- [Instructor] Not knowing the impact of your time
on social media is like trying to run
in the dark as you won't know
what direction you should take moving forward.
With your social media goals in mind,
review your progress on a monthly basis
to understand which techniques are working
and which need to be altered or dropped entirely.
Whether you're looking at your analytics yourself
or a team member is reporting on your progress for you,
there's a few ways to monitor your activity on social media.
First off, if you're interested in what traffic
is driven to your website and what activity occurs
as a result, take a look
at the referrals report in Google Analytics
or with whichever web analytics tool you're using.
At a high level, you'll get a better sense
of which social channels are driving the most traffic;
but, most importantly, how much time they spent on site
and what conversions they're driving.
Here, in this Google Analytics referrals report,
it is clear that Twitter drives
a significantly-higher amount of traffic
to the site than LinkedIn and Facebook.
I'd recommend that this leader take a closer look
at what they're doing on Twitter in addition
to reviewing their company's activity there
to see how they can continue to drive results.
The next approach to monitoring progress
is looking at the native analytics tools
that each social channel provides for free
like Twitter's Analytics or Facebook's Insights.
From these dashboards you'll be able to quickly see
which posts drove the most interactions
in a given time period,
what types of content performed best,
and the overall reach your content receives.
Since these tools are free,
they don't often provide the most robust reporting;
but they do provide you with a general overview
of what content works to inform your future focus.
For instance, the Tweets report in your Twitter Analytics
informs you of how many impressions, engagements,
and link clicks each Tweet drove over the last 28 days.
Lastly, if you're using a social media management tool
to publish and schedule your content like Buffer
or HootSuite, you'll be able to review your progress
with their analytics offerings.
With most third-party tools, their analytics will only
be useful if you're sharing a majority
of your content through their service
as that's how the software accurately tracks your progress.
The upside to sharing your content on social media
through these tools is that you're able
to review your progress and generate reporting
from one analytics dashboard.
As a leader at your company, you don't need
to get bogged down with super-specific, granular reports
of your progress on social media.
That's the responsibility of the marketing team.
Instead, make the time to get a high-level understanding
of what's happening with your social media use
on a monthly basis to illuminate the best direction
for your future efforts.