Track Your Social Marketing

UPDATE: Check the comments below for a response about link juice from the BudURL team!

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Jim Stroud turned me on to this service called BudURL and I am LOVING it!

Finally there is a super easy way to track your social marketing campaign effectiveness.

What is BudURL?

It is a URL shortening service. That’s nothing new. That part of it does the same thing as TinyURL and other services.

What makes BudURL really cool is live click tracking! It can really give you insight into your social marketing efforts by allowing you to create a BudURL out of any link, and then track the clicks your new short link gets live.

Usage

Say you want to see how many people really click on your stuff at Facebook. Make a BudURL and post something and sit back and watch. There are tracking programs that do this and I use them too, but this thing is dead easy!

Drag the BudURL quick link to your browser link bar and you can instantly turn whatever page you are on into a short URL, take that new link and post it on Twitter, and track in real-time how many of your followers click it.

Make a new BudURL for the same link and split-test the effectiveness of your call to action.

For Example…

My contest for a free year of Blog Success is running right now.

I can click on my BudURL link on my browser toolbar while on the page above and instantly turn it into a unique, short URL.

Then I can place that particular link anywhere in my social network to track true response and how many people are REALLY following my updates.

But that’s not all. I can make ANOTHER unique BudURL out of the real link and track the effectiveness of another call to action to see if it is just my headline writing skills that need improvement.

New BudURL – New Post – Different Results?

I go back to, say, Twitter, a few hours or a day later and use a different headline with the new BudURL. More clicks may mean you did a better job at creating clicks with how you wrote your update. It may also mean that more of your followers were online at the time, so don’t take this as pure science.

At any rate, BudURL is something you can use to “see” what really happens when you interact with your social networks.  It would definitely improve how you build your authority on any given network and get people to really pay attention to your updates and links because it would show you how good or bad your response really is in real time.

Track Videos or Interviews

Put a BudURL inside a video you plan to syndicate and see how many people use it.

Jim Stroud is on my weekly radio show and he tracks how many listeners type in his BudURLs instead of just giving out raw URLS.  He makes BudURLS for each show so the clicks tracked are definitely only from the listeners of that episode.

TIP: Make sure you make a note of where you are using every single BudURL so you remember where you put the link and what it is tracking.  There is a handy notes section that goes with each BudURL to keep things straight!

How would YOU use BudURL?  Comment below!

Tagged as: budurl, click tracking, social marketing tracking, social media tracking, tracking tools