The best way to determine whether or not you are on track with your social media is by having a checklist. This can help you to see what you have accomplished and what’s holding you back and will allow you to make the right changes for next year.
1. Did you achieve your blog goals? Don’t just dive into the new year and expect new things to be accomplished. It’s important to set goals for yourself to achieve throughout the year so you know how far along you’ve come. It is the what you set yourself hoping to achieve and is measurable. Common objectives include: building a media platform or email list, driving sales and lead generation, supports search and social media efforts, establish thought leadership, etc. Compare your efforts this year to the previous year to track of what works better.
2. How much traffic did you blog generate? Use Google Analytics to track your traffic. Be sure to check your page views based on patterns such as what days are more popular to what time your posts are. By analyzing this, you can achieve the best potential audience for your blog posts. You should also check the causes based on your content itself. What special events or promotions were the most popular? What topics had the largest audience? It’s important to see what people want to read about and when they are most likely to read your content.
3. Has your audience changed over the year? You need to study your readers to see where they are coming from. This helps you to understand the demographic you have and their background. from search engines to inbound links on other sites, you can understand where you are lacking in content distribution. This also includes what device they are reading your blog on. Access time on your site is also important to see if you can attract and keep the people on your site with your content. If people are going to your blog and leaving quickly, you need to revise your content.
4. What content was the most effective on your blog? Analyze your content to see if they are aligned with your business goals. Does it resonate with your readers and keep them on your blog? Look at your best topics and work from there to see what people want to read. The statistics can tell you exactly which topics are working for you and which ones aren’t. This can also include what media you are including such as images, links and videos.
Your end-of-the-year checklist will help you to better understand your blog’s performance. Analyze what works and what doesn’t to help you achieve your goals and make changes to better next year. Use that as a basis to create a new action list for 2014 and your business will grow from there.