Whether you’re just dipping a toe into the social media marketing game, or you’ve jumped in head first, you’ll know how vital analytics are. Analytics are the tools we use to make sure that our marketing efforts are making the mark that we want them to.
Learning how to interpret this data can seem daunting, but just remember: you don’t have to measure everything. Understanding the top social media analytics and what they mean for your business is the most important thing.
Just a few key metrics can give you valuable insight into your social media posts’ performances and inform your future efforts in your social media marketing. You don’t need to spend hours learning the ins and outs of every metric. To help you on your way in the world of social media analytics, we’ve got the most important ones for each social media platform for you to become familiar with.
Reach
Reach is exactly what it sounds like – how many people your Facebook posts reach. Facebook’s analytic program breaks it down for you into Fan Reach and Organic Reach.
Fan Reach measures the how many fans of your page have seen your post. If your Fan Reach is low it could be an indication that people who originally liked your page have since unfollowed you, indicating that you may need to reconsider what or how you post, and how you generate fans.
Organic Reach shows you how many people, fans or otherwise, who’ve seen a given post. If your Fan Reach and Organic Reach are more or less equal, it indicates that your Facebook posts aren’t being viewed by anyone who isn’t a fan, and therefore you should look to promote your Facebook page on other mediums, therefore driving more non-fans to your Facebook page.
Engaged Users
This is the other very important metric for understanding how well your Facebook posts are doing. The more people interact with your post the wider audience your post and your brand gets.
Use the Engaged Users as an indication of what content people were interested in and use this to inform your future content creation.
Page Reach and Engagement Rate
These metrics are the same for LinkedIn as the Facebook ones discussed above, and should be focused on just like with Facebook. The more popular posts – the ones which reach the most people and drive most engagement – should be the ones you choose to be sponsored posts (posts you pay to be displayed on more feeds).
Follower Demographics
This metric allows you to understand who’s following your page. What industry they work in, what level they are, where they are… This is very important to understanding if you’re reaching your target audience or whether you need to change your approach.
Pins Created From Your Website Content
This metric is exactly as it sounds, and it’s the best indication of how visually appealing and “pinnable” your website images are. If this number is low, you should try adding more images or updating current images. Aim for images which speak for your brand and will encourage people to pin and re-pin.
Visits to Your Website
Once again, this is a very important and self-explanatory metric. This is an indication of whether your activity on Pinterest is driving traffic to your site. When you’re testing new types of posts, keep an eye on this number and see which content ends up driving more people to your website.
Best Tweets
This metric is found by clicking Recent Tweets and changing the filter from “all” to “best.” This will show your 15 best performing tweets. They’re the ones which drove the most engagement. This metric will show you what resonated with your followers most. Your future tweets should reflect this.
Best Time of Day
There’s no actual analytic tool to find out this information, but you can easily work it out by looking at the time stamps on your best tweets and correlating that with the peaks in your Timeline Review.
Gauging the time of day which is most effective for reaching people and engaging them with your tweets can really up your Twitter game. With this info you can schedule tweets to be posted when they’ll make most impact.
