Social media platforms can become powerful tools. It takes just a few hours for a post, image, or video to spread around the world, with the creator barely having to lift a finger. Every blogger should therefore keep their readers’ activity in mind when carrying out a regular blog analysis. Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms offer their own analysis tools, which you can use to follow your blog-related social media activities. The statistics of a Facebook fan page provide information on how far a blog post reaches, how high the interaction is, and the resulting number of clicks on the website over time.
With Google Analytics, you get a deeper insight into how influential your social media channels are on your readership and how much they contribute to the success of your blog. The ‘Acquisition’ tab lets your track which social media channels bring your readers to the blog. By clicking on the ‘Social Data Hub’ tab, you can see how your blog comes across on social networks, which means how often it is mentioned and shared, and responses to the content. If you embed social plugins (buttons that the user clicks on to like or share articles) into your blog, you can track any activity through Google Analytics.
Remember that those subscribing to newsletters and RSS feeds are also an important source of traffic and should not be neglected in the blog analysis, because they can be excellent indicators of readership loyalty. A newsletter subscriber is often more valuable than a Facebook like. This is because the newsletter represents a direct channel to the reader, unlike the Facebook like (which the reader may have clicked simply to enter a competition). In order to measure and analyze the number of subscribers, there are separate analysis tools such as Feedburner from Google, while it is also possible to analyze each newsletter provider.