If you’ve ever ran a social media account for an organization, you know that in the behind-the-scenes there are all these numbers to help you know which posts are more popular than others. These are the social media analytics of that account. Buffer defines “social media analytics as the gathering of data from social media platforms to help inform us and guide our marketing strategy.”
Analytics can tell you many different things, and according to Business News Daily you have to know what metrics you are looking for to know if you are reaching your goals. In your social media strategy, you should make these clear, and then find which metrics go along with the objectives to know if you are meeting them.
Here are some native analytics tools you can start incorporating into your business.
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If you have a business page on Facebook, you can see your page insights. These insights can tell you how your page is doing with its overall activity like visits, actions, audience and clicks. It also includes graphics to help you visual the information.
As well as an overall view, you can also see post by post analytics. I really like this section because it shows you your posts in a list with the date, time, type, target, reach, engagement and an area to promote. If you see a post not doing as well as you’d like, you have the option to boost it to get more impressions.
Viewing on a desktop or laptop you can see a bigger scope and even graphs that Facebook provides for you. On the Facebook app they recently added a “Pages” tab at the bottom, so you can view all of the pages you monitor more easily.
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Instagram also uses insights for only business accounts. I have found that this native analytics tool is my least favorite for an overview, but my favorite for individual posts. When you go to your insights, you can see three tabs: Content, Activity and Audience. Under Content you can see an overview of your page for the last seven days. You can see posts which you can organize by a lot of different analytical metrics and up to two years ago. The next category is stories which you can only see the past 14 days, but you can organize by metric here too. The last section on Content are your promotions.
Under activity you will see more analytical metrics, but only for seven days’ time. I wish they would add the option to increase the period of time shown.
The last tab is for your audience. This page shows Growth, Top Locations, Age Range, Gender and Followers. I think the followers section is the most valuable here because you can see when you should post based on when your followers are online.
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Unlike Facebook Insights and Instagram Insights, Twitter Analytics can be applied to any account. On the Twitter Analytics Home tab, you can see a summary of how your page is doing. It also breaks up your months into sections to see what was most successful for your page. It includes highlights of your Top Tweet, Top mention, Top Follower, and Top media Tweet.
When viewing your Tweet activity, you can see a graph with all of your impressions to see when you had the most activity. This tab gives you metrics on your impressions, engagements, and engagement rate. You can also see likes, retweets, link clicks and replies.
The next tab available is to view your audience analytics. This area is a lot more detailed and has more categories than Facebook by far.
Besides these native analytic tools there are a bunch of companies that can also provide analytics tools, but most of them require payment to use. Some of these companies include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Google Analytics, Hubspot, Buffer and more.
In order to grow your social media presence, you need to look into your analytics to really know what your audience wants. After knowing your analytics, you won’t be questioning how your content is performing anymore because you will know exactly what your audience likes, and what they don’t.
Lexie's Blog 