Gathering the results for traditional marketing usually comes in the form of phone calls, feet in the door, coupons, and increased revenue. But how do you know what's happening with your social media marketing? This month's column will be all about tools to track your social media marketing results. There should never be any money or time spent on promoting your business with social media without measuring the results.

Just like, traditional marketing, you can continue to track using the same traditional techniques: phone calls, feet in the door, coupons, and increased revenue. But is that all? With Facebook analytics you are able to see the response to your boosts and ads even through click throughs to your website. When one of our clients ran a Facebook boost, we were able to quantify the results of the boost directly to new customer purchases. She spent $30 on the boost reaching an audience of 1300 with 13 new clients. These new clients spent over $1000. How did we know this? By using Facebook and Google analytics along with collecting data about those new clients through website sales, we were able to produce exact statics. Now, if you recall my previous article entitled Bots or Nots you'll know that this audience of 1300 is more like 650 due to the fake bots which were part of the statistics.

Twitter analytics provides you with the data on how your tweets are trending. It provides data on the activity from your tweet replies. I love the audience information which provides the interest of my followers so I can fine tune the tweets based on THEIR interests. Since Twitter is ideal for artists, musicians, and venues, the events information provides details I can use to help those clients who would benefit from these details. Depending on how active you are on Twitter, evaluating your analytics monthly may be all you need to do.

As for LinkedIn, they need to catch up with Facebook and Twitter to create a one-stop analytics page to view what’s happening with your account. When first coming onto your profile you can easily see who has viewed your profile as well as how you are ranking in your industry. It also provides information on how to improve your profiles. As for Company pages on LinkedIn, there are all sorts of analytics. Ways to increase your analytics on LinkedIn include: getting involved with your first level followers, start a long post (aka blog), publish your post on Pulse, share content and get involved with groups.

Then there’s Pinterest. It’s all about pictures. But is that all? Pinterest provides ways to track your pins. Through Pinterest Analytics you can see how people are reacting to your pins. One of the most important practices you need to make is when pinning always pin from your website. By doing so you will be able to not only collect data on engagement popularity, audience demographics and audience interests but also create a way for pinners to purchase your products. Creating pin images that get attention are very vital on a social media that is rich with visual content.

Knowing more about what's available to you through analytics will provide you with a way to track the activity on social networks and make smart decisions on how to fine tune your posts, pins, tweets, and hashtags.

Alyse Mitten, along with her staff at Interlace Communications, Inc., assist businesses in marketing through online and print marketing strategies. For more information on how we can help you contact us at 484-709-6564, email alyse@gomaava.com, or visit our website at iciconnect.com.