How to Track Twitter and Facebook with HootSuite

Dear readers,

Are you tracking the results of your Twitter and Facebook posts?

Do you have any ideas which posts get the most response?

One of the reasons I started to use HootSuite was that they make it easy for me to track Twitter and find out which of my posts get the most clicks.

The HootSuite dashboard has it’s own URL shortner called Ow.Ly (Get it? Hoot and Owls?) When you post a link to a web site in your Twitter or Facebook you just paste it right into HootSuite and they will shorten it to an ow.ly link.

All your ow.ly links are tracked by HootSuite. The tracking can do a couple things. You can sync it with your Analytics and get an overlay of your ow.ly stats on top of your Google Analytics. Here is one such image:

In this image the blue line is my Google Analytics traffic for one of my web sites. You can see the average number of visitors for this particular site ranges from 20 to 100 visitors a day.

The green line in the image represents clicks on my links from twitter.

This is just one of the reports HootSuite provides.

One report provides overall status of my tweets. It shows me how many clicks I received. It also shows me who mentioned me and provides details on the people that mentioned me. It shows how many times they mentioned me and provides info so I can click for more details.

They also provide individual tweet reports. These reports show my individual tweets and if I click them show me how many clicks each tweet received. That way I can see which specific tweets got more clicks. This allows me to look for themes or content that I might want to tweet again if they were really popular the first time

Finally, I mentioned Facebook. If you have a HootSuite account and you have Fan Pages you can connect your HootSuite account to your fan page. Connecting it to your fan page allows you to post from HootSuite but it also allows you to track stats on your fan page. You can see how many fans you have, how many active fans you have, how many new likes you receive, how many unlikes you receive and… even get biographical stats on your fans! You can see gender, age, country, and more! I for example have 6 fans from the Ukraine! (who knew!?) I also have 55% male and only 45% female fans. I gotta work harder at the female audience

So now you can see why I’m a big fan of HootSuite

- Ben Fitts

PS. Yes HootSuite launched an affiliate program today, but I had already started a draft of this post before I even knew they had an affiliate program