Tracing Performance of Individual Social Media Posts

[Heydarian]

Hello Moz community,

I have an Analytics question. Is there a way (using the social media APIs or otherwise) to track performance of individual social media posts to generate monthly reports?

We list lawyers on our directories for people to find.  We also share the lawyer's information on our social media posts. I'd like to be able to generate a monthly report letting the lawyers know what we've done for them on social media pages.

I'm thinking....we can identify a social media post by the URL inside the text of the post (IF URL_Inside_Page =Lawyer-Profile-Page_URL Then). I'd like to see numbers like:

• Facebook post clicks (combined)
• Facebook post likes (combined)
• Facebook post views (combined)
• Twitter post views (combined)
• Twitter post clicks (combined)

Thank you

[Heydarian]

Thanks. I'll start using a URL shortener and see what kind of data I can get. The final solution might be a combination of social media management tool and a URL shortener. I'll have to play with something like sproutsocial and see if I can programatically generate social media performance for a sub-group of my posts (separating the reports for each lawyer in our system)

Thanks agian

[TheSymmetran]

Nima jan, just try it man it costs literally nothing to setup a branded shortener at bit.ly (well it costs you some kind of short format domain, this can be expensive if going for some of those 2 letter TLDs)

Once you try it and do a test, you will see what level of analytics bit.ly shows in free mode. They also have an enterprise mode with expanded analytics and some other bells and whistles, but I never tried it before.

I almost exclusively use a branded short domain for all my social media posts, not just stuff that goes to my own web properties, meaning if I am tweeting something about someone else's blog post, it will still go through my branded short domain, this is so I have basic clicks numbers on the actual link and for free information, I cannot complain about it.

Please keep in mind that likes and views are better tracked with social management suites. I like sproutsocial, but there are other ones and more capable ones out there too. That information comes from Facebook, so if it is something that Facebook does not provide (either directly or through API), nobody can provide.

You can get a free trial from sproutsocial and check it out, it is neato.

[Heydarian]

Hi sym_admin,

That's a really good idea. If I use a branded URL shortener, I can see how I can track link clicks. Can I also track likes and views and other social media metrics?

[TheSymmetran]

Ever heard of a custom branded url shortener? That is one idea I can think of for tracking some of this information in a reliable and less costly way, with some limitations. You can also always setup url paramters for it too, but that is more pain and money down the drain.

What I think you really need is the data provided here: https://www.facebook.com/help/336143376466063/

You could technically use tools that can present API data much better than the sources themselves can show in their reporting and using that you can generate a much more user friendly report. one example is sprout social.