with niche marketing

Niche marketing allows you to hone in on those interested in your niche. Traditional broadcast advertising takes a shotgun approach. But with niche marketing, you focus on your target audience through topic-related Facebook groups, forums, and social networking sites.

In this way, you can discover the answers to vital sales and marketing questions, such as:

What does my target market care about?
What does my niche struggle with?
What is trending in my niche?
What trends are driving sales?
Who are my main competitors?
How do my products compare to theirs and how are they different?
How are they using social media?

What should you measure on social media?

Deciding what to measure on social media is going to depend on your goals. Are you trying to increase awareness, improve engagement, or drive traffic to your website? Are you trying to grow your email list? Or maybe you are interested in sales. Your answer to this will determine the social media metrics that you choose to track.

Measure social media awareness

Awareness is all about getting eyeballs on your content. Depending on the social media platform, you’ll want to track reach or impressions.

Measure social media engagement

Engagement refers to the interaction that others take with your social media content. For engagement, you can track things like comments, likes, or retweets.

Measure traffic to your website

If driving traffic to your website is your goal, then you will want to track clicks.

Measuring email list growth

How many opt-ins are you getting from social media marketing?

How to track social media metrics

Fortunately, it’s easy to track social media metrics for awareness and engagement. The numbers you need can be found in the social media platforms themselves.

Facebook Insights

For your Facebook page, look under Insights for metrics such as Page Views, Page Likes, Reach, and Post Engagement. You can export your data to a spreadsheet, which is always a plus in my book.

Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics gives you a nice graph that shows daily impressions and engagement. More information is available in the right sidebar. And you can also download all your Twitter data to a spreadsheet

Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest Analytics gives you several options for viewing different metrics online. Profile shows you impressions and engagement for ALL your pins (both those leading to your website and third-party pins). Website shows you impressions and engagement activity for pins from the website that is linked to your Pinterest account.

*Note: you must have a Pinterest Business account to access Pinterest Analytics.

In addition to using native platform analytics, most social media marketing automation tools offer analytics, so you can refer to those as well.

How to Use Social Media Engagement Metrics

Social networking is not a one-way conversation. Rather, it’s a means of building relationships with your target audience. While building awareness can be a goal, engagement is more important than eyeballs. You want to create a path, with website visitors and social media followers taking the actions you guide them to.

After you track social media engagement for a period of time, use what you learn to:

Refine your basic social media strategy
Develop your content strategy
Ensure that you have accurately defined your target audience
Determine the best times to post on each social channel

Tracking social media shares

To gain insight that will help you build your brand and increase reach, start by creating content that your followers will want to share with others.

Then track those shares to see which content works best. You can get data on the number of shares from some native platform analytics like Facebook and Pinterest. Plug-ins like Social Pug make it easy to track shares across many platforms.

Tracking email list growth from social media

Growing your list with social media is a form of engagement. If growing your email list is a goal, create a content upgrade or e-course and then announce it on social media. Track how many new subscribers you get from each channel.

I use a plug-in called Thrive Leads to create my opt-in forms. This plug-in includes reporting that shows where my conversions are coming from.

The vast majority of my email subscribers come from Pinterest, with only a handful coming from Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Clearly, my time is better spent focusing on Pinterest.

Another option to track social media success for your list-growth efforts is the Pretty Link Lite plug-in. People tend to think of this plug-in for tracking affiliate links, but it can be used for any kind of link. So, if you have landing pages for your opt-ins, create a Pretty Link for each social media platform. Then it will be super-easy to track where the clicks are coming from. You won’t be able to see if those clicks converted into subscribers, but you will know which platforms are driving traffic.

Tracking sales from social media

If you want to learn which platforms drive the most sales, then create a special offer for each social media platform’s target audience. You may be tempted to run the same offer on all platforms during the same time, but resist! The only way you can get an accurate view of each platform’s performance is to test them separately. Track your results for each social media platform, then compare them to see which performs better.

Track social media success – from eyeballs to engagement to conversions – and see what a difference it can make to your marketing and product development efforts.

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