Hopefully, our analytics series has given you some helpful tips and tricks when it comes to analytics and how to use them for your website. The finishing line is now in sight and in this final instalment we will help you to understand how to take all that data from your social media, whether that be Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, and use it to grow your online presence!
👍 Facebook
There's a wide range of analytics you can see within Facebook Insights that can help in numerous ways. But, once you’ve accessed the data in Facebook insights, you then need to make sure to action all those metrics to improve your reach and engagement, and attain those marketing goals!
A key starting point is that you need to have your goals set out clearly so you can be sure you can measure the success of your posts and use insights appropriately. For example, is your goal to get clicks to your website? Enquiries? More engagement for your brand? Once you know what you are trying to achieve you can measure these goals through insights.
Facebook does have a great section called ‘Actions On Page’ within insights that can tell you if a post is getting clicks to your website, a specific action or phone number clicks which can be helpful to see if time spent on those posts are actually generating the intended action or getting lost and becoming redundant in the user’s news feed.
When it comes to post reach and engagement, you can look at what performs well on your page. Posts with images may be performing better, so this may prompt you to focus your attention on more image related content and ensure you are always gathering new photos, relevant to your business, to share. The nature of your posts may give you some food for thought too, with a more formal tone detailing company services performing well or you may find a funner, more emoji-filled post with top tips that may be a better fit for your brand.
The trends you see when looking at your post insights are worth keeping in mind when you next schedule posts and audience insights such as demographics, active times and age can all help you fine-tune those posts and target your messaging. Using your insights to create better buyer personas can improve your reach and drive further engagement with better marketing content, making time spent on social media content more worthwhile.
Don’t forget by scrolling to the bottom of the Overview page on Facebook there is a section at the bottom which is called ‘Pages to Watch’ which allows you to do some competitor research by looking at how your page has been performing against other, similar pages. It’s also a great tool for looking at current industry trends and can help generate post ideas and improve content so that it appeals to your target market more.
📷 Instagram
As Instagram is owned by the same company as Facebook, now known as Meta, its main analytics tools are found within Facebook Creator studio. Insights are also available on the Instagram app by navigating to your page and then clicking ‘Insights’ or alternatively clicking the ‘View Insights’ button below a post if you want to check analytics on the go. It’s worth noting that the app differs slightly from the desktop version and in some cases offers more detailed insights than creator studio so it’s worth checking out both!
When you first go into Instagram insights via the app you will see an overview which can be changed from week view to month view and shows, at a glance, your growth from the previous period including accounts reached and engaged. This is an important tool as if you had a bumper period of engagement compared to the past then you are doing something right! It’s a good idea to know why you have been performing so well, such as trends, popular hashtags and content you used in that time period to try to keep the same level of success.
One of the big questions with Instagram is ‘When should I post?’ and with content not showing up on the user’s feed in chronological order now it can be even harder to know and keep track of the best times to post. This is one of the best uses for Instagram insights as you can see your followers’ demographics and see the times they are most active, as well as their age, gender and location. Whilst these times aren’t written in stone (and popular post time can often change) it’s a great tool to guide you on the best times to post as well as to help shape content to your audience.
Instagram insights also let you see where your impressions are coming from, for example, if they are coming from people sitting on the sofa scrolling Instagram’s main home page or via your hashtags. If you aren't getting a lot of traffic from hashtags this may be an indicator to carry out some hashtag research to help increase your reach.
Just like Facebook, by using the Instagram app’s insights you can see the number of interactions, impressions and reach of a post and how many of these interactions come from followers and non-followers. These metrics help you see what content your followers are (and aren’t!) loving and what is drawing non-followers in. If you find a post isn’t performing as well as you would like, don’t automatically think this is because of the content, it could also be down to the time you posted or hashtags used which is where using the different insights including demographics and individual post statistics go hand in hand.
🐦 Twitter
Twitter is much more basic when it comes to its built-in analytics but it’s still worthwhile to have a glance over every month. Its main takeaways are the fact it highlights your top tweets and the type of tweets that perform well which is good to know each month so as mentioned before you can try to figure out why it had such high engagement and what to do next.
It also shows your top mentions and followers which can be handy to see which local businesses and communities you are engaging with and the circles you should be populating within Twitter. You can also see how many people have visited your profile as a result of your tweets, which, if you are looking to try to generate web clicks is great to measure whether people are actively visiting your businesses profile.
If you head over to the Tweet tab in Twitter Analytics you can then see a little more detail of your percentage engagement rates, retweets and link clicks. Again, this can help with conversion tracking and see if your tweets are meeting your goals and people are actively clicking through to your site.
Your engagement rate can help you gauge how successful a tweet has been engagement wise or whether users have just scrolled straight past it. If you aren’t generating thumb-stopping content then the hours you put in have not been worthwhile. By using Twitter Analytics you can see what works and what doesn’t and improve your content.
📊 Using Analytics to Help Decide Which Platform is Right For You
As well as helping you to improve your content and reach your target audience, analytics can sometimes help you decide which platforms are more suited to you and your business. A good rule of thumb for new businesses is to have two platforms that work well for you and you dedicate time to them rather than several spread too thinly. For example, if Twitter isn’t performing as well as you might like, even after actioning analytics data, it may be better to cut your losses and focus attention on Facebook or Instagram if that is where your audience are more likely to engage with your content.
That's a wrap! It's been fantastic sharing some of our knowledge on analytics with you over the last couple of months and we hope it’s been helpful! We know it can be mind-bending but it really is an important tool for any business and even just a basic understanding of analytics can help guide your decisions when it comes to web and social media. Keeping on top of your analytics and checking in regularly can help shape your content and get the very best out of it. If you’ve missed any of our Analytics series, you can look back over the posts here!
Don’t forget we have a whole host of helpful articles, covering topics from accessibility to short-form video, as well as regularly updated guides added to our blog every month. If you’d like to see how we can help you use analytics to boost your social media presence please get in touch.