Like any other marketing techniques, you need to measure your social media marketing techniques as well. By using social media analytics you can not only analyze your performance, but you can also modify your marketing strategy for a better reach and visibility.
When you are adopting new techniques or skills, you should focus on what you are doing and how well such techniques will help you to achieve your marketing objectives. For this purpose you can follow the reports, charts and graphs to analyze your previous performance. We, social media marketers, are kind of lucky, we can use not only bunch of free social media tools, but Facebook and Twitter offer free analytics tools as well.
In this blog, you’ll discover four ways to use Facebook and twitter analytics to accelerate your marketing strategy.
How to measure what matters to you
Social analytics also have their share of vanity metrics like others, which allows a very little value. If you are paying attention to vanity metrics surely it will distract you from focusing on the analytics that are important to your strategy and goals. If increasing your user engagement is your goal, then you have to get zero for per post engagement levels to check what works and what doesn’t.
Adjustment of Your Content
You can check data for individual posts performance with the audience, including their reach and engagement on both social media giant networks Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook:
On Facebook, go to Insights > Posts > Post Types and you can review the engagement even by the type of content you posted (post, link, image, video). This section tells you everything regarding types of posts return in the highest engagement rates as well.
Twitter:
On Twitter, see snapshots of engagement for each of your tweets by going to Settings > Analytics > Tweets.
View of engagement on each of your tweets.
By paying close attention, this data will show you clear picture of audience mentality and how your audience responds to your tweets (links, images, and video). Let’s assume, your audience engages when you share curated links, but they are less interested in your own blog links, you can discover these all facts and others by monitoring your tweets engagement.
Engagement and Reach vs. Post Type will be helpful for you to tweak your approach for sharing content by following this method you can find your targeted audience easily.
Tune-Up Your Posting Schedule
You can never know the exact time when your audience gets online on social media during the day. But, having such insight can be good for planning your posting schedule.
Facebook:
On Facebook, go to Insights > Posts > When Your Fans Are Online. For example, have a look at the chart below; this one illustrates the hourly usage of Facebook by the audience.
Twitter:
For Twitter, there is no such tool offered yet, but you can use a tool such as Tweriod, Sotrender, Rival IQ etc. to find out when your followers are online.
Posting your content at the right time will make a big impact on your social media marketing strategy. Timely posting is extremely important when you need to target limited niche of audience on social media. Let’s imagine if you are posting early in the morning, but the audience interactions typically engages with your content in the afternoon, then you don’t have to post in morning. Experiments in different times of the day and your insight and analytics will help you decide the suitable time for posting or peak engagement times in a day.
Inform Your Messaging
Facebook and Twitter both are the reigning champs of social media networks with mass data of user including demographics, interests, lifestyle etc.
On Facebook, go to Ads Manager and open the Audience Insights.
On Twitter, open the Settings > Twitter Ads > Analytics > Audience Insights. Following snapshot clearly shows that, this information is readily available for social media platforms to collect data.
Instead of planning and building strategies of your content marketing to target your buyer personas, you should refine your content strategy to appeal to your targeted audience based on real audience data.
Want to Enhance More engagement?
Mostly social media marketers want to increase the number of likes, reposts and shares from their social media posts. But bitter truth is that not everything you share is going to be viral with your audience. But you can engage your audience by sharing versatile, relevant topics and content. You can also use your data to integrate your social media marketing efforts to your content marketing strategy.
On Twitter, open your Settings > Analytics > Tweets and you can see which post topics get the most user engagement.
On Facebook, open Insights > Posts > Post Types and then click the engagement metrics in Facebook to show comments, reactions and shares for each post instead of post clicks or general engagement.
Now, you can identify content which is still underperformed and how you can improve engagement by enhancing your title and headlines or add more values to the content you promoted.
Without analytics you cannot identify your goals. It makes easier to improvise your intrusive metrics and focus on what really matters to you.