Are you monitoring your social media?

Having a social media presence has become mandatory for conducting business in today’s market with only a few exceptions. But, in our efforts to find quality posts, responding to comments, “Likes,” “tweets/retweets,” we may be overlooking the most essential part of the whole social media effort: analytics.

Monitoring your social media pages and performing regular analysis is crucial to social media success. There are a number of tools that exist to make this job easier for you. Here are a few tips and resources to help you navigate the ever-changing world of social media.

Think about your end-goal.

Why do you want to implement social media monitoring and what you hope to get out of it? Perhaps you want to be alerted immediately when people are saying positive or negative things about your brand so that you can provide timely responses and change a certain aspect of your business. Maybe you want to see if your posts are engaging followers and friends and maybe generating some new leads.

Create a schedule that is reasonable for regular monitoring.

Maybe once a week you evaluate the posts and tweet traffic you receive and modify future content that is shared as needed. Remember, social media growth does not happen overnight, relationships take time to develop, and engagement takes time to strengthen.

Use monitoring tools.

Check out Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, HootSuite, and Social Mention, which are a few tools that provide a quick, aggregated look at all of your social media content, customer comments, and analytics, allowing you to quickly address user feedback then return to your day-to-day activities. If you can’t afford to invest in these services, consider making a spreadsheet that documents the author, time of post, post content, and number of shares/likes/retweets per post. Share this document with everyone who is involved in the social media efforts at your company through a cloud-based repository like Google Drive so everyone knows who posted what and when to avoid duplicated content.

Don’t forget, posting quality content is the number one way to grow traffic and interactions on your social media sites. Keep posting and start monitoring!