Disclaimer: This article is dedicated to those who are a little afraid of analytics.
Social media is not just another marketing tool. It’s a science. Though it starts with ideation and creativity, but it always revolves around deep data, numbers and statistics. It’s more than just posting and sharing or networking. You need to measure your performance for the sake of the time and money, you invest.
But unfortunately, not too many social media managers feel comfortable to analyze and scrutinize social media deep data. This is probably the reason that many marketers have to face a hard time, dealing with their clients’ queries on ROI.
If you too tag yourself as one of them, here is the harsh truth for you: If you cannot manage your social media data, you cannot succeed in social media marketing.
However, you must be thinking how you could handle so many data, as you are nearly afraid of numbers. You are not alone. There are many social media marketers, who consider themselves as mathematically-challenged, yet they are successfully doing their job. Want to know the secret?
The magic mantra is: If you cannot have it as a whole, cut it into pieces.
All you need is the right analytics tools and the right metrics to monitor. Let’s dig deeper.
Google Analytics: Google analytics is the must-have tool for all businesses that have a web presence. You can literally integrate everything under one roof, be it your website, blog or your social media pages.
However, if you are a newbie, Google analytics may seem a bit over-ambitious for you. But it’s as easy as updating your Facebook status, especially as it comes with a detailed guideline. Let’s start with some primary metrics.
For running online campaigns, we often need to set a landing page. You can identify the best and worst landing pages on your website on the tool. It helps you plan your future campaigns.
You can also target the best-performing geographic areas for your next online campaign. Google Analytics offers a comprehensive view on cities, countries and continents, where your potential customers reside. You can change the view according to your needs.
Facebook Insights: Facebook offers an in-built analytics tool for business pages. There are 6 broad categories Overview, Likes, Reach, Visits, Posts and People. But you don’t need to deal with all of them. Three data are enough to draw insights about your page’s performance.
First of all, figure out the best time and day to post on Facebook. You can see how many fans are present on each day of the week. This is available under Posts. This is extremely helpful to ensure optimum reach of your posts.
Second is, measure page posts success with their reach.
Compare each post with by their reach and try to identify what kind of posts is doing well on your page. You can also tally them with the Likes and Dislikes. Try to identify the days, when many people ‘Unliked’ your page. Now go to Posts tab and figure out what content you posted on or before the particular day. And the process is same for Likes. If you can draw a pattern between posts and Likes/Dislikes, you can easily determine which posts are working and which are not.
The third metrics is Total Likes vs. Talking about This (TAT).
If you are new to Facebook marketing, you must be giving more priorities to Facebook Likes. But not necessarily all the people, who have liked your page, come back to see what you post regularly. Talking about This (TAT) signifies the number of people, who regularly engage with you. For a business both of them play a vital role.
It’s stated that pages with less than 100,000 Likes should get a TAT of 10% of total Likes. And for pages with more than 100,000 Likes, TAT percentage should be 5% of total Likes.
Followerwonk: Facebook Insights show you the busiest and laziest time slots for your business on Facebook. Followerwonk does the same, but for Twitter. Go to Analyze Followers and get a detailed analysis of your Twitter community.
With this Moz tool, you can see the busiest hours for your community. These are the slots, when the people, you follow, log in to Twitter.
The tool also shows the hours, when you tweet. Here you can actually compare two time slots to determine the most beneficial hours for you. However, you can also figure out when you get most of your retweets and mentions on Twitter.
Twitonomy: Twitonomy is a Twitter-based tool that helps you monitor any Twitter account, including yours. After logging in, you can see that there are several tabs on your Twitinomy profile. Go to Mentions & RTs tab. Here you can find everything that you need to know about how your content is being shared.
There are three segments under the tab: Mentions, RTs and Favorites.
The most important data that you can find on Twitonomy is the most influential and active people in your community. These are the people, who not only share your content, but also help you amplify their reach. So, ensure that your tweets reach them.
Apart from that, you can detect the hashtags, for which you have got maximum number of mentions and favorites. This is helpful to create your future tweets for utmost visibility.
Bit.ly: Bit.ly is an URL shortening tool that offers a detailed analytical data about every link. It not only shows you the total number of clicks that your links get, but also gives every tiny yet significant data like time of clicks, geographic regions, from where the link is clicked, and the platforms, where the link is shared.
The time of each click is important to find out the best time to share your content. However, you may not find the right time at the first chance. Keep experimenting with different time slots to figure out the best ones for you.
Secondly, knowing where and how your content is viewed and saved would give you an edge over your competitors. You can toiler your future content accordingly and concentrate more on the platforms that offer better visibility.
Facebook Ad Analytics: If you are a Facebook marketer, running ads is nothing new to you. Be it for more Likes or for getting attention to a particular page post, Facebook ads are must for businesses. But do you measure your ad performance with conversion pixels? It helps you compare the actual result with the expected one.
Conversion pixel is an advanced option to track your ad performance. Create the pixel according to your ad objective.
Facebook will provide you with a code that you need to copy and paste on the landing page of your website or blog that you are targeting in the ad.
So, here is the summery:
Tool – Google Analytics
Metrics –
- Best-performing landing pages
- Potential geo-locations
Tool – Facebook Insights
Metrics –
- Fan activity time-slots
- Post reach
- TAT
Tool – Followerwonk
Metrics –
- Time-slots when your community is active on Twitter
- Time-slots when you are active on Twitter
- Time-slots when you need to be active on Twitter
Tool – Twitonomy
Metrics –
- Influencers in your community on Twitter
- Most active people in your community on Twitter
- Hashtags that get you maximum Mentions and Favorites
Tool – Bit.ly
Metrics –
- Best time to share a link
- Best platforms to share your content
- Potential locations to promote your content
Tool – Facebook ad Analytics
Metrics –
- Comparison between expected result and actual result
- Tracking your ad performance more accurately