Most solopreneurs today use social media to promote and market their business. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and LinkedIn are perfect marketing tools and produce all the right results for a solo business owner. That being said, how do you measure the success of each of these sites? How do you know which marketing efforts are working? And once you obtain that pertinent information which marketing initiatives should you ideally discard? After all, marketing campaigns are not successful unless they produce the precise results that you are looking for. Realistically speaking, all solopreneurs need a set of tools that help determine the results of the usage of each media site. Below is a list of items and products you can use when determining how well your current campaigns are working.

HootSuite

This tool is an excellent one for beginning marketers. This tool allows you to track metrics and create dozens of different individual reports to help you measure your success. It is also a good tool for a veteran marketer. I use it everyday.

SocialMention

This tool is similar to Google Alerts. That being said, it is geared toward social media results only and lets you know who is saying what about your company. Essentially, it gives you an overall description of what others think about your business.

Klout

This tool is free and allows you to see when a user is online as well as measure your company’s influence on many different social media sites. It combines items such as link clicks, followers, and more to give you a composite score that gauges your online influence.

Facebook Insights

This dashboard gives you information about your audience and what they react to, so that you can adjust your marketing content and campaign accordingly.

Twitter Analytics 

Again, this is a dashboard that tracks various tweets from different individuals. It also tells you who the new followers are, how many mentions you’ve received, and who has recently been followed.

Google Analytics

Often overlooked when it comes to tracking social media results, it allows you to set up campaigns with specific links in them. At that point, you can track those particular links. It is a very inexpensive and simple tool that is extremely effective.

Bitly

Anything you share can be tracked with Bitly. This primarily enables you to shorten links and allows you to view what your audience members are interacting with.

Buffer

This is an excellent tool for content scheduling. It can post your content automatically to a selection of pre-set channels that you have developed.

TweetReach

You can enter a hashtag or search term, and then track a specific conversation or campaign that is mentioned on Twitter. The tool searches for tweets that you ask it to.

Keyhole

This tool is similar to TweetReach but it covers Facebook and Instagram as well. It requires a monthly subscription but offers a free trial period first.

More Simple Tools

In addition to the above more specific tools, you can also perform a variety of other and simpler tasks. These include:

• Conduct a search engine search on your company, product or service and see what comes up. If your company or its product or service is not included in the top 10 or 20 search results, this may be a sign that you need to adjust your marketing efforts.
• In addition to sites like Google, you can also conduct searches on some of the lesser-known search engines such as Technorati, Twitter or Delicious.
• Creating alerts allows you to receive a notification every time your company name is found anywhere on the Internet from news to blogs to groups and more.

There are also other ways to track your return on investment (ROI) and the effects of your current promotional campaigns. These include Blogging Analyzer, which allows you to analyze a particular article for all the known SEO factors and helps you improve the Search Engine Rankings of the blog post.; Majestic, which allows you to see the number of times there is a link to your blog or website; and tracking the number of users who both “like” and comment on your Facebook status updates.
Finding out your social media results is not that difficult. There are both free and inexpensive tools you can use to track your followers and users who are paying attention to everything you do and will provide a wealth of information on those users. Like anything else, you simply need to research these tools to decide which one will work best for your solopreneur business.