The Numbers Game v Engagement & Interaction

Whereas you can reasonably easily track traffic on your website and find out what pages your visitors are accessing, and where they came from, social media channels present a different set of challenges.

You may have 10,000 likes on your Facebook page but nobody ever shares your posts. While the number of your followers is impressive, what counts in social media is engagement. Put simply, this is how much of your content is interacted with or shared by your followers.

There are ways of growing followers quickly, including buying followers, and enticing people to join your Twitter or Facebook by running competitions or promising giveaways. Care must be taken when running such campaigns as both Twitter and Facebook have strict rules to which you must abide.

We recommend growing your following organically as you will find a better response from a few targeted followers than a mass of faceless followers who have no reason to interact. This will take time, so don't be put off if progress seems slow at first.

As with websites, it is important to post a variety of regular content items to your social media channels. Photos are great for Facebook, questions work well across both Twitter and Facebook and as social media content has a much smaller lifespan than, say, an article or feature piece, it is important to post regularly.

Social Media Analytics

Once you have reached 30 'likes' on your Facebook page you have access to insights, which, like Google Analytics, show you what sort of reach and engagement you are getting.

There are free tools for Twitter such as Twittercounter which gives you a free weekly analysis of your follower count and you can upgrade to a paid version for more complex analytics.

YouTube, now being part of Google, has an integrated analytics package that tells you all sorts of things from which videos were viewed, to how long they were viewed for and from where.