How to check your social media analytics

Struggling to work out if your social media posts are hitting the spot?

Let me show you exactly where to check your social media analytics, or ‘Insights’ as we call them. These are the handy stats behind your audience growth and engagement, which show you exactly how well, or not, a social media post, campaign, or overall marketing strategy is doing.

Why you need to understand your social media analytics (and how to track them)

Your social ‘insights’ are the analytics, or stats behind your audience data and your content’s performance. These social media analytics are crucial to understand if you wish to make more impact with the content you create on each social media platform. Let me walk you through the reasons why these are helpful to understand;

1. They tell you who your audience is - not just in age and sex, but geographically as well. They also give you an idea of when these people are most active and therefore when you should be posting.

2. They tell you which pieces of content your audience preferred to engage with - which is important if you are posting regularly, because you don’t want to continue to create content that isn’t truly resonating with the people who could easily become sales leads.

3. They show you clearly what isn’t working overall - this indicates when it is time to invest in learning new content skills to make more of the content trends that are exciting your clients right now.

Watch the video for some more tips on understanding your social insights.

I generally record my social media analytics weekly now, but many of my clients prefer monthly. Either choice is fine, but the act of recording your insight data at regular intervals is important, because it shows you clear patterns in your potential client’s thought processes on a given platform, over a period of time. It also shows you over time how well individual campaigns have been viewed by your audiences across different platforms, giving you an indication of individual platform strategies you may need to design.

Will my social media analytics change on each platform?

I often get asked if your social media analytics will vary on each platform? Yes, your analytics will change from platform to platform, just as your audience will too. It is also true to say that over time on one individual platform, as your audience evolves, that your approach to that individual platform may change too.

How to use your Instagram insights in 2021

There are three areas that you will want to take note of initially, until you are more familiar with how to use your business account insight data and what these stats show you. The key points you are looking for are;

1. Your Audience - where your audience is based and what their demographic information is.

2. When your audience is most active - because posting at the right time of day for you matters.

3. How your audience has responded to the content you have shared - the posts, stories and IGTV videos you have created and which have performed well in the last set period of time (for me that is 7 days, but it could easily be 30 days if you prefer). This will tell you lots about your audience preferences.

Watch the video for further explanation.

Once you feel comfortable with recording these social media analytics regularly, you can look around and see what other insights might be useful for you to record from your Instagram account.

How to use your Facebook insights in 2021

Just as there were only a few areas of interest you need to record initially on Instagram, the same is true for your Facebook business page too. Under ‘Insights’ you will want to record data from;

1. People - the demographic split in particular

2. Activity - The times your audience is currently most active. You will find this under ‘posts’.

3. Posts - which format and specific content is performing well for you

Watch the video for further explanation.

Once you feel comfortable with recording these social media analytics regularly, you can look around and see what other insights might be useful for you to record from your Facebook business page account.

How to use your Twitter insights in 2021

Twitter works slightly differently with the insights that it gives, or ‘Analytics’ as they term them. You will be able to record things like;

1. Tweet impressions - how many times Twitter has shown your tweet

2. Profile visits

3. Mentions - where someone uses your Twitter handle in a tweet

4. Followers

5. Top tweet

6. Top mention

7. Top follower

Watch the video for further explanation.

What is missing from your Twitter social media analytics is the key to your demographic and audience activity information. For this I use a free software called Followerwonk to help me and I use the ‘analyze’ tool, typing in my handle and my setting ‘analyze their followers’. This will tell you: where your audience is based and when they are most active.

As always I hope that has been helpful.

Sara x