After you’ve set up your social media strategy to align with your business goals, and pulled together either paid or free social monitoring services, you’ve got one more habit to get into: tracking. From one fellow community manager to another, you know how important it is to know how one tweet performed versus another, or if one blog post rocked on one social network over another. This can only happen by having the right tracking in place.
Use Trackable Sharing Buttons
Not all sharing buttons are created equal, which is why you should pick sharing buttons that will give you a good signal of what’s going on in your site. You may see some insight in your analytics that tell you people visited your site, and some of them were from social. But to really know how and where your community is sharing your content, your sharing buttons should tell you.By using the right sharing buttons to help you see which social network is most popular among your audience, you’re going to understand your community better. Who knows? There may be a strong niche community reading your content in a social network you’re not actively engaging. These are a community manager’s dream gems to find!
Use Trackable Follow Buttons
Do you know, off the top of your head, how many social followers your site got for you this week? If your follow buttons were trackable, you’d be able to get this number without much digging in your analytics. And wouldn’t it rock to be able to tell your teammates you know that most of your Instagram followers came from your site? (This happened to us, actually!) As a community manager, this is the type of understanding that’ll open your eyes into exactly how your audience is engaging with your content. Discover which social networks your audience is most engaged with, and how your site is helping you drive engagement off your domain with trackable follow buttons.Use Trackable URLs
You can automatically have unique hashes appended to all of your site’s pages to help you generate unique links that you can then use to push to social. Address bar sharing adds a unique set of characters to the very end of your URL that will make that URL unique. (And don’t worry, this will not negatively affect your SEO.)The reason you’ll want to do this is if you’re trying to monitor how the same content performs on different social networks, and which messaging performed best on the same topic.
There’s nothing more frustrating than spending so much time creating awesome content, and having tons of Tweets out there to drive traffic to your pages, and then not being able to tell which phrasing or timing actually worked best. Go beyond the pageviews and visits by making all your site’s URLs generate uniquely. You’ll then even be able to catch where a big segment of your traffic came from.