Social Media is a Waste Of Time

Ok now that I have your attention you need to read further. Social media is one of the best ways to get traffic to your website but you have to have tracking installed so you can track what you are doing and the response you are getting. Below you can see my report of my Twitter account. I get this daily as part of my Raven Tools report.

I normally only track one month at a time and have it versus the previous month. This report shows two months worth of data though. At first you may look at this and say OMG Vinny you had over 1000 post in the time. That is correct about 500 a month, but when you factor in that about 700 are automatic I only did about 300 post in two months. Most of my tweets were during Affiliate Summit. I really didn't do much tweeting at all.

The number to look at here though is the amount of re-tweets. For very little effort I get RT's on my post like crazy. That is the goal so that I get new followers and I can funnel them towards my email newsletter list. You can also see that I get a lot of other mentions and that is just fine by me. Lets break it down even further. In the graph below you will see that I track post, mentions, and events.

What I do is when I make a post on my site I create an event so I can track it. This is the dark gray lines on the chart below. I can see what post received traffic and more important what post didn't see traffic. By looking at this I can see that my post on 8/9 and 9/6 worked well on Twitter. I need to go in and see what they were and find a similar topic to write about.

The main thing is that I track every single thing I do when it comes to social media. If you look above you can see my follow 500 people experiment in full effect also. The results of that aren't in yet since I am waiting on some more figures. I also get reports on Facebook and G+ that look just like this.  I have this report emailed to me every morning along with the rest of my Raven Report.

Do you know what you are doing on social media? Are you just posting to Facebook and Twitter praying that something will get retweeted? That isn't a good idea and is probably a waste of time.