Anyone who reads my posts would know that I love social media analytics - I honestly can’t stress enough how important it is to keep track of how your social media accounts are performing, so you can capitalize on what’s working and drop what isn’t.
In this post, I’m going to look at four ways in which you can use social analytics to maximize your brand’s impact online, and make the most of your time and effort.
1. Follower Growth: Identify if your content is drawing in the right audience
I’ve been preaching the benefits of engagement over follower growth for a long time, but it's also important that you don't completely overlook your follower numbers in favor of engagement stats.
When it comes to social media analytics, follower growth (or lack thereof) can be a good indicator of how your social media strategy is working - an influx or steady increase in followers usually means that people are finding your account, and liking what they see, which is clearly a positive sign.
It can also mean that you’ve had a mention by a bigger brand and you’re getting an influx of traffic, which is important to note in order to capitalize on such opportunities.
Maximizing brand impact using this metric
This one's pretty simple - pay attention to big influxes or significant losses of followers. Sometimes factors outside of your control affect this (big mention vs the social network flushing inactive accounts), but it's important to keep tabs on such to ensure you best manage it either way.
2. Reach and Impressions: How far is your content really going?
First, let’s discuss the difference between reach and impressions.
Reach refers to the unique number of people who saw your piece of content or social media post, whereas impressions is the number of times your content was displayed (one person or account can see your post more than once).
To add to the confusion, I’ll also go ahead and let you know that each social media network defines reach and impressions a little differently, and it changes once again when it comes to ads.
Even with those important notes of clarification, it is important that you keep track of these numbers. Both of these metrics let you know how far your content is reaching, and enable you to calculate your active engagement rate (how many of the people who saw your post actually took an action on it). Higher reach and impression numbers mean your content has legs, which can help direct your future strategic decisions.
Maximizing brand impact using this metric
I use my social media analytics trackers to keep tabs on both for every social media network a client is active on. Based on these insights, we can go back and take a look at time periods when there are peaks and figure out which content is giving us the most reach and engagement.
This also helps me come up with new content ideas based on what's working - which brings us to…
3. Engagement and mentions: Peaks in interaction
My favorite social media analytics to track are engagement and mentions.
As noted in my post "6 Tips To Strengthen Your Social Media Strategy in 2019", these are now the key factors that social platforms are looking to emphasize, and therefore, tending to the audience you’ve already built is the best way to grow, and reach new audiences. If the algorithms see that your audience is engaging with your content, it has no choice but to show your content to a wider pool. boosting your opportunities for new connections.
Engagement includes likes, comments, clicks, shares and messages. Keeping track of these will help your brand or business in so many different aspects, including:
- Customer service - Keeping track of mentions will enable you to answer any customer concerns. Even if you get a not-so-great mention or comment, it's likely worth addressing, as other people seeing this will know that your brand cares about its customers. Thoughtfully commenting back to those that comment on your posts is a good way to start building relationships online.
- Influx of likes, shares, or comments - A big influx of these engagement types can mean that you’ve hit content gold, or that another account (or website) is driving traffic to your social media channels. Pay attention to posts that get a lot of engagement, so you know what kind of content your audience is into.
- Messages or DMs - Ask questions, and have your followers send you a message to answer. If someone's taking the time to write you a direct message, they're more likely to be interested in you, your products or services.
Maximizing the impact of your brand using this metric
Again I use my social media analytics tracker templates to fill in the relevant data. Twitter will give you your account’s engagement rate based on a time period chosen (I usually do it for a month at a time), while others, like Facebook and Instagram, require you to download data and calculate this yourself or use a third party tool.
4. Clicks and traffic: Your posts are converting
Sometimes, clicks and web traffic can be a little bit overlooked when it comes to social media analytics, but ultimately, these are the actions that you really want to drive from your social media audience.
If your followers are willing to click away from the social media network that they’re on, then you know they must really be into your brand or business. Track clicks to your landing page and clicks on your page buttons where possible. You can do this by using a third party tool like Bit.ly, or for those who are more tech savvy, you can use trackable links.
Maximizing the impact of your brand using this metric
I always make sure to use Google analytics to keep tabs on which social media networks are driving the most traffic to my site. This is useful information to gauge where my audience is “hanging out”.
A bonus tip here – if you're looking to streamline your efforts and find out which social network to cut, this can also be a good place to start.
I hope this post helps you navigate the world of social media analytics a little more - I challenge you to go ahead and play around with the analytics tools of the various social media platforms and get an understanding of the various data points and what they might mean for your strategy.
Getting your head around this useful information can make a major difference in how you use social media to reach your target audience.
A version of this post was first published on Dhariana Lozano's blog.