In previous posts, we’ve covered curation and scheduling. Now it’s time to use some social media applications to analyze your results.
15 Social Media Applications to Measure Your Success
You’ve been reading your news feeds, curating information, and finding great nuggets of information on Twitter and other networks. You’ve tried some of the social media applications mentioned earlier in this book, and you’ve scheduled some tweets and found your groove.
On occasion, you join a twitter chat on eBooks, self-publishing, or blogging. You’re enjoying your new friends from Australia, Malaysia and New York.
The next step is to analyze your efforts. Yes, this will involve numbers but you only have to review them, not compute them yourself.
“But I can intuit how I’m doing!” you might say. Great, let’s just see if the analytics prove that you’re right.
Measuring engagement is just as important as measuring book sales. Your author platform is all about building and furthering your brand — you — and social media provides the means to do that. You don’t have time to waste and that is why analytics are so important.
What if you discovered that your travel book was more appealing to men than women were? Would that information prompt you to adjust your messaging? What if you discovered that your historical fiction about the Tudors was selling better in New York than in Oregon? Wouldn’t that information lead you to scheduling your posts when East Coast residents are more likely to be online and using social media?
With analytics, you can better understand the demographics of your following so that you can tailor your messages and their timing accordingly. Applications that measure your return on investment (ROI) will ensure that your time on social media is well spent.
Not to worry. Analytics aren’t particularly difficult. There are applications to conduct the intricacies of calculating the metrics and provide detailed reports. The hardest decision you will have is to make is determining which application is right for you. There are many to choose from.
Now for the applications that can help you.
Social Media Applications to Measure Your Success
This free product from Google will provide you with insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. For example, you can determine whether your website visitors are coming from Twitter or Google+, what they do while they are on your website, and how often they return. Everyone who has a website needs to use this tool.
For $39/month, SproutSocial will analyze your Facebook and Twitter accounts. The analytics are comprehensive and in addition to a PDF report, you can download an Excel spreadsheet that examines your click-through-rates on a day-by-day basis. It provides in-depth demographics and measures tweets, retweets, follows, mentions, replies and direct messages. It will also measure how social you are and determine your influence. You can also use this application to schedule your posts, unfollow users, and at the premium level, it will determine your best posting times.
Use this free application to monitor conversations occurring on the web about you, your books, and the self-publishing industry in general. It takes less than 10 minutes to setup. It pulls information from your Google Analytics account to tabulate page views and visits. Pricing starts at $1.99/month.
For $49/month, this application will analyze your data every week, build your reports, and send them to you. Measureful automatically distills your Google Analytics data into weekly insights and reports. You can connect your accounts in five minutes or less and wait for the reports to arrive.
Curalate bills itself as the only analytics program for Instagram and Pinterest. It will analyze social media conversations and provide insights into your Pinterest and Instagram profiles. Use it to measure, monitor and grow your influence. In today’s increasingly visual world of applications, Curalate can combine sophisticated image recognition algorithms with technologies to provide you with an analysis of your images at a pixel level. If you’re a photographer or artist, this is the analytic tool you need.
A free account will provide you with an analysis of one user, 20 keywords, social media metrics, and 100 pages and backlinks. It offers a software package that provides online search engine optimization, and SEO advice, data and tools. Check the website for pricing.
You can use this social media monitoring tool to measure online buzz about your books and the response to each post you schedule to determine which tweets and posts were most effective. Its dashboard provides information on positive and negative remarks and measures the success of your Facebook and Twitter posts. This application also integrates with Google Analytics. Individual plans are $20/month or you can test drive it with a free trial.
This is a free tool that you can use by simply signing in with Twitter. In clear columns, it will provide you with information on how many people navigated to your website from Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and Delicious. It will also tell you how many of your website pages were shared, how many downloads occurred, and how many pages were scanned. This is all important information to have.
If you want to measure your account growth and determine the best times of day to send your tweets, then SocialBro is a great app to use. This application will bring into focus your target audience and help you to better understand your audience on Twitter. It will also monitor hashtags, keywords, and URLs. Plans start at $6.95/month.
You try this application for free or start a premium account for just $3.99/month. Tweriod will provide a monthly analysis that analyzes your Twitter follower base, provides summary statistics, provide numbers on mentions and replies, and measure your influence. If you use Buffer to schedule your tweets, Tweriod will determine your best tweeting times and automatically synchronize that information to your Buffer queue.
Yes, this application known for scheduling your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter posts also provides analytics when you purchase the paid version, which costs $8.99/month. The paid version will also allow you to post to your Google+ page.
This is another scheduler that offers detailed analytics on all your posts to every social network when you purchase one of its paid plans. It will also work seamlessly with SocialBro and automatically queue up your best tweeting times.
Bit.ly is not only a link shortener. When you consistently use this website to shorten your links, Bit.ly will track click-through rates for you. It also offers an enterprise analytics platform.
Crowdbooster offers a 30-day free trial. After that, plans start as low as $9/month. At that price, this application will analyze your Facebook (up to 50,000 fans) and Twitter (up to 50,000 followers) pages. You can also use this app to schedule your tweets and Facebook updates and you will receive weekly summaries analyzing your progress.
Which application do you use to measure your success?
Also see:
9 Social Media Apps to Help You Be More Social
21 Apps for Your Tweets, Posts & Updates
How to Curate Your Best Content
About the Author: Frances Caballo is a social media strategist, trainer, and author of Social Media Just for Writers: The Best Online Marketing Tips for Selling Your Books and Blogging Just for Writers. Presently, she is the Social Media Editor for the Women’s National Book Association-SF Chapter, the San Francisco Writers Conference, and the Bay Area Independent Publishers Association. You can find her on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+.