As with any digital marketing tactic, you need to be able to track and measure your campaigns in order to understand how successful they are, and what you can do to improve them.
With most social networking channels, you do not actually host your presence, which means that custom tracking is limited. There is often a strong reliance on the built-in tracking offered by the various channels; although new third-party tracking services are emerging and offering competitive and sophisticated tools (often for a fee). In some cases, it is also possible to integrate tracking to some extent if you are directing traffic to a web property that you own.
Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights is available to page administrators and provides data on how people are interacting with your content. This includes demographic information about the people connecting with your content (age, gender, and location breakdown); which tabs and which content posts are seen and interacted with, how many people hide your content from their news feed, and when. There is also data that shows how people got to your page.
YouTube Analytics
YouTube Analytics is available to all YouTube users for their videos and channels. As well as showing video views and popularity broken up by geographical territory; there is some demographic information shown as well. Discovery data shows how people got to your video.
One of the most useful reports for any video is audience attention; showing when people stop viewing a video, or rewind sections of the video, and comparing this to videos of a similar kind.
Twitter Analytics
Currently, Twitter Analytics is available only to Twitter advertisers, but there are a number of tools that use the Twitter API to provide analysis. HootSuite’s Twitter management tools have built-in analytics (www.hootsuite.com), and Twitalyzer (www.twitalyzer.com) is another tool that can provide insightful data.
Important metrics for Twitter include how many people interact with your content by clicking through on links, replying to you or retweeting messages.
Click tracking with URL shorteners
URL shorteners offer analytics that shows how many people are clicking on links, when they are clicking, and where in the world they are. When you are sharing links on services like Twitter, you should be tracking this data. When selecting a URL shortener, consider whether or not they keep the click analytics private.
URL shortening services provide an easy way to share long links by generating a short URL that redirects to the original link. This is especially important when sharing links in messages with limited character counts, such as tweets.
There are several URL shortening services: bit.ly, goo.gl and ow.ly are three examples; and some websites have their own bespoke services, such as nyti.ms for The New York Times. (which is excellent for reinforcing brand recognition).
For example, we may want to tweet a link to a blog post on GottaQuirk, Quirk’s blog. The URL to a post may be http://www.gottaquirk.com/2013/02/08/my-quirky-tips-for-digital-marketing/.
That’s 89 characters!
Using bit.ly, a URL shortening service, the link becomes http://bit.ly/153sjC6. It’s now just 19 characters long and can be tracked.
Even better, some link shorteners allow you to customize your link, so the result could be: http://bit.ly/QuirkyTips, which is much easier to read and share.
Web analytics for social media
Web analytics software such as Google Analytics plays a part in social media tracking. On Facebook, a tracking script can be inserted in applications and tabs where content is served through an iFrame. When you are sharing links to your own site and content, campaign tracking parameters can be used to track the source of visits and report on them in your web analytics tool.
For example, we may use campaign tracking before we shorten the URL, so the URL before shortening becomes; http://www.gottaquirk.com/2013/02/08/myquirky- tips-for-digital marketing/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social_ media&utm_campaign=ORM
