You work hard at ensuring that your content produces positive results for your business. However, without tracking the results of your social media efforts, you won’t really have a clear understanding of how you are doing. Are your efforts really paying off? The only way to know for sure is to capture the results using an analytics tool.

Using the right approach

In some respects, there is nothing that is more important than your content and the results that it produces for your business. It is important that you do not discount (or underestimate in any way) what a powerful and important tool social media is for your business. Hopefully, you are interacting on the most appropriate social media channels for your particular business.

It is important that you become very well acquainted with those social media platforms so that you can be certain that they are right for your business. That also means that you need to understand exactly what they have to offer and how you can leverage all of their features (or, at least, the ones that apply to your business) for maximum benefit.

After you have successfully increased traffic, the next thing that you need to do is to measure the results of your efforts. You will do that through an analytics tool. The reason that it is so important to capture that information is because the results will show you in which areas you are doing well and in which areas you need to improve or make some sort of change. That information will prove to be invaluable to your business.

At this point, you may be wondering exactly what you need to do to track your social media efforts.

• Establish objectives that are tied to you social media interactions: It is very important that you have objectives toward you need to work before you actually make the effort to capture the analytics. You will want to establish those objectives when you are creating your social media marketing strategy. It will serve as an important part of your roadmap. If you stick with the plan, you will eventually achieve those objectives successfully. Your objectives should have the following attributes: they should be precise, measurable (as we have already discussed), realistic, relevant to what you are doing and what you stand for, and they should be accomplished in a timely manner.
• Choose an analytics tool: Once you have gotten to this point, you will need to choose an actual tool. Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools and it will probably serve you well. If you choose to use Google Analytics, you will need to set up an account so that you can connect with your metrics. After you have done that, you will be able to generate reports with the results of your social media interactions.
• Establish the goals of your analytics: You may be surprised at what you discover once you start tracking your social media activity (both positive and negative). Gathering analytics will help your business in many different ways, including allowing you to understand how to increase your return on investment (ROI). The analytics will give you a very clear idea about where you need to go with your efforts and where you should not waste time or effort.
• Interpreting your analytics report: The report is important for your business because it helps you to understand how your social media efforts are impacting your business. The report will cover important issues such as a general overview of your activities, referrals within the various social media networks, the level of engagement of your target audience members (which also includes how and how much those people share your content with other people), information about your landing pages, your ability to track how other people are linking to your website as a result of your content, the number of conversions that you are able to achieve, the number of social buttons that other people have clicked on (that is, of course, tied into engagement as well), and the increasing number of users to your website.

What to do with the results

Once you have captured data on your social media activities, you will need to capture that data in one place. It is very important that the data align with your social media objectives. The more buttoned-up and organized you can make the information, the better it will serve you in the long run. You will definitely have occasions going forward in which that information will come in very handy.

Conclusion

All business owners need to capture the analytics from their social media activities. That is the only way that they (and you) can determine if your efforts are well spent and if they are paying off or if you need to focus your efforts elsewhere. It will ultimately save you a great deal of time and effort. You will be able to choose which aspects of your efforts are most critical to your success and you will see that capturing that information will help you to achieve your goals more quickly and easily than you would otherwise.