I’ve used this quite before and I’ll continue to use it, as it’s an important one.
“Every line is the perfect length if you don’t measure it.” ― Marty Rubin Click To TweetI love this quote not just because it’s short and simple, but because it’s such a visual representation of how not to treat your social media accounts. Throwing off status updates into the ether is essentially assuming that what you are doing is effective, no matter the results.
There are so many tools out there these days that you can use to achieve this with. Some of these are simply free services built into the apps themselves that you may not know about, and some are paid. I’d like to highlight 3 that I am using to get insight into my accounts.
Official Twitter & Engage Apps
It’s pretty common-place for someone to not use the official Twitter application on their iOS or Android device. There are a host of great 3rd party clients out there, but did you know that you can get statistics on your Tweets from within the official Twitter app? It’s pretty simple, simply view one of your Tweets, and look for the little ‘bar graph’ icon in the lower right. Click this and you’ll get impressions and interaction data for your tweet!
Pretty sweet eh? And you didn’t even spend a dime! Want to take it further? Twitter recently released an app called ‘Engage’ (check it out in the App Store). It’s targeted at verified and high profile users. It’s basically Twitter without the timeline. It gives a manageable interface for those that receive too many interactions than they know what to do with. It allows you to see influencer follows, replies just from verified users, but most importantly, in the ‘Understand’ tab is a general overview of your Likes, Retweets, Followers, and Mentions. It also gives you a quick overview of your impressions for the last hour.
Price: FREE
URL Shorteners
There are countless tools out there to take your long winded URLS and shorten them into something a little more digestible. Did you know shortening the URL isn’t the only benefit those services provide? Many of the URL shortening service provide statistics for the links you create with their tool. Bit.ly, probably the most common URL shortener, offers some great insights into the links you shorten.
This is one of the reasons that Post Promoter Pro integrates directly with Bit.ly for URL shortening.
Don’t want to use a 3rd party service? There is a stand-alone, self-hosted solution called YOURLS or Your Own URL Shortener. It works just like Bit.ly or any other link shortening service, but instead of being service, purchase a domain and configure it with YOURLS. If you have the technical knowhow, this is a great way to get a ‘branded’ short URL since you need your own domain. While Bit.ly does support ‘branded URLs’, it’s only available via a paid account.
Price: FREE (with paid options)
Crowdbooster
Crowdbooster is actually a service I purchased when I first started out building Post Promoter Pro. While it contains a few similar features as Post Promoter Pro, like scheduling a post to social media, what it really shines in, is it’s statistics. I only use it for it’s stats. It has some great insights to help you learn who your most influential followers are, and how they impact your reach. By isolating your shares, that get re-shared by people with more followers, it can help you build an idea of what your potential reach is.
Once you have determined the types of posts that your influential followers like to re-share, you can start to hone in on your ‘brand’ and ‘voice’ on Social Media, really giving you the best chance there is to rapidly grow.
Price: Plans starting at $9/mo