Analytics is the measurement of your social media’s engagement, top posts, and other collective, measurable data to help you visualize and determine what works and what doesn’t in terms of social media management. The most important analytic you can measure is probably your top posts and/or tweets. This is very crucial when deciding what your followers are engaging and interacting with the best, allowing you to use this information towards your end goal of increasing analytics.
Facebook analytics are somewhat similar but definitely differ from Twitter and Instagram analytics. When looking at Facebook’s analytics, they obviously measure your post engagement but also your page views, likes, reach, and videos. They also show what times your post received the best engagement. Twitter analytics show your top tweets, top mentions and top follower. It also measures your activity on Twitter where you can see how impressionable your tweets were over a certain period of time. Another interesting thing Twitter analytics measures is your twitter traffic and bounce rate, which is basically your reach and how long a follower is on your page or engages with your tweet before moving on. Instagram measures your engagement per follower and per media as well as hashtag, follower, and content analytics. As a business or brand, Instagram also compares your competitions analytics.
To be an effective social media manager, one must not base their strategy purely on engagement. Posting ten times a day is not recommended, but instead post two to three times a day and ensure each post is relevant, up to date, and engaging. Making every single post a promotional ad or a “buy this now” is generally ineffective, exhausting and overused by businesses. The best times of day to post can be found in studying analytics. Always identify your audience, understand your goal of growing your analytics, channel specific metrics, and certain tools for channel measurement.
Business’s rely on analytics for many things. Looking at their most engaged with posts helps them to configure a social media strategy that will increase their analytics. They also use analytics to measure reach which is simply how many people their post actually reachs and similar things like best times of day to post and also the type of content that followers engage with most. Business’s use analytics to stay ahead of the social media game with constantly changing algorithms.
As a business, your goal should always be to grow your analytics. You do this by measuring the top posts, tweets, engagement, page likes and views, followers, and reach. Taking all this into consideration when creating that “perfect post” will allow you to up your analytics. From a journalist standpoint, engagement is important but content is key. Using analytics to view your post’s reach can encourage and help you create a “sticky post” which is just something that really sticks with your followers and you use this along with other analytic metrics to boost engagement and can ultimately overall increase your reach and followers.
A big company that helps your measure analytics is of course, you guessed it- Google. They are able to measure analytics on all your social media accounts in detail. Personally, I would prefer to use Google to assist in measuring my analytics because they measure the most minuet details that can be a deciding factor in influence and engagement.
Analytics are very valuable to business’s, journalist, and brands who use social media to spread the word and increase customers, followers, readers, viewers, etc. I believe the brain behind analytics is a computer although they may be managed by specially trained social media managers. Even to an average, recreational social media user, analytics can be useful in figuring out why or why not your post gets little to no engagement and who your post is really reaching may surprise you.
If I was given the incredible task of discovering and designing a way to measure engagement, I would create a system that tracks every post you make and every post your friends make. There would be certain categories for different posts such as a picture, video, re-posts, and captions only. By separating each category and measuring reactions, comments, and shares per post, then the system would compare your posts and engagement versus your friends and give you tips and tricks tailored specifically for you to enable increased engagement.
Facebook’s “like” button means to me that your post generated and sparked some sort of reaction. Either they literally just liked the post, agreed with it, or could relate to it in some fashion. I think a better way of measuring popular attitude has already been created by Facebook when they added other reactions besides the “like” button. The only thing that is missing now is a “dislike” button and I feel it will come in good time, but may end up creating more problems and reports than Facebook wants to deal with. In the end, analytics is a major part of every business and social media manager’s job in order to increase their brand’s reach, engagement and followers.
Ashlynn Worley 