10 Ways to Succeed in Social Media, Part Nine

9. Measure the results of your activities.

If you’re serious about using social media, not just in it for fun, then you need to measure the results of your online activities so you know where you stand.

If you publish a blog, you can use such tools as Technorati to see how it compares to others in your industry or Google Analytics to find out which posts people are reading, where they’re coming from and how long they’re staying on your site.

But that’s not all you want to analyze. You also want to look at how many readers are subscribing to your blog, how many comments you’re receiving, how many other blogs are linking back to yours and how often it’s turning up in search engine results.

And that’s just for starters. Ideally, a blog should lead to a multitude of new business opportunities – including speaking engagements, PR, WOM, leads and sales – all of which you want to monitor, qualify and quantify. 

On Twitter, of course, it’s great to have a lot of followers, but how many of them are retweeting you or actually engaging with you? Are you being included on a lot of lists? Are you using bit.ly or another URL shortening tool to track the number of people who actually click through your links? Have others featured you in their Follow Friday tweets?

Among the many tools you can use to assess your performance on Twitter are Twitter Grader, TweetLevel, TweetStats, TwitGraph and TweetMeme. 

Facebook, of course, provides some interesting demographic information to page owners about their fans, not to mention data such as number of “likes,” “wall posts,” “comments” and “visits.” You also want to observe – and respond to – what fans write on your page; that’s an obvious way to manage and monitor your brand’s reputation.

It’s easy to count your connections – or members of any groups you manage – on LinkedIn as well as how many times they interact with you.

And on YouTube, you can track how many times your videos have been viewed, how many subscribers you have to your channel, friends, ratings, comments and more. 

And that’s just scratching the surface. There’s an infinite number of metrics you can monitor in social media, both quantitative and qualitative, all of which you should look at carefully if you want to succeed. And there are many good social media monitoring tools — such as Radian6, Trackur, Cision and Scout Labs just to name four — you can use to do the job for you.

This is the ninth in a 10-post series on how to succeed in social media. I’ll soon be publishing the last post in this series here on my blog, A New Marketing Commentator. Please stay tuned. And if you have any feedback on this series for me, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment. Thanks.

Previous Posts in This Series…

10 Ways to Succeed in Social Media, Part One
Adopt the right company culture.
10 Ways to Succeed in Social Media, Part Two
Set realistic expectations.
10 Ways to Succeed in Social Media, Part Three
Create enough quality content.
10 Ways to Succeed in Social Media, Part Four
Stand for your brand.
10 Ways to Succeed in Social Media, Part Five
Work as a team.
10 Ways to Succeed in Social Media, Part Six
Leverage a number of channels.
10 Ways to Succeed in Social Media, Part Seven
Overcome the social media “dip.”
10 Ways to Succeed in Social Media, Part Eight
Educate others more than you promote yourself.

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