It’s that time of year again- (and no we’re not referring to Thanksgiving or Christmas) although they’re very much on our mind! No, it’s the time of year when The Practice team sits down to do a recap and report or two on the past year. We’ve been delving into piles of social media data, and with this, we’re asking- why is it so important to keep track?

For one thing, it’s important to monitor key words, growth, and reach every month, or even week, for what’s being said about us or our clients, because when it comes to social media, news and comments travel at lightning speed; it’s crucial to keep our fingers on the pulse. Secondly, we want to know how this is working, and what trends we need to continue, or even adopt. For this, measurement is key to improving upon our efforts, even when external factors such as algorithm changes might impact upon traction. The importance of keeping an eye on how other competitors or influential industry leaders are using social media can never be underestimated too. As clichéd as it sounds, there’s always something new to learn from other users, and we can see their efforts as a benchmark for our own. Finally, monitoring trends and piggybacking them is crucial when we’re thinking about the bigger picture- and that means SEO; therefore if we see that links, or certain keywords are impacting search engine rankings, we’ll be sure to use them again or watch how and if they continue to help.

And when we’re looking for an in-depth overview of our Facebook and Twitter metrics, our favourite picks have got to be the good old Page Insights for Facebook, Twitonomy for Twitter, and HootSuite for a complete glance at both. We love Facebook Insights, (particularly the reinvigorated design), with its clear graphs, figures and charts, and also for the fact that it gives the user access to historic data for the past quarter- a lot better than most free monitoring tools which only allow insights for the past week. Secondly, it’s useful to be able to quickly and easily extrapolate our data every month into an Excel spreadsheet for prompt referral if need be. When it comes to Twitter, sadly the site’s own API is dubiously hidden behind the “Twitter ads” tab and so not easily accessed when we want to check traction. Instead therefore, we rely on Twitonomy- a great (and possibly the best) tool for insights into pretty much anything except historic growth information, for which you need to be a premium subscriber. Nevertheless, the free version is brilliant, offering everything from a complete overview, to individual tweet data and even predicted influence. And when we want to keep an eye on our Facebook and Twitter data all in one place, we of course turn to HootSuite to schedule posts, see a comprehensive view of all streams, and use data to create free reports if required.

Do you monitor social media accounts for individuals, brands, or even yourself? Do you think it’s important to check these statistics frequently? We’d love to hear your opinions, so please tweet your thoughts to us @PracticeDigital, and share your comments on our Facebook page.