As a freelance writer, I frequently encounter orders for keyword-rich and relevant content; however, I rarely see an order for such content along with corresponding posts for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or other social media platforms. Integrating social media into a marketing strategy involves a coordinated, comprehensive approach, yet some SMEs seem to be using a haphazard method akin to throwing cooked spaghetti at the ceiling to see which noodle sticks.
In addition to synchronizing your blog posts with your tweets and such, you can streamline the campaign and enhance its power to draw visitors by understanding a few basics about analytics. With its importance to interpreting Internet data, analytics programs abound with handy tools to track your social media success. Here is a brief synopsis of several popular programs to start you off in 2015.
Google Analytics
While Google Analytics may not be the latest, hottest trend in analytics, its resources still rank very high as easy-to-use and effective. The program will provide you with data relating to which social media sites are driving traffic to your website, giving you the ability to drill down to each specific post.
Klout
Klout attaches to all of your social media profiles and tracks not only your social influence, but also the influencers within your circles and networks. Klout adds to this a visual geographical chart of your influencers, giving you greater ability to customize content.
Google Trends
Google Trends gives you the capability to drill down to long-tag keywords and their relevancy to trending searches. Moreover, Google Trends gives you the ability to track keywords and phrases over long periods, allowing you to make adjustments based on months or seasons.
Facebook Analytics
Facebook now provides a new Page Insights tool, which offers data on likes, reach, visits, posts, and people. Moreover, this analytics tool for business pages shows information that relates the time of day visitors read your post and their engagement with the page. This tool also shows who is liking the page, ensuring that you can tailor your posts to your target audience more accurately.
Google Alerts
This handy program sends you alerts for any number of keywords and names. The simple set-up for Google Alerts will keep you up-to-date with the competition and conversations for any industry or subject. While this program will not provide you with ratios, you will receive real-time information raw data.
Pinterest Analytics
If you use Pinterest to add visual content to your digital marketing, the analytics tool will show you which pins are trending throughout the site. This information will help you adjust future pins, especially those with links to your website, product line-up or blog.
Rather than throwing the spaghetti noodles at the ceiling just to have them rain down on your head, spending a little time with one or more of these effective methods for garnering actionable information will add some science to your social media strategy, as well as greater punch to your entire digital marketing campaigns. Analytics puts the science behind the Internet into your hands.
As a true foodie, Wendy H would never waste a tender spaghetti noodle by throwing it at the ceiling.
