Do You Know How Your Social Platforms Are Performing? These Tools Will Help!

By now, small to medium size businesses, SMBs, know the many benefits of having a strong social presence, but how can you tell if the platforms you’ve chosen are performing optimally? If it isn’t in your budget to hire a full time marketing analyst, there are some tools you can use that will be just as accurate, and can be used locally or server-side. Once you’ve learned how to use them, you’ll be able to keep up with exactly what is working, what is not and what ‘could’ work with a few minor tweaks.

First You Need a Very Specific Plan

The first tool you need to learn to use is right upstairs in the gray matter that makes up your creative genius. That’s the right brain activity that helps you design a social networking plan that will help you build a loyal following while building and promoting your brand. Here you will work towards a long term goal with shorter goals used as stepping stones to get you there. There is a ton of information on the web that will walk you through the steps of making a social marketing plan.

It’s Time for Analytics

Once you have developed your plan, written your content, and posted frequently as per the steps you have chosen when developing your social marketing strategy, it’s time to see what is actually working. But, not being a market analyst, how can you accomplish this? It can be a laborious task to analyze each post, each page, and each site individually, logging results on a spreadsheet and one which most SMBs simply don’t have the manpower to manage. Not to worry. There are tools for that.

Choosing the Right User-Friendly, Multifaceted Analytics

What you should be looking for here is a tool, or set of tools, that makes it easy to see quickly a visual representation of how everything is performing. Whether you have one social site or half a dozen social platforms you use to promote your brand, one tool should be able to extract pertinent data, pull it all together, analyze what is working, and what needs to go. A tool like CardioLog Analytics does all that and so much more.

What Your Tools Should Do

Look for a user-friendly dashboard from which you can see exactly what the tool has extracted from each social platform and then delete anything not performing to your expectations. Then you can easily add new content or new sites at the very same time. It’s amazing what a fully integrated analytics tool for Microsoft Office or SharePoint for Office 365 can do.

Putting It All Together for Maximum Results

The key in knowing whether or not your social platforms are working for you is in the set of analytics tools you subscribe to. Some can be used locally on your internal network, some can be used in the cloud for collaborative efforts of an entire team, and others like CardioLog Analytics can do both. There is nothing quite as effective as building a social network when it comes to building a loyal customer base, but unless you know what is working within your strategy, you’ll never grow your market to its potential.

The only way to effectively plan and execute a social marketing platform is to continually analyze the performance of each platform. Once you have the tools to do that, your following will grow exponentially. Isn’t that the plan? Design, measure and recreate as you go. That’s a strategy which any SMB can learn.

About Author