Analytics are a valuable resource in social media marketing. They can help a brand understand its audience and gain more success. However, they can be overwhelming when you look at all the data. To gain efficient insights, a strong first step is to create a goal. Depending on your goal, you can analyze different metrics to reach the answer. You need to ensure every goal has a correlated metric because they allow you to determine if you are reaching your intended success. To help you begin your analytic journey, here are some common questions/ goals to get started.
Who is my audience?
Understanding your audience is a very common first step in marketing. This main question can impact your tone, voice, social platforms, content, and more. Luckily many social networks allow access to follower metrics. Specifically, I’ve used Instagram analytics in the past and have found strong information about my audience. Depending on which social network you are using, you can find demographic data which includes follower age ranges, gender, geographic region, interests, and workplace.
Am I doing better than my competitors?
Competitor analysis is another very beneficial process. Oftentimes, it can give you ideas for content and ways to improve your overall social presence. Additionally, it can help you gain a sense of where your company fits in the market. A strong metric to use is share of voice, which can take the form of volume or sentiment. This metric represents how much of the online sphere your brand is taking part in. Volume refers to how often consumers are mentioning your brand when engaging in conversations about your product/ service. Meanwhile, sentiment refers to whether the online conversations skew positive or negative. Both are important to gain an overall impression of how you compare to the competing companies.
Additionally, Linkedin and Facebook give business accounts the ability to do competitor analysis for their platforms. You can bookmark the accounts you view as your largest competitors and see how you compare. Oftentimes these dashboards will rank based on follower count, follower growth, and amount of posts. This can be beneficial for seeing how you compare on the specific social app.
What are people saying about my brand?
To see what people are saying about your brand, share of voice (sentiment) and engagement (comments) are the ideal metrics to analyze. Analyzing the share of voice will give insights about your brand in terms of mentions and tagging. Similarly, you can look at your comments to gain a sense of current brand image. You should be analyzing more than just the number of comments but what they are communicating.
When is the best time to publish?
Knowing when best to post ensures that your content will reach a large quantity of your followers. Analyzing your engagement metrics can help you discover when your followers are most active. Look at which posts reached the most individuals and then see if that coincides with a time/ day.
You can also directly find what times your followers are most active through follower metrics. For example, in the Instagram insights dashboard, you can see when your followers are most active during the day and which days are best.
Which content does my audience enjoy the most?
To decipher the best type of content, it’s important to look at engagement metrics. You can view what posts perform the best in terms of likes, comments, shares, or retweets. I’d likely sort by likes first since it’s the simplest form of engagement. By organizing your posts you can see what content type has historically performed the best. Content categories include photos, videos, reels, and text posts.
Which social media network is the best for my brand?
Figuring out the best platform requires looking at a combination of metrics and what the overall goal of your social footprint is. The main metrics I would recommend are conversion rate, engagement rate, and awareness. Many companies are aiming to convert followers into consumers therefore the platform with the most conversions may be the best. Follower count and engagement rate can help you figure out how strong the audience interest is on each platform and how effective your posts have been. Finally, your goal may be to reach new consumers, therefore expanding your reach is integral. In that case, the platform with the strongest awareness metrics would be best.
How can I have a better performance on social media?
To improve your performance on social media you should look into growth, reach, engagement, content, sentiment, and impressions. All of the metrics contribute to your overall performance on social media. You can work on improving one metric at a time, but it’s important to consider all of the KPIs to create the most effective social plan.
Sources
Chen, Jenn. “The Most Important Social Media Metrics to Track.” Sprout Social, 11 Aug. 2022, https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-metrics/.
“How to Track Social Media Metrics on Four Social Networks.” Social Media Examiner, https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-track-social-media-metrics-on-four-social-networks/.
“Which Social Media Metrics Matter?” Business.com, https://www.business.com/articles/which-social-media-metrics-actually-matter/.