Individual Technology Exploration: Social Media Analytics

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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.

Facebook Insights

An example of what your insights page might look like in the overview.
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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.

These are the images Facebook for Business gives you on their page as examples.
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Instagram Insights

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.

An example of Instagram Profile Insights.
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Twitter Analytics

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.

These two Images are screenshots of the overview of “All Twitter users” under my audience analysis.

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.

What is social media?

Social media can mean a variety of things depending on the person you are asking. It can be a way for people to connect, engage, network and even meet. In today’s society more and more people are becoming active users of social media and using it for multiple hours a day. For individuals, social media can be a very personal tool for them. It allows them to stay connected to friends and companies. It can also be a way for people to express themselves and talk freely about what they believe in. For an organization or business social media can be a useful marketing tool to connect and engage with their customers and promote their products or services. According to Likeable Social Mediaby Dave Kerpen, from a marketing point of view, word of mouth is very powerful and a very effective marketing tool. Which makes world of mouth on social media an even more effective marketing tool because it reaches a larger number of people. This can either take place between friends (or acquittances), or it can take place between a person of high popularity and their audience. Either way the people receiving the message will more likely listen because for them it is a trustworthy source. 

Different platforms can change the way people use social media as well. People using Facebook generally stick to friending people they know and interacting with them in person as well as online. This is especially true because to be friends both parties have to initiate something before they can connect with one another, however, Twitter is a little bit different. While you can still keep your following to friends, many people you don’t know can follow you if you have a public account. This can make your reach a bit wider especially if a lot of people follow you and your tweets get more retweets. Because this platform allows retweets, the amount of people that could see one tweet can be multiplied instantly. Platforms like Twitter tend to be a bit more casual and are often a source for many topics including a lot of humor. In my experience someone can have a tweet or two that reach many people but their account as a whole may not reach many at all. Twitter is also often where we see a lot of celebrities express their thoughts. 

Another place we see this expression is Instagram. Instagram is a platform where people post personal photos and videos that they want others to see. In my opinion Instagram is one of the most popular platforms for millennials and generation z users. It is also common to see people called influencers on here. Influencers are people that have a larger voice on a platform. They are usually well liked by a number of people and have some type of influence over them, hence the name influencers. Influencers tend to endorse products either because they like it or because the company is giving them some kind of compensation. Either way when users see this endorsement from this trusted influencer, it usually causes the product or company to be more desirable.

While social media generally means the same thing for most people, everyone has their own interpretation of it. There are even more ways others can use and interpret social media, but this is what comes to mind when I think of social media and how I think of social media being used. 

Kerpen, D. (2019). Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, And Be Generally Amazing on All Social Networks That Matter (3rd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill Education.