Analytics are key to understanding what is going on with your website. There are a few good analytics programmes out there, but we use Google Analytics the free service that you easily put onto your website.
There are a few reports that are really useful for you to run to show you what is going on, let me detail them for you.
1) Social Conversion Report
We all know that the ROI on Social Media activity can be really hard to measure, yet in 2013 it is an activity that we should all be doing. Like other reports in Google Analytics you do have to set up goals, these can be items purchased, but can also be contact forms received. If you can put a monetary value to these goals so much the better as that will give you a really good understanding of your Social Media Success. The great part is that this report will tell you the exact channel that your web visitors came from, so you can refine your message and perhaps get rid of some channels or change your tactic on the ones that aren’t performing so well. Read More Here
2) Social Source Report
Slightly easier to set up as you don’t need to configure goals for this one, the Social Source report does just that, it will identify which channels are sending you traffic and which content is the most popular, this is a great report tool to start with. Read More Here
3) Social Plug In Analysis
Every website these days uses them, those clever little plugins that enable you to quickly and easily share and/or like content. In fact these days websites without them look a little out of date. But how do you know which plugins work well and which ones don’t? This is the report to tell you. Again it will highlight instantly the content items that are getting the most shares (so you should be writing more of them!) but also it will highlight if any of your plugins aren’t working that well.
You might need a little bit of help setting these up in the first instance depending on how technical you are, but it is worth investing a little bit of time and energy into making these reports available to you so that you can see how your Social Media efforts are doing!