Knowing how well your social media business accounts perform is the key to build more brand awareness. But it can seem difficult to sort through all the social media data out there.
Every platform has its own intricacies to navigate.
Most social media platforms provide some form of analytics through their site. Twitter analytics shows you all that you need to know. Facebook analytics are available through selecting the Insights tab on the top of a business Page. Through Instagram, insights can be seen on promoted posts.
There are also many third-party sites that offer services to compile all social media analytics in one place.
Once the data is collected, use these tips to analyze it and find out how to reach an audience and what to do to engage with them.
Bust Out the Spreadsheets
When auditing social media data, it is really helpful to put all of the data from the various platforms into Google sheets.
Break down a sheet by each platform — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and so on. Then measure the number of followers or impressions on each and the amount of total engagement of each.
Looking at the level of engagement compared to the number of people that saw the content can give good information for analysis. If posts are reaching thousands of viewers but only getting engagement from a handful of people then they might need to be improved in some way.
Breakdown Social Media Data
It’s good practice to breakdown engagement of each platform by type.
For example, Facebook has likes, clicks, shares, and comments. Breaking each category down shows how people engage with the posts to give more detail to the audit and better understand an audience.
Use this information to figure out an average amount of engagement to show the standard performance of a particular page.
It helps to remove outliers when calculating averages. An extremely popular post that got a lot more likes than any other can be left out so it doesn’t throw the numbers off too much.
Do analyze the outliers on their own though. When a post gets triple the likes and shares of an average post, figure out why.
Was it because it was shared by someone else? Should that person be considered a possible influencer to reach out to? Test assumptions and get to the root source of the success.
Test assumptions and get to the root source of the success.
Set Performance Goals
Now those average level of engagements can help set benchmarks for future posts. Set a goal to increase the number of likes by 30% above the average for the next post.
Once posts start meeting benchmarks, new goals can be set to continue to improve the business’ social media strategy as a whole.
Monitor Time and Frequency
Find out when followers will engage with posts. Analyze the high and low traffic time periods for an audience and post a few times during each period. Doing this for several days can show when an audience likes to engage with that content.
It could be that when traffic is lower engagement increases due to less competition amongst all of the other posts out there.
Measure impressions to see how many people are being reached during a given time period. Compare that to how many posts were made. It may be that a slight change of only a few extra posts can greatly increase engagement.
Analyze for Success
Many trends with social media data can fluctuate on the regular. Successful social media campaigns stay nimble and monitor these changes. That way, they can adapt their approach to reach their audience.
It’s best to not make too many changes at one time though because it can make it hard to see how those changes affect the data overall. Make changes in increments to test them over time.
To really find out what your audience thinks about your business you can try a free reputation audit. If your reviews aren’t as good as they could be, then there are reputation services available to help improve them.
We hope these tips help you analyze and grow a successful social media presence.