How was your social media performance over the last year? Â What measurements are you tracking and how did you do in comparison to your previous year?
But before looking ahead it’s also useful to look back!
Here are some ideas for looking at performance over the last year.
1. Â Do comparison reports on Google analytics
Google Analytics allows you to do comparison reporting so you can compare this month against last month or this year against last year.
This is really useful as you can see if there are similar patterns. Â Note: Â It’s really useful during the year to add annotations to your graphs to take note of why there was a spike or dip in your website’s activity. Â This helps with analysis. Â See this post on Google Analytics training
Under one of the ‘Audience’ reports (select Audience on the left hand side) pick the date option and select ‘custom’. Â Enter the dates for the current year and tick the box for ‘Compare to’.
Now select previous year.
When you produce a report you can then see this year and last years graph on one chart.
2. Analyze Your Best Posts in 2013
If you’ve been blogging all year it’s useful to analyze which posts were shared most on social media. Â These may not be the posts that got you the most traffic (you will have to check Google Analytics for this). Â But it does show you what was popular, and if content is shared out on social media it drives traffic back to your site anyway.
Social Crawlytics allows you to do this analysis.   All you need to do is enter your website address and select the Forward button  (don’t worry about the other settings).  It does not let you specify a date so it will do an analysis of all your content but you’ll have a good idea of what posts you wrote over the last year.
On the next screen you have the option for setting a schedule. Â This means that this report will run regularly. Â For this report we just want to run it immediately so ignore the settings and just select the ‘Forward’ option.
When you run the report you will see a graph similar to the following:
You can also run this report against your competitors so you can see what were their popular posts also.
3. Â Which posts got the most traffic
As well as figuring out which posts got the most shares you should check to see which got the most traffic. Â The posts with the most shares and traffic should be ones that you write plenty more of in 2014!
This information is available under the Behavior > All Traffic section of Google Analytics. Â You just need to make sure to alter the date so it is displayed for the full year (top right).
4. Â Analyze your Facebook Account Performance
The Agorapulse Barometer is a free tool that compares the performance of your page against other pages that also ran the barometer. Â Â There are over 5,000 companies that have already run the barometer so if you run it and see your stats are lower than other pages it’s time to do something about it.
When you are running the barometer you can filter results based on pages that have a similar size in fan count (less than 1,000, between 1,000 and 10,000 etc).
This was developed by the guys at Agorapulse who have a neat tool for managing your Facebook page.
5. Â Do an analysis of your Twitter account
There’s a couple of reports you can run.  You could start off with the Simply Measured free twitter report.  This will give you an overview report of your account.  Here is a couple of items from the report that I picked out.
Your most influential followers. Â Have you picked up really influential followers over the year that you should be building relationships with?
From the list above I see there are some influential people that are tweeting about relevant content so what I’m going to do is set up a Twitter list that focusses on these people so I can interact with them more.
In the following image it shows me when your audience has sent the last tweet. Â What you want to see is that you have a really active Twitter following that are interacting regularly on Twitter.
After running this report you might want to remove people you follow that are not interacting on Twitter.  For example, if they haven’t tweeted in the last 6 months or 1 year.  ManageFlitter is a useful tool for identifying and removing these people.
Another useful tools is Twtrland. Â This will give you an overview of your profile, for example, you can view:
- How many retweets do you get for every tweet
- How many replies did you send
- Who are you interacting with
- What percentage of your tweets contain links
6. Review your Pinterest performance
Tailwind provides a free trial which you can use to review your Pinterest account. Â You can identify things such as:
- Who are the most influential users pinning your content
- What content is getting the most pins and repins
- How is your following growing over a period of time
- Who are the top repinners of content
- What pin categories are doing the best
7. Â Check out Instagram
If you’re reading any of the trend posts for 2014 you’ll see Instagram on a lot of the reports.  Instagram is growing rapidly and don’t be surprised if it doubles in size over the next year.
Iconosquare provides useful analytics on your Instagram account. Â For example you can view:
- The most liked images
- The most used hashtags
- Follower growth / loss of followers
- Engagement on content
8. Â Monitor performance on Google +
Google+ is an important platform and will continue to increase in importance as the year goes on.  One tool recently released that Im currently testing is Steady Demand. This provides you with good analytics on your personal or business page.  Check to see:
- What type of posts get the most engagement
- Post quality – are you posting content correctly – the right length, mentioning people, hash tags, etc
- Overall connections summary
Note: Â The Steady Demand guys are offering a discount for RazorSocial readers. Â Use the code: steadyrazor and get 20% off the quoted price.
Summary
It’s very useful to step back and take a look at what has worked and not worked before you put plans in place for next year.
Too often we base our plans on what we think rather than what we know. Â Analytics helps us to understand what really happened!
Will you use any of these tools? Â What tips have you got for this?
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