Social media, the digital platform of exaggerated personas and heightened expressions, is home to billions of individuals that yearn to form relationships and connect to other like-minded beings. However, social media isn’t just targeted at people like me and you but to organisations, too. A place where a new source of consumer insights is created to form future business strategies with the help of social media analytics.
If you’re new to the business industry, like I am, then you would not of even thought of analytics before. You’d post your update and rate its’ popularity from the amount of social sharing, such as likes, comments and shares.
Yes, this is a big part of social media analytics but there is a whole hidden world of data behind each and every post you create.
I know, I know. Data is boring BUT, and this is a big old but, once you start to analyse the data you become addicted. You will start checking every hour of the day to check your popularity (Or unpopularity…).
Unfortunately, unless you have business social media accounts then there isn’t much available to yourselves, except for Twitter, which I think is the most irrelevant social media site in existence.
If you need some instant gratification to feel as though you’re posts are changing the world then go ahead and click your lovely face icon in the top right corner and go to analytics.
In this section you can uncover whether you need to up your social media game or not. This section creates a monthly summarisation of your page, including:
- How many tweets you’ve posted.
- How many impressions your tweets have received.
- How many people have visited your profile.
- How many new followers you’ve gained.
- How many people have mentioned your @@@@.
- Your top tweets and top followers.
If this isn’t enough to fill that yearning for popularity then do not stress my friends, each individual tweet you send into the twittersphere comes with its very own set of data.
Underneath each tweet there are three small vertical lines, click on it.
Here you will find:
- Tweet impressions
- Total engagements that are broken down into several categories, such as link clicks and profile clicks.
For those of you that are still reading and have that swanky business account… *tumbleweed*.
Facebook offers an extensive version of analytics compared to Twitter. You can pretty much see data connected to every single aspect of your account.
If you go to your business page and click on the insights tab then you will be able to see your performance statistics.
Like Twitter, you can see your performance over a time period but now you can choose your own, whether you want to analyse a day or 28 days.
Things you can analyse on the insights tab of Facebook:
- Summary: Total and weekly page likes, total and weekly post reach and total and weekly engagement statistics.
- Popular Periods: Do you want to know which posts were the most popular so that you can boost them with promotions? Or do you want to know which time was the most popular in terms of new page likes so that you can revise the content used and understand trending and viral themes?
- Traffic and pages: You can understand who, what, when where, why and how people discovered your business and whether they hated you and blocked your content from appearing on their timelines. Yes, Facebook is a snitch.
- Video Content: If your business creates a lot of visual storytelling for your followers then you can track the most popular videos and the amount of minutes they viewed before switching over to a cat playing the piano.
- Demographics: If you want to collect this data for strategic marketing purposes or just to be a full-on stalker then congratulations because you can collect most things, from gender to age and location to language.
So there it is.
The basics of analytics for two giants in the social media world.
Now that you’ve learnt how to feed your own ego its your turn to get analysing.
– Liam
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