Marketing a book is one of the toughest and most time-consuming parts of being an indie author. When book launch time comes, you’ll find yourself posting to various social media platforms (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc). And it doesn’t stop on your launch day. You must maintain a presence in the early stages of your book release–at least several weeks post-launch.

Fortunately, there are tools available that you can use to track your social media presence.

TalkWalker alerts

I found a nice tool called TalkWalker that allows you to set up alerts that are emailed to you based on certain keywords. I entered in Author Unleashed and can preview the results. I had better luck finding my name since there are many books with the word “unleashed.”

track your social media presence

TalkWalker alert setup is easy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is amazing for tracking conversations that mention your name or books. You can sign up (for free) easily using your Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ accounts. Furthermore, the tools let you add multiple accounts so you can view your social media presence across platforms. Within 5 minutes of signing up, I connected my Facebook author page, personal page plus my Twitter account.

The tool takes some getting used to at first because you need to set up “streams.” However, there are pop-ups to guide you through this. Check out the reports feature. I was able to get a report of engagement on my Facebook author page for the last 2 weeks:

social media

Facebook engagement courtesy of Hootsuite

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I can see myself pulling up reports each week or each month to see whether certain posts or images are getting more engagement from followers. Hootsuite also lets you create posts from within its dashboard and lets you schedule delivery. I don’t know about you, but I need to get that up and running!!

 

Old school spreadsheet

The automated tools are great, but sometimes I want to be old-fashioned and use a spreadsheet. Just in case any of these tools disappear, I want to track my social media–where I was when I started out versus where I end up in a few years. Every week as part of my Saturday morning routine, I pull up my social media tracking spreadsheet and chart where I am in terms of followers, likes, etc. I added in a pie chart to show where my main networks are.

social media

My tracking spreadsheet

 

I like to see how I’m improving week by week. I’m not always perfect about entering in data each week–you can see I  missed a month. Growth over time is important. You can see my Twitter following has increased the most since I started tracking. I pay close attention to the orange line which is my newsletter signup. I want to increase that significantly in 2016.

Do you want to use my social media tracking  spreadsheet also? Click here to download it. Please be sure to sign up for my email list and get free book planning tools from my Author Unleashed series.