How to measure social media traffic

Posted by Andrei on August 04, 2016 in How To's

Social media is incredibly important these days, it can change the way you look at your business. But to know how to implement the right social media strategy gives you the leverage you need. To achieve great results, you have to put all into your social media campaigns. And one of the best ways to grow as a company is to track every single marketing channel you have implemented. So, if you are using PPC, then you need to track the results of these campaigns. Or, if you are choosing banner advertising, then make sure you have a way to track this so you know if you have higher conversions and ROI then your competition.

Social media is important in building businesses, and for doing that, it’s vital to have a solid way to track your entire social media campaign. Collecting these data will allow you to make the right changes going forward for building a strong business and increase engagement and conversions.

Here are some tools which we think are awesome to track social media traffic.

Google Analytics

This is one of the best and easiest ways to monitor, track and collect data quickly. The Google tool provides an all-in-one solution, where you can find data on landing pages, users, bounce rate, referrals, locations, and so much more. This will allow you to gather an entire data about your campaign which will help you to build a strong momentum.

Here’s some of the information you should pay close attention to when getting started:

  • Location: you can find out where most of your visitors are coming from so that you can focus on these areas when going forward.
  • Bounce rate: it will allow you to find out how people relate to your content, if they like it or not. So, the longer they are staying on your page, the better it is for you.
  • Referral: this section is great because it’ll give you the insights into where your audience is coming from, and will help you understand what social networks are converting the best. For example, if the data shows traffic coming from Facebook, then you will know this is a solid social media network for your business.
  • Landing page: every time you run a social media campaign, post several posts to find out which ones will speak to your fans or audience. It’s important you track your landing pages because this will tell you what pages your fans like the most. Also, it will provide insight into what posts on social media did better than others.

Buffer & Hootsuite

These tools are a smarter way to share on social media, both having pro versions that requires you to pay a monthly fee. These apps will provide enormous valuable information which you can use to improve your social media campaigns.

If you choose their pro versions, you will receive some great reports, for example on how many people clicked a post that was published through them. It will take some time to get used to the way it all works, however once you know it, these tools will be very useful.

Bit.ly

If you are an expert on how the digital world works, you already know about Bit.ly. For those of you who didn’t hear about it, Bit.ly is a URL shortener that allows you to save characters so you can add more #hashtags, for example. This tool has been around for years and is our favorite for URL shortening and analytics. That’s right, for some time now, Bit.ly is providing complete stats on how many people viewed and clicked the shortened link that you shared on different social media channels.

Through Bit.ly you can find all about:

  • Clicks: It will tell you how many people have clicked on your link. In this way you’ll be able to find out what posts or tweets your audience likes more.
  • Location: Where your audience was when clicking on a certain link. This helps you focus on regions and countries that engages with your posts or tweets.
  • Referring Channels: if you’re using more than one social media channel (and you should be using more than one) this tool will show you what channels have been sending visitors to your content. Overtime, you’ll see how some are better than others and can focus on these ones in the future.

Facebook Insights

This tool is developed by Facebook and provides insights about your audience. You will have access to a great amount of information about your business community, age groups, location, interests, buying habits or related groups.

This information helps you build the right social media campaigns for Facebook and optimize your traffic. It is known that FB has one of the best analytical data for advertisers and this data will let you find out information about your readers and where the traffic is coming from. Moreover, tells you how your fans engage with your content, a data that is very important to improve conversions. To see the Page Insights, click Insights at the top of your Page.

All the above tools are among some of the best for tracking social media traffic so that you can optimize your campaigns. Overtime these platforms can help you understand not only your traffic, but which social media campaign works best for engagement.

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