Give Your Content An Extra Boost with Analytics

Your historic Social Media Marketing results need to influence your future Social Media Marketing plans.

Let us explain.

Of course, you need to push content out across your platforms. However, it’s also essential to take a step back and allow time to review and reflect. You can do this by analysing the results and return on the content you’ve shared – before you plan too far ahead with your future content.

The reason for this is, you can learn a lot from your results and what your audience responds to. Therefore, by taking the time to analyse, you can set yourself up for bigger and better results in the future.

Key Metrics To Consider

Reach

One of the key metrics to review in your social media analytics is your content’s reach. Reach is important because it gives you an insight into what level of exposure your posts are getting and therefore how impactful your Social Media activity can be with regards to growing your brand (and product) awareness and driving traffic to your website.

What’s more, Social Media algorithms will determine your reach so if you see Facebook, for example, showing specific posts to a larger audience it’s worth taking a look at your text and creative to see what may have marked this as quality content in the eyes of the Social Media platform.

Your organic reach will be somewhat limited to your followers, but if you encourage your audience to share your posts, you will be able to reach users beyond those who already follow you. Another way to increase your post reach, especially on Twitter and Instagram, is to include hashtags in your copy. You may find that some hashtags gain better reach and engagement than others so make time to conduct hashtag research.

Engagement

As above, engagement is vital to increasing your reach and exposure. High levels of engagement will also encourage Social Media algorithms to show your post to a higher percentage of your potential audience.

Factors that may influence your engagement levels are the length of your copy, the creative that you use (Video / Static Image / GIF) and whether you include a strong call to action or not. It may seem too obvious, but it helps to give your audience a direct call to action to encourage them to take the next step and not just keep scrolling!

Video Views

You could even dive deeper into what works best by reviewing your Video results based on their length. For example, are longer, more detailed videos producing higher views or do your followers prefer something short and sweet? Use this insight to influence the style and length of the videos you share going forward.

Conversations

Likes, Shares and Retweets are interesting metrics to help you understand if your audience like your content but comments are an even more useful source of feedback. When your customers start interactive and insightful conversations, whether they’re directed towards you as a business or simply to engage with other followers and customers, you will find out more about them than other engagement metrics reveal.

You may see your conversations move from comments to messenger on some platforms, which will make it even easier to analyse the impact of your Social posts. Look out for a pattern here and what posts tend to be the best conversation starters and share more like these going forwards.

Traffic

Of course, Social Media is a fantastic place to inform and engage with your customers, but digital sales or enquiries are still highly likely to come from your website. Therefore, tracking the traffic that your Social Media content drives from platform to site will allow you to monitor return on investment (ROI). Your website traffic will reveal the quality of your reach and exposure based on what actions your audience take on your website and whether they convert or bounce straight off.

Additional Things To Consider

Trends

If you find some posts receive better engagement than others, then take a look for any trends or patterns to identify why this may be. Video posts or GIFs, where there is a mix of copy and movement, may encourage your audience to engage more than a static image, for example.

Times

There is a lot of information available based on what the best time to post on Social Media is. You’ll likely find this broken down by different platforms and days. Researching the latest recommended times to post it’s an excellent place to start. Still, once you’re in the swing of posting, Social Media platforms will share their suggested times and days based on your actual audience, which will always be more accurate than generic times found on Google.

Terminology

If you’re finding your feet with your audiences across multiple platforms, then you may wish to test out different terminology. For example, LinkedIn will likely be more professional than Instagram, but perhaps your Instagram followers would appreciate some buzz words too. Use Social Media to position yourself as an expert in your field and ensure the language you use on your posts supports this.