How To Analyze Your Current Business Performance

Written by Doreen Dilger, The Home Based Business Coach
When using social media to market and promote your business, it's important to look at the effect you're creating from your efforts. You want to be sure that your efforts are producing the exact results that you are shooting for. Otherwise your business is being performed in a blind spot, without a plan, and you will not end up where you want to take your business. 

Know What You Want to Accomplish:  You can't analyze things that matter if you aren't sure what you want to accomplish with business marketing. Are you trying to get more readers? Are you trying to get more email list members? What exactly are your goals regarding your marketing efforts? 

Is your goal is to boost your business income with tweets, expand your awareness with Facebook, or get more visitors to your site via your blog? Is it working? Can you really tie your income rise or fall to a particular event such as a particular event? You can if you decide what metrics to study prior to your campaign, and how you will examine them.

Know What Tools Exist to Study Your Metrics:  There are many different tools that you can use to study your Twitter metrics. Here are a few, but there are many more. Simply do a search on Google Search with the words "Twitter Business Metrics" and you'll get many results. Also try asking your mentors, friends and colleagues what they use.

BrandTweet Statistics - If you want to see who is online right now, as well as look at various stats about your Twitter account, you can use this service. It also helps you visualize your contacts in a new way. How you use it depends on what you want to use it for. What do you need to know about your efforts with Twitter? Just enter your Twitter username (or even a competitor's) and get great information such as people the username has replied to, people who replied to the username, and other important information. http://stats.brandtweet.com/

 Facebook Analytics - Facebook has very good native analytics that you can use to track the ads you're posting, the updates you're sharing and the interaction and engagement of your audience. Just go to your admin panel in Facebook, choose the page you want to analyze and look at the total reach, paid reach and promotion stats that are available for viewing.

 Google Analytics - You can cut and paste some code from Google to your website or blog to find out a lot about your traffic and what it does when it comes to your blog or website. Every blog you have should include Google Analytics. You can easily include that with the code and easy plug-ins if you use WordPress.

 Autoresponder Analytics - Who is opening your messages? Who clicks through your messages? Which headline works better on your email - this one or that one? All can be determined with the analytics included with your autoresponder of choice.

Most online services offer some sort of analytics so that you can study your numbers. The thing is, you want to know what numbers to look for. What is your goal from any one marketing campaign? Do you want to know how many opens you get on average from an autoresponder email? Do you want to know how many people are signing up for your e-list from a certain blog post? Write down the metrics you're looking for and determine if a tool can help you track that particular metric.

The important take-away is to know what your goals are, to know what metrics to look at to determine if you're reaching your goals, and then to do so regularly. You can study metrics weekly, monthly, quarterly, or whenever you choose, but it's best to pick a regular time and not do it randomly. It's also best to determine in advance which metrics are important in a particular campaign.