From the blog

Learn more about social media analytics

Written by Lucy Kemish

You know you want to manage your social media in-house, but you’re struggling to understand your social media analytics. Maybe you just don’t know where to start?

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We will go through what social media analytics are, some of the main platform analytics, and what some of the key terminologies mean.

“Social media analytics is the process of tracking, collecting and analysing data from social networks. This makes the process easier” (Hootsuite, 2021)

We need to know about analytics which means we can adjust our social media strategy accordingly, so we can continue with what is working and adjust what isn’t. This means you are making the most of your time, and not wasting money, not forgetting your effort that goes into these things. 

You can use paid or free options, and we will look at these in a bit more detail later on.

But first let’s break down the terminology, so it’s easier to understand

Analytics terminology made simple

Organic traffic: Visitors that land on your page from unpaid means 

Page views: the number of times your page has been viewed 

Reach: the number of people who saw your Facebook post

Content interactions: an interaction between the audience and your social media profile 

Total followers: Demographics and sources of followers

Post engagements: a like, comment, share or click received on a post from your page

Visitors: Demographics and sources of visitors

Followers: someone who subscribes to your page to receive your updates

Let’s take a look at the some of the FREE options:

LinkedIn

Understanding your LinkedIn followers is vital, you can use it to adjust who you are attracting to your page by adjusting your posts and they can help you to recruit new people. You can review three sets of analytics in LinkedIn from a company page:

  1. Updates (You can see impressions, reactions, comments, shares, engagement)
  2. Visitors (You can see demographics of your audience here, including job, location, industry)
  3. Followers (The same as for visitors, but for followers instead)

Facebook  

Facebook analytics allow you to view analytics to see how your audience is engaging with your Facebook page. You can view Facebook page insights such as video views, page/post engagement, post/story reach, recommendations, and responsiveness to messages. You can also view when your audience is online to allow you to craft your marketing message in a timely manner.

Additionally, you can look at your Facebook audience insights (e.g. age, gender, job titles, relationship status, hobbies) to deeper understand your audience and therefore adjust your marketing strategy accordingly. Lastly, if you are using Facebook ads, you can track and monitor ad spend, people reached, engagement and links clicked.

Twitter

There are three main sections to Twitter analytics 

  1. Home

You can find your top tweet, follower, and mentions in this section. You can also view your top-performing content. 

2. Tweet Activity Dashboard

Within the Dashboard, you can track engagements and impressions including video views, link clicks, retweets, and replies.

3. Campaign Dashboard

Within the campaign dashboard, you can track your Twitter ads which include impressions, reach, engagement rate, and cost per action.

Instagram

There are some specific data you can view for Instagram, take a look below:

Posts and stories: You can gauge how individual posts and stories perform by viewing likes, replies.

Activity: You can view how many people view your posts and/or stories. You can view interactions here such as profile visits, email taps, call button taps.

Audience: Learn all about who is viewing your content and when. So that you can create an engaging strategy to suit your audience, at a time when they are looking at your content.

Impressions: the number of time your content is displayed, no matter if it’s clicked or not. An impression indicates that it’s been included in the newsfeed

You can learn all about your audience from your Instagram analytics which means you can craft your marketing message for that audience. Along with audience analytics, you can track post and stories performance. There are three areas you can investigate:

Both Hootsuite and Talkwalker are paid options.

Finally let’s look at some of the paid options available:

Hootsuite

Hootsuite allows you to view the number of clicks, comments, reach, shares, and video views. You are able to see the increase in your followers. The fact that you can report these in excel, Powerpoint or PDF’s means that it’s easy to share the results, which is good if you’re part of a team. You can also track response times, which is particularly useful to see the productivity of your team.

Talkwalker 

Talkwalker allows you to analyse engagement, reach, comments and also evaluates tone, intent and emotions behind messages. Talkwalker allows you to filter by region, demographics, types of content and different devices so you can really get to understand how to target your marketing message to your audience.

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