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  • Is Your Social Media Plan Paying Off? Here’s How to Tell.
Technology Articles > Social Networking > Others > Is Your Social Media Plan Paying Off? Here’s How to Tell.

As a writer, I have mixed feelings about social media experts. More often than not, these supposed experts are shooting in the dark. But, the consensus seems to be that you can’t live without a social media campaign if you own or run a business. Even the big businesses are doing it, so small businesses should follow suit. The problem with this mentality is that there are very few ways to ensure that the money you are spending on that social media marketer is paying off.

Thankfully, there are some ways to tell if your shiny new social media plan is working. Even better, you can use any of these methods all by yourself – no expert needed. Not sure that your campaign is working or if you’re tossing your money out the window? Here are some ways to track your social media efforts.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a tool that’s as simple to use as the Internet. Google’s Analytics has also been around for a long time now – and it’s free. With Google’s free tool, you can’t tell what your clients are buying, but you can tell if you are getting any traffic at all. Simply log into the Google Analytics tool, plug in the details for your site, and take a look at the tool once in awhile. You’ll quickly see if your site is alive or completely dead to the Internet universe.

Facebook Offers

Facebook is full of ways for companies to boost revenue. One of those ways is called “Facebook Offers.” Offers are like coupons – in fact, they are coupons of the electronic sort. Basically, if you set up a Facebook Offer (simple to do), you can then tell how that offer is working by tracking the number of people who cash in your coupon.

For example, if you offer a free item with each $50 purchase, you only offer this deal through Facebook Offers, and you see more than 1000 people taking advantage of that offer, you know that your Facebook campaign is working. If only other social sites were so simple!

Tracking Twitter

Trying to track Twitter usage is a lot harder. You can use the Facebook tactic listed above (only make an offer through Twitter), but Twitter is really more of a dialoguing tool than anything else. Twitter was devised to being dialogues, though campaigns can be fruitful if you use a popular tag or two. Set up an offer that’s only available through Twitter, and see whether or not that offer gets any hits. If not, don’t pay for someone to run your Twitter campaign when you can dialogue with people for free.

Hiring the Right Social Person

This one is a toughie too. There are a lot of scammers out there! Marketing people who were once at the height of marketing sophistication when the Internet was a new thing are now trying to become social media experts – using the same old tactics!

This, my friends, doesn’t work. There are also some new social media experts who barely touch Facebook for personal reasons, but use buzzwords to sound like they have a clue. How do you tell a good social person from a bad one? Make sure to track your ROI using the tools listed above!