This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Health & Fitness

Tracking Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

Several methods don't cost any money and can greatly help companies track how their social media efforts are working.

The past couple of weeks I have been hearing a lot of people asking how they should be tracking their company's social media marketing efforts. There are several paid services that you can use, such as Sprout Social (which I am familiar with), but I am going to talk about some tracking methods that won't cost you any money -- only your time.

Each social site has its own tracking methods built into it depending on what you are using. I gather my stats from the sites and input them into a spreadsheet, because it is easier for me. Youtube is probably the easiest one to track, as it has the views right on the videos so you can see how many people have viewed your video.

Facebook has an insights include for all business pages. By clicking on that tab you can see everything from how many people are talking about your page, your weekly reach, post reach, likes, comments and page views. As an admin of a page, you can easily see what external websites people are coming to your Facebook page from. One of the best things is the gender demographics that are provided. This is good to help you tailor your posts better to certain age groups or men/women.

Find out what's happening in Oak Creekwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

For Twitter, I am using Hootsuite to post all of my tweets for several reasons. One of them being that it has tracking built right in. You get more tracking information with the paid services, but the free version of Hootsuite provides you with what you need. To help keep track of my mentions and any time our company's Twitter name is used, I have set up a column to catch just my name. So I have a column for mentions and one for my Twitter name. It is a one-stop program for Twitter, plus you can also post to your other social media sites if you so desire.

One other tracking mechanism that every company should definitely be using is Google Analytics. It is very easy to use and allows to you track almost anything on your website. It is one of the most powerful web analytics tools on the market and it is free for anyone to use. You will get information such as: What are the traffic patterns of visitors to my site? Where are my visitors coming from and what do they do on my site? How can my website convert more visitors to customers? What site content are most people interested in? If you are not currently using Google Analytics, I highly recommend that you sign up for it today.

Find out what's happening in Oak Creekwith free, real-time updates from Patch.

These are just some of the tracking elements that I am using. If you have any other suggestions or questions please use the comment section below. Happy Tracking!

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?