This is great info, Cas — thanks! What patterns are you seeing?

Sandy

I’ve been keeping the spreadsheet for a couple of weeks now. I love seeing the results and can highly recommend it.

Also, Kayleen, for Twitter, you can go to your Twitter page to get the information on how many times each tweet has been re-tweeted or favorited. Click “expand” under a tweet and you’ll get that info. If it doesn’t have it, that means there was no activity.

On your Facebook personal page, you can count the number of likes, comments, and shares of your content. When you do this, you’ll start to see patterns — perhaps updates with images get more likes than updates with links to more info.

It’s manual and tedious, but it’s do-able.

Sandy

I’m a spreadsheet junkie, too, Sara. When writing each of my books, I set up spreadsheets to track my daily (and sometimes hourly!) progress, using a formula that automatically tabulated the number of words I had written. It was a great motivator — and distractor. 🙂

It’s not so obvious, Kayleen.

For Twitter, you can find total followers and the number of lists you appear on from your profile page. But you’ll have to dig a little to get retweets and so forth. As Elke mentions above, Hootsuite offers these analytics, if you sign up (and pay for) its Pro program. There may be other free programs, but you’ll have to track those down.

Hootsuite also offers analytics on other social media sites, including Facebook. But if you have a Facebook fan page, you can get many of those numbers without a third party. Click “see insights” and you can get tons of really useful data about how your page is performing.

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t offer these kinds of analytics for personal profiles, which is one reason it’s a good idea to set up a page.

Hope that helps! If anyone else has ideas for gathering this information, please chime in!