How to use social media analytics
Posting regular content on your social media platforms is all well and good - but do you know how well it’s actually performing? Do you use your statistics properly and are you implementing them into your marketing strategy?
By identifying these statistics into your marketing plan, you will be able to see what is working well on what social media platforms and what isn’t working as well. It’s no good posting for the sake of posting if you don’t know how well each post is doing!
We give you some of our tips on how social media analytics work, what they can tell you and how you can utilise them to your advantage:
Facebook analytics
Facebook probably has the most options when it comes to measuring your analytics. Not only will you see an overall summary page of your statistics, but Facebook gives you a host of insight options to choose from including followers, page views, posts, promotions and more.
Want to find out which posts are performing the best? Facebook let’s you see your top five performing posts of the month which is great for understanding what content your audience is interacting with the most.
Another useful feature Facebook has to measure analytics is viewing what days and what time of day your followers interact with your page and content the most. I.e. Your followers might be most active at 6pm on a Friday night. Therefore, this should be an ideal time for you to post your content in order to reach your audience.
Twitter analytics
Don’t be fooled. Twitter has just the same amount of analytics options as Facebook, but is used in a slightly different way.
Instead of displaying a whole host of options on the side, Twitter shows you a whole page of the past 28 days of activity, including top tweets, impressions, how many profile visits you’ve had and how many mentions you’ve had.
If you scroll down, you can compare your monthly statistics with each month and you will be able to see what you have achieved in previous months.
Another great feature to Twitter analytics is that you can export your data which gets stored in an excel spreadsheet, which is useful for when you’re comparing your statistics when composing your digital marketing reports.
Instagram analytics
Instagram analytics can be sometimes hard to find. But if you look at the top right hand corner of your Instagram business page, you will see lines that resemble a chart. Click onto that and you will be given a whole host of Instagram analytics which show how well your posts have been performing.
Instagram analytics can show you things like key demographics of your audience, what time of day your followers are most likely to view your content and you can see what your top posts are of a certain time frame.
LinkedIn analytics
If you have a business LinkedIn page, then it’s essential to use LinkedIn analytics to see where your business page is being viewed and what companies are looking at you.
If you select the 3rd option on the drop down menu to the top left hand side, you will see three further options where you can measure your analytics. These are: Visitors, Updates and Followers.
Visitors can show your traffic metrics and what time of day your followers are viewing your business page, plus your visitor demographics and what top job functions, seniority and industry they come from. This is particularly useful to see whether you are attracting the right business types to your page.
Updates gives you a chart displaying your engagement, impressions and how many clicks, likes and comments you are receiving, plus a summary of your top posts. And followers displays your follower highlights and your followers demographics including location and which companies of certain size are following you.
Overall, whatever social media platforms you choose to use for your business, it is important to use social media analytics as part of your marketing strategy, in order to accurately target, measure and implement your marketing plan successfully.