Social Media Marketing is it Working?
You understand the importance of building your online presence with social media marketing, but do you know if what you are doing is actually working?
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You have optimized your social media platforms, are generating regular content and getting some engagement. However, you aren?t certain whether or not that investment of time and resources is really making a positive impact on your business. How does a business owner find out whether or not their social media is effective?
The answer is analytics! Most of the social media platforms offer some sort of analytics function that automatically tracks data on your social media efforts. It can be an overwhelming amount of information. Here is a breakdown of some of the most relevant statistics to help track your social media marketing effectiveness.
Google Analytics is a great overall tool for measuring social media effectiveness. It doesn?t go into the details that an individual platform?s analytics tool will but still is a great place to start in terms of checking engagement.
If you log into Google and then go to Acquisition ? Social on the left side menu ? you will come to statistics based on social media traffic. 
On top of general engagement, Google also tracks other types of engagement such as mobile interaction, widgets, and traffic duration.
If you go into the Insights section of your Facebook Page, you will see a bunch of information on how well your business page is doing. Here are a couple of places to look for stats on how well your posts are doing and when you fans are most active online.
If you go into Insights ? the Overview and Posts tabs will both take you to an area with a breakdown of all your Facebook posts and how they performed. It measures engagement in terms of views, clicks, likes, comments and shares.
This gives a good overview of which posts generate the most engagement in order to duplicate or repeat those types of experiences.
Another thing many business owners and marketers need to pay attention to is peak posting times. Facebook gives a visual of when fans are most active online in order to inform page owners when is the best time to post. This chart can be found under the Posts tab.
Twitter now offers it?s own set of analytics as well. While being logged into your Twitter account, got to https://analytics.twitter.com to view your analytics. The site has a ton of different data sets including information on top tweets, followers, mentions, likes, audience demographics and more.
Twitter also offers a breakdown of posts with data on impressions and engagement. You can find this under the Tweets dashboard. It also breaks down each post, like Facebook, with information on how it did and how much engagement was achieved.
Pinterest analytics function for business is fairly new, but offers the basics the other social media platforms do ? including information on engagement, audience, impressions, and how individual pins are performing.
Pinterest also has an option to link your website and the platform to give statistics on how many people are accessing your site through your pins.
There is not a lot of meat to the official analytics function on Pinterest yet. However, there are other tools available such as Tailwind that do a more detailed job with engagement data.
If a specific social media platform you are using doesn't offer analytics, there is most likely a tool or app designed to help. This will help business owners and marketers track what efforts are effective and what needs to be changed. It is essential to develop a social media strategy, give it some time (recommended minimum 6 months) then experiment, test and measure.
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