Use Social Media Analytics To Track Traffic And Engagement
Social media analytics refers to collecting and organizing data from social media sites and blogs and evaluating that data to make accurate business decisions. Here, social media refers not only to Facebook or Twitter but any platform users use to promote their business. These insights can be used to not only make tactical adjustments but can also help drive strategic decisions. Analytics helps us simplify data from dozens of networks, millions of people, and various activities. Social analytics can give you a deeper understanding of user behaviour and demographic data. Social media analytics guides you to keep track of your marketing strategy’s progress and ensure the welfare of your clients and competitors. It also gives an in-depth idea of the areas we need to improve, target audience, engagements, etc.
To track social media analytics, we tend to look at likes, comments, shares and saves, but we should also consider monitoring mentions and discussions of our brand or consumer insights. Social media analytics tools help to do all this math while also creating performance reports to share with the team, stakeholders, and clients — to figure out where we’re succeeding and struggling.
Let us now discuss a few points on the importance of analytics in detail:
- Helps to understand the audience: Analytics help in understanding the audience, their age, likes/dislikes and country they are from, and these data, in turn, help us to identify the timing of posts, length and level of professionalism, etc. E.g., if we can post something when most of our audience is online, it will have the highest chance of appearing on their feed, thus driving more engagement.
- Gives an idea of what’s our best: Social media analytics help us to identify which platform we are engaging the most with and which platform we need to give more focus on. Tables, pie charts, graphs and other graphical reports help to decide on this.
- Helps create better content: When we track our social networks, we understand what kind of content drives the best results. Some platforms like Facebook have built-in analytics that shows what types of media perform best. We can also use analytics to check how our blogs perform. We can see which content is shared more, the number of visits to each social network, how much time people spent and how many people converted to subscriptions and sales.
- Helps to understand competitors and learn from them: Our competitors are also creating content on the topics we are working on, and they have unique insights. Many online websites help you with this data. Just we need to put an URL that displays the traffic percentage, engagement and other data, which will help to identify the type of content that works and reaches the wider audience. We can also take note of the mistakes and shortcomings so that we can avoid them and only focus on content that gives results.
- Metrics can help create a better strategy: We may not always create the best strategy in the first attempt. We can make mistakes and follow tactics that will not work. This is where metrics can play a major role in guiding us. They will not only give us the best strategy but also suggest steps to follow it
Frequently Asked Questions:
- Which tools can I use for tracking my social media performance?
Ans. Many reliable tools can be used to track social media analytics. Few platforms like Facebook and YouTube come in-built with these options like YouTube Creator Studio, and other tracking tools include HubSpot, Google Analytics, etc.
2.How frequently should I check my analytics?
Ans. It is recommended to check your analytics regularly to keep yourself updated about your performance.
3.What metrics should I measure in social media?
Ans. We can track various metrics such as Engagements, tags, mentions, followers, likes/dislikes, reach, etc.