Essential Tools for Tracking Your Brand on Social Media

This is a guest post by Lior Levin, if you want to guest post on this blog, please contact us.

Social media provides a powerful outreach tool for your brand among customers, but while it can be used to spread good news, it can just as easily be used to alert potential customers of a failure on your part. Such a situation brings opportunities and challenges that your business must be prepared to address in order to ensure your brand recognition remains strong, positive, and effective.

Here are some ways you can maximize your brand tracking on social media:

Make Your Brand Easy to Search

Image Credits: Loupe by Szorstki.

You can’t effectively track the response of customers to your brand until you make it searchable. From your company website to your social media sites, use consistent brand names and phrases that customers can use in association with your products and that your marketing team can analyze. In addition, pay attention to the hash tags and terms that customers are already using.

When it comes to using Twitter especially, Robert Gembarski writes at the Branding Personality blog, “if you don’t already have a specific hash tag related to your business or brand, I highly recommend creating one”. This will make it much easier to keep track of what people are saying about you and your brand.

StumbleUpon for Sharing and Tracking

Image Credits: StumbleUpon Summer Party by Laughing Squid.

Over 20 million users are registered with StumbleUpon, an online content discovery tool for articles, videos, and pictures. By adding a StumbleUpon badge to your blog posts or a toolbar to your website, customers can easily add your content to StumbleUpon where others can click on it and you can consequently track it.

One of the best new features on StumbleUpon is its link-shortening and tracking feature. Jennifer Beese describes it at Sprout Social: “StumbleUpon has introduced its own URL shortener, Su.pr… It not only gives you the options to shorten a URL, or share it with the StumbleUpon community, it also provides additional analytics. Use the Su.pr link shortener to see how many clicks and retweets your link has received, and to view your top traffic sources for the articles you’ve shared.”

Like Button for Facebook

Image Credits: Thumbs Up – Like by Marco Fieber.

Keep track of your website’s “likes” on Facebook and even the progress of your competition with the free tool LikeButton. This is a quick and simple way to immediately learn who is sharing your website’s links on Facebook and what customers are saying.

Hootsuite

Image Credits: HootSuite image by kk+.

One of the best tools for managing you social media accounts and providing metrics for your brand’s performance and reach among customers is Hootsuite. While URL shortener bit.ly provides analytics for any links you create with it, Hootsuite provides the complete package for managing multiple social media sites and accounts all in one dashboard that provides useful analytics so that you know when you’re on the right track and when customers are communicating with you or about you.

Search on Social Mention

Image Credits: Social media dataflows by Anne Helmond.

If you want a to search for your brand beyond the results that Google provides, look into one of the many social media search engines such as Social Mention. This is one of the best search tools for social media because of its comprehensive lists of key words, extensive social media sources, and intuitive graphs that will tell you in a matter of seconds how your brand is positioned among influential users.

Track Incoming Links with Google Analytics

Image Credits: Fluid icon: Google Analytics by Lasse G.

If you’re already using Google Analytics, then pay particular attention to the incoming links and the connections between your traffic spikes and social media efforts. For example Eric Bratt of Bratt Media suggests, “If you’re trying to get people interested in a product demo, be sure to set up the “goals” feature in Google Analytics so you can track the number of completed lead forms. Extend your analysis to see which keywords and referring websites are generating the most conversions. If you operate a content site, focus on visitor, loyalty and content reports.”

Pay attention to the links that are most successful and analyze whether your tweets or Facebook updates for certain links were more effective than others. Use your analytics results to determine which products and campaigns have traction and which ones need to be replaced.

Effectively generating reports from the tools mentioned in this article won’t take long once you know which hastags and keywords to search for. The real work begins when you compile your data, analyze your effectiveness, and plan for the future. However, without collecting reliable data, the analyzing and planning stages are impossible. And for the other way, you can also optimize the offline tracking, like by spreading the brochure printing with description about your business and your phone number included.

Cover image credits: Parabolic by Auroqueiro

About the Author!

Written by Lior Levin, a marketing consultant for a neon sign store that specializes in producing custom neon signs, and who also works for a psd to xhtml company.