Understanding Your Social Media Analytics

Ideally, you should check your social media analytics regularly especially if you run any business pages.

You can also hire a social media marketing agency that can provide this insight or help train your or a team.

Here is our advice on what to look out for so you can make sense of what you see, and adapt your social media marketing strategy in response.

Audience

It can be extremely useful to understand who is viewing your content, and the audience section is specifically designed for this. It will give you a breakdown of aspects such as gender, age, interests, income, browser type and even when the user is most active online.

If your audience doesn’t align with your brand as a whole, you can switch your efforts to a different platform where the demographics will be a better fit. For example, if your target audience is over 60 you might find them on Facebook but probably not on Tik Tok.

Clicks

Clicks are usually tied to link clicks, such as how many times people clicked a URL in your social media message. Clicks are also measured in relation to PPC (pay per click) advertising, which works by creating a PPC campaign on social media and paying a pre-agreed amount per click.

Clicks act as somewhat of an anomaly in the analytics stakes, because you are looking to drive traffic away from the original page the user is on. In contrast, other analytic categories focus on how the user interacted with the content while remaining on the page. Therefore, it can be tough to receive a high level of clicks even if the campaign is successful.

Engagement

Engagement includes any kind of interaction between you and your followers. It could be likes on a post, or even them sharing a review of your services and tagging you (user generated content). A high level of engagement signals people are not only seeing your content but interacting with it in some way, which is what you want to see.

Polls are an excellent way to boost engagement because they are simple to use and offer the chance for people to give their opinion. Photos and video also help to boost engagement, especially as visual content is more tangible for your users versus walls of text.

Impressions

Impressions count the number of times your content was displayed, regardless of whether it was clicked on or not. All platforms have a slightly different way of calculating impressions. On YouTube, an impression is earned after at least 50% of a thumbnail has been viewed for 1 second.

It can be extremely insightful if you have a high impression rate but a low engagement or click through rate. This would indicate you’re doing all the right things to get your social media content noticed, but the actual content itself is not appealing to the audience.

Reach

Your reach refers to the total number of people who see your content. In an ideal world, all of your followers would see your content. But due to the ever changing algorithms plus the need for users to hit a notification bell to see what you post, this isn’t always the case.

If your reach is low on a particular post, it could be down to the time of day it was posted. For example, if you post content in the middle of the night your followers aren’t likely to be active then. Though poor reach could also be due over posting too, as the platform may deem your content as spam.

Getting to the bottom of a low reach number will help you boost all other areas of your analytics. It could even be as simple as including more hashtags, as this will open up your audience to a wider crowd.

Creating A Social Media Report

If you’re familiar with digital marketing, you’ll know that social media analytics are routinely exported into a spreadsheet to generate a report. Depending on the client, this could be done on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis.

The data will also consider organic vs paid elements, such as paid reach vs organic reach. This will show how successful paid advertising campaigns were, compared with the traffic your pages normally receive. When the data is analysed in greater detail, it can help to build a better picture of your overall strategy.

To Sum Up

Social media analytics might seem baffling at first, but it’s worth getting to grips with the topic. That way, you can better understand your audience and build impactful campaigns as a result. If you lack the time or knowledge to analyse your own social media stats, then it’s worth outsourcing your social media marketing to a professional instead.