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Posted by Bakul Sengal
July 28, 2016
Everyone is aware of the benefits of social media today. Having personally experienced the power of this media to spread brand awareness and accelerate growth, I am using this blog as a pulpit and soapbox to shout from this digital hilltop.
You can preach and exhort the CEOs and executives; the power of social media but the flame doesn’t blaze bright until you start experiencing yourself.
How do you measure the growth driven through social media? I go through my blog’s Google Analytics from time to time and the global reach you can achieve through the social channels never cease to amaze me.
With spreading your brand awareness, it is also quintessential to monitor your brand on social media. You get a crystal-clear picture of what is being said about your company online and respond to an online community. Moreover, knowing what to measure and how to implement new strategies, one can update the business strategies and marketing efforts for better reach and engagement to boost the conversions and increase brand visibility. That’s the reason why marketers use social media analytic tools to measure the performance gained through various social networks like Facebook, Twitter and many more.
In this post, you’ll discover how social media insights can help you improve your marketing on social media.
Facebook and Twitter are the social channels that offer useful data on how did the individual’s posts performed with the audience. This includes an insight of reach and engagement.
Where can you see these metrics?
On Facebook, you have to go to Insights > Posts > Post Types to get a review of the engagement by type of the content you posted(image, text, video, post, link).
On Twitter, you can get a snapshot of each of your posts by going to Settings > Analytics > Tweets.
Consider this data religiously, because it paints a clear picture of the type of content your audience is interested in. On reviewing this data, you can determine how your audience responds to the use of images, links and videos. By monitoring this data on reach and engagement with the post type, you can tweak your approach to share the relevant content with a particular audience. This follows with leveraging the type of content that your audience wants to have.
For example, sharing the links might not do well overall, but you may discover that your audience was less inclined to engage with the curated links but more interested in the links to your own blog.
Check up your analytic and insights for the peak engagement times. Most of your audience may be active during the day, but that does not imply that they’re checking their social accounts at that time. At what time and on which days, people are engaged depends from one audience to another. This can be found by the social metrics.
On Facebook, go to Insights > Posts > When Your Fans Are Online
On Twitter, you’ll have to use a tool such as Tweriod to find out when your followers are online.
Posting your content at the right time can make a great impact. If you post early in the morning and a large audience engages with your content in the afternoon, then your early morning post may get buried and seen by only a little portion of your audience.
It’s better to experiment with different days and times to see when the audience is more likely to respond. Zero in on the time when they’re most active to improve your reach and engagement.
Facebook and Twitter, both channels offer wealth data that includes the audience’s location, interests, behaviour, lifestyle, demographics, employment and more. Twitter offers helpful audience information but Facebook provides the most diverse data set. You can get useful data from social media in a number of ways depending on the platform you’re using.
On Facebook, open Ads Manager > Audience Insights and on Twitter go to Settings > Twitter Ads > Analytics > Audience Insights to check your audience data.
Refining your content strategy based on the real data that appeals to your target audience is what you need to do. Let’s see some of examples how you can improve your social media marketing efforts by reviewing audience data.
– Plan out the content based on the latest pain points discovered.
– Adjust the tone of your messages to fit your audience.
– Create and Share the offers that the audience is interested in.
– Revamp the content and posting strategy to target the newly found audience segments.
The majority of marketers look forward to maximizing their likes, shares, retweets and responses on social media. Unfortunately, everything you share is not surely be winning your audience every time. You’ll always have some posts performing better than many others.
As mentioned in the above tip, you can refine the type of content by using similar data sets to see which topics really work well with your audience. So, use that data to integrate your social media efforts into your content marketing strategy.
For doing this on Facebook, go to Insights > Posts > Post Types and switch the engagement insights in Facebook to show likes, comments, reactions and shares for each post.
On Twitter, go to Settings > Analytics > Tweets to look at which posts got the most engagement.
– Filter the top-performing posts and use them as theme by brainstorming relevant content covering similar themes.
– You can also repurpose the old content that performed exceptionally well and promote it to the audience who may not have seen it.
– When you identify the content that underperformed, find out why it may have fallen short and look out the ways to optimize it by adding more value to improve the engagement.
Like any data set, social analytics also have their fair share of vanity metrics which often provide little value. Getting addicted to these impressive metrics is very common, but this can distract you from analyzing the metrics that would actually help you take some actions and make important decisions. So, focus on the analytics which is important to your business strategies and goals and review the data that indicates trouble signs impacting your efforts.
When you look at the insights into what affects your business goals, it will be easier to harmonize the distracting metrics and focus on what really matters.
How do you use social analytics to improve user engagement? Did you find these ways helpful in driving and refining your marketing? Feel free to share them in the comments below.
