Social Media Tracking & Analytics Tools for Actionable Results

Social media has become an integral part of marketing plans, and for good reason. According to the State of Inbound Marketing study conducted by HubSpot in 2012, inbound marketing like social media costs around 61% less per lead than traditional outbound marketing. It’s no wonder marketers are moving towards implementing more social media strategies in their marketing campaigns, but there’s still the issue of proving whether or not these campaigns are effectively reaching your target audiences.

Fortunately, there are multiple social media tracking and analytics tools you can use to gather the data you need to prove your social media ROI. Here are a few to keep handy when tracking the performance of your organic and paid social media campaigns.

Organic Social Media Tracking

Organic social media is social media that is used without any sort of monetary payment to earn visitors and traffic. In other words, it’s social media that is used for free. It’s one thing to use social media, but it takes a bit more effort to use social media in a smart way. That’s why it’s essential for businesses to track and measure the performance of their organic social media traffic — otherwise, you could be wasting valuable time and resources.

There are a number of useful social media measurement and analytics tools on the market that businesses can use to keep better tabs on their organic social media efforts and ROI. Some of these include:

Call tracking – There are two ways to use call tracking numbers to track social media effectiveness:

• Set up visitor-level call tracking to show visitors a unique phone number on your website based on each social media platform. For instance, each visitor will see a different phone number if they visit your website from Twitter vs Facebook, allowing you to see which social media platforms are the most effective at driving website traffic and phone calls.
• If you are not using visitor-level call tracking, you can find out what social media channels are driving calls and visits using source-level tracking based on the referring social media site’s URL.

HootSuite, Buffer and similar social media management tools – These social media tools allow you to manage all your social networks from one central location, which is much easier than logging into each individual social media platform separately. This makes the social media tracking and measurement process much more streamlined and organized. In addition, these platforms also come with their own social media analytics tools to assist you with tracking social media ROI.

Brand monitoring tools – Using tools like Mention and Google Alerts can help you keep tabs on your brand’s web presence and give you an idea of how social media is affecting your online visibility.

Paid Social Media Tracking

The premise behind paid social is relatively self-explanatory. It includes any type of paid social media, including Facebook ads, promoted Tweets, sponsored Instagram posts and more.

Investing in paid social significantly increases your chances of being seen by your core audience. These days, it’s crucial for any business to use paid social in order to succeed online.

Some examples of paid social include:

• Facebook – Using Facebook Ads is a simple, effective way to deliver your brand’s message to the right audience. Facebook makes it easy to target a specific demographic and see the results of each campaign with Facebook Insights.
• Twitter – Twitter offers a number of different types of paid campaigns to cater to specific needs and goals. There are campaigns for increasing your followers, driving traffic to your website and promoting your app, all of which can be tracked using Twitter analytics.
• Instagram – Instagram allows you to create ads the same way as you would with Facebook, ensuring your ads get seen by the right people.
• Pinterest – Promoted Pins enable you to boost the reach of your favorite Pins to gain visibility amongst your target audience. Pinterest analytics lets you track the performance of your Pinterest campaigns.
• LinkedIn – Targeted LinkedIn ads are useful for driving professional, quality leads to your website. The social network makes it easy to measure campaign performance directly from your account with LinkedIn conversion tracking.

Using call tracking with paid social

Call tracking can enhance the power of your paid social campaigns by allowing you to get a better grasp on your ROI. Here are two main features to take advantage of:

Visitor-level call tracking – Use visitor-level call tracking to correlate keywords with social media campaigns, phone calls and website visits. This lets you see which keywords are driving the most clicks and calls for your business, allowing you to better optimize your campaigns to improve ROI.

Source-level call tracking – Similarly, you can use source-level call tracking to attribute phone calls, conversions and web traffic to specific paid social campaigns. Just assign a designated phone number to each individual campaign and you’ll be able to track the performance of your paid social campaigns with ease and accuracy. This is especially helpful for tracking conversions on Facebook pages with Call Now buttons.

Benefits of Using Call Tracking in Social Media Campaigns

Adding call tracking to your social media tracking toolbox comes with a plethora of useful benefits. Among these include the ability to:

• Collect the social media metrics you’re missing by tracking the phone calls driven by your social media marketing campaigns
• Assign a different phone number to each social media channel to get a better idea of which channels are the most effective at driving calls
• Optimize your campaigns with real-time feedback

Why Call Tracking for Social Media?

It’s easy to view the number of visitors and even interactions your social media channels receive, but what happens after visitors leave your social media page? Do they visit your website? Do they pick up the phone and call your business? You don’t know unless you install call tracking.

With CallRail’s call tracking platform, you can get the full picture of which social media campaigns and channels drive website visits and phone calls. This in turn enables you to better track the effectiveness of your online campaigns to accurately calculate marketing ROI. The more information you have about the success of your campaigns, the better you can tweak your social media strategy to yield desirable results.
There’s no question that social media is a great way to stay in contact with current clients while reaching potential clients at the same time. With CallRail, you can easily prove the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and optimize your strategies for more effective marketing. Ready to get started? Learn how our call tracking numbers work.