You decided to do it. You decided to take the plunge and give social media a try. Either you made the investment to pay someone else to manage your company’s social media or you’ve been giving it go. Either way, as a business owner you now need to evaluate if last year’s effort was really worth the cost. Did it even move the needle for your business?
Social Media Analytics
“Social Media Analytics refers to the approach of collecting data from social media sites and blogs and evaluating that data to make business decisions. This process goes beyond the usual monitoring or a basic analysis of retweets or “likes” to develop an in-depth idea of the social consumer” (techopedia)
Social media analytics is the best way, currently, to evaluate the performance of your social media networks, see how it moved your business or brand, and identify what worked and what needs to be improved upon the following year.
But how do you do that? How do you take everything that has happened in the last year and review it in a way that makes sense, not only for yourself but for your staff, company, and board members?
The Most Important Social Media Analytics
From the analytics provided by social networks to third-party tools, it’s not surprising that you get overwhelmed by the amount of numbers and graphs out there. However, if you focus on the most important analytics, you will be able to build a foundation to give you a sense of how your social media is performing.
Here is our list of the most important analytics to look at and evaluate when reviewing your social media efforts:
Profiles: The social media networks that your business/brand has active (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc.)
Followers: The total number of followers across all of your business/brand’s social media networks at the end of year. (i.e. Twitter: 2,000 + Facebook: 5,000 + Pinterest 500 = 7,500 followers)
Impressions: The total number of times a post showed up in somebody’s news feed/timeline (the number of times people had the potential of seeing a post) across all social media networks for the entire year.
Reach: The total number of people who viewed a post across all social media networks for the entire year.
Post Count: The total number of posts published to all social media networks throughout the entire year.
Engagement: The total number of times people interacted with posts (i.e. liked, commented, shared, reacted, etc.) across all social media networks for the entire year.
Engagement Rate: The level of engagement posts are receiving from your social media following. Calculated by:
(Engagement / Followers) / 12 = Average Monthly Engagement Rate
Clicks: The number of times people click on the post, photo, video, or link across all social media networks for the entire year.
Audience Demographic: The followers demographics broken down by gender and age group.
Putting it Together
After you collect the above numbers and begin to review them, ask yourself the following questions:
Did your follower count increase over the year?
Did your impressions and reach increase from the previous year? If this is your first year of social media, does the total number of people that saw your company’s posts seem impressive to you?
Does the post count feel like you consistently posted throughout the year? Or did your efforts fall short?
Were people engaging with your posts?
Is your average monthly engagement rate between or higher than 1%-3.5%?
* 1%-3.5% is an average/good engagement rate
Were people clicking on your content, and heading to your company’s website?
Does the audience demographic fall within your company’s target audience profiles?
Did you reach your goals set at the beginning of the year?
Don’t have a social media goal for the year, and don’t know how to establish one? Read ‘Your No Fail, 5 Steps to Strategic Social Media’.
*Advanced Note
If you have Google Analytics set up on your website or another website analytics tracking software, you have the ability to gain deeper insight into the performance of your social media. By logging into your website analytics tool and locating traffic acquisition, you can view a breakdown of where your website traffic was originating from. Take a look at the social media category. Here you can see the level of web traffic social media was bringing in as well as which social network brought in the most.
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