Most good marketers know that tracking is critical to success – Social Media is no different. Many marketers just starting out with social media do it in a haphazard manner and fail. Yet those who are able to produce consistent results through social media have one thing in common: They track their efforts. Here, you’ll learn the ins and outs of why you should track, what exactly you should track and how you can track your social media results.

Why Track?

There are many reasons to track your social media. The first and primary reason is that tracking is the first step to improving numbers in business. If you have no idea how many fans are joining your Facebook page per day or how many people are watching your video per day, then how are you going to improve those numbers?
Another reason to track is so that you know what’s working and what’s not. Perhaps your twitter and Facebook campaigns are really not doing so hot, yet your video campaigns are pulling in visitors by the boatload. You now know where to focus your attention.

Finally, tracking saves you a lot of time. Social media can be a bit of a “spray shot” at first. You’re on twitter, Facebook, MySpace, a hundred video distribution sites, digg, reddit, delicious, stumbleupon … The list goes on and on. Over time however, if you track properly you’ll be able to distinguish which areas are paying off and which areas are just a drain on your time.

What Should You Track?

Now that we know the why of tracking, let’s talk about the what. What are the actual metrics you should be tracking?
The most important in any marketing campaign is always: How much money did we make? How many new customers did we acquire? In other words, what was the impact on the bottom line?
As simple as that sounds, it’s often overlooked for impressive visitor figures or branding data. In the end, the whole point of branding or exposure is dollars in the bank.
That’s the most important metric. Here are some other metrics you may want to track:
– How many views did your page get?
– How many views did your video get?
– Which site pulled the most views / visitors?
– What’s your average join per day?
– What % of visitors converts?
– What selling point or promotion generated the most buzz?
To put it in short, you should track everything. Even though only a few numbers really matter, metrics allow you to get a good handle on your business.

How to Track

There is a handful of software out there to help you track your social media progress. ViralHeat(least expensive), WebTrends and Omniture (most expensive) are some of the most popular. Each has their strengths and disadvantages. Although social media analytics software isn’t quite as advanced as web analytics software, there’s still a lot of data you can glean and use from them.
There may be data you want tracked that the software doesn’t’ support. In that case, it’s best to track it by hand at first to get a feel for it. Then, if it’s worth it, you can have custom software built to track it for you. It would only cost a few hundred dollars to have a simple script written up on freelancing sites online.

There you have it. You’ve learned why you should track, what metrics you should track, how to use analytics software to do your tracking and what to do if there are metrics you want to track that your analytics software doesn’t cover. Track carefully and meticulously and you’ll be well on your way to a successful social media campaign that brings results.

If you need social media analytics tracked or website analytics reelWebDesign.com can help. Give us a shout out today info@reelwebdesign.com.