This post originally appeared on Service Magic’s blog Pro Connection. See our weekly blog posts there every Thursday!

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So you’re doing a great job with social media, you’re creating great content, you’re reaching out to new audiences like never before… but how do you know if your audience is really engaging with you and what you’re putting out on social media?  

1. Sign up for a free bit.ly account

If you’re putting links out there via your social media accounts (and you should be, how else are you going to get people to visit your website?) they should absolutely be bit.ly links. And I don’t mean any old bit.ly link, I mean one that you can track. You can sign up for your own free bit.ly account here, which will allow you to track clicks and engagement for your links. Better yet, you can hook up your bit.ly account to Postling so it’s easier than ever to create updates with your shortened links. Now you know exactly how many people clicked on your links and how soon after the link was posted did engagement peak.

2. Use Facebook Insights

Sometimes Facebook can feel like a bit of a black hole. You put content out there and you aren’t sure if anyone is reading it or engaging with your page. Well, luckily Facebook has built a fairly robust set of engagement metrics called Facebook Insights. You’ll be able to see if your number of like-ers is going up, the engagement level of each post, and number of comments received per day. It’s a great way for you to understand your progress at a glance.

3. Use codes for your offers and promotions

If you’re offering promotions or discounts via social media be sure to use a separate code for each of your platforms. Let’s say you’re offering a 10% off introductory offer for new customers — maybe you use the code “newtwitter2011” for Twitter and “newfacebook2011” for Facebook. This way, you can track the success of the discounts by platform and see exactly where these new customers may be coming from.

There are many other ways for you easily to gauge your progress with social media. This is just the starting point. Think you’ve found an even more effective way to judge your engagement levels? Let us know in the comments!

Alexis Lamster