Further to last weeks post Website vs Social Media, like your website you need a way to measure the success of your social media program.

Do you know what types of posts get the most engagement on your social media platforms?  ​  For Facebook, what works best? status updates, photos, link shares or videos? Do you know what gets the most “Shares, Comments and Likes”?  For Twitter, what gets fav’d and retweeted the most?

Many of the software apps on the market can give you reports on this information.  You won’t find one that gives you everything though.

We’ve used LikeAlyzer to check the stats for our Facebook page and not only does it tell you what’s working, but it also tells you what’s not working.

  • How quickly do you reply to comments?
  • How often you are posting?
  • Page performance
  • Posts by page
  • Posts by others
  • Page comparison

Bonus:  LikeAlyzer is FREE!
Update:  LikeAlyzer is no longer available and here is an article that explains what’s happened.

If you are using Hootsuite, as of right now, there are some basic analytical reports included with the account, you can buy additional reports. Sprout Social has one of the best reporting features available, but you need one of the higher paid plans for it.

You can also check your Facebook Insights and your Twitter Analytics to get an idea of what’s working and what’s not.

By now, you may have seen articles online telling you what the best times are to post on Twitter or Facebook.  Personally, I don’t believe in one person tell me what the best time to post is.  Why?  they don’t know who my fans and followers are and they don’t know when they are online, so how can they tell me what time I should be posting? One expert says I should be posting at 4 PM every day, when in fact most of our Facebook fans are online at 7 PM.

You will eventually see a pattern as to when your fans and followers engage with your content.   Things to keep in mind:

  • seasonal changes: in the summer, your fans may be online more in the evening, but in December, they may not because of the holiday season.
  • time zones:  depending on who you are targeting, you may see spikes in traffic through Facebook Insights at strange hours
  • if there are any special events or holidays taking place, your fans may not be online at that time.

An economical way to gather stats is to use a spreadsheet and by day, write down what you posted, and to what platform.  Check the stats after 7 days, list it in the spreadsheet and after a while, you may see a pattern developing.

The goal is to “do more of what’s working” and “less of what’s not working”.  The only way to reach that goal is to experiment and that goal will be changing on a constant basis because our fans and followers change as well.

How are you tracking your social media performance?