In a past blog of ours talking about who should be running your social media, one of the things we pressed on is having the proper experience to run the social media account for a business. Coming up with proper content isn’t something that can be done in an hour with whatever comes to mind; there has to be thought put into each post, and each post needs to have a reason behind it. One of the best ways to figure out what to post is by looking at the analytics of your current social media accounts.
So what is social media analytics? To describe it in the easiest way, social media analytics is the process of collecting data from your social media sites, such as your Facebook business account or your Instagram. This information then can be used to formulate business decisions and marketing tactics. Analytics are crucial when deciding on what to post and when to post it. We covered some of our reasons as to why analytics play an important role in content management in our Facebook Live last week, but we wanted to go more into detail so that you can figure out whether or not your current social plan is working for you:
Figure Out Which Posts Were the Most Popular – and Why
Take a look at the analytics on your current social media channels and find your most popular posts. Look for the posts with the most likes, comments and shares. Ask yourself this question: “Why was this post so popular?” Once you’ve discovered these posts, it’s time to look at the back end of your channels and look at the analytics.
There are multiple social media channels that have their own analytics tools, with the most popular being Facebook Insights and Analytics and Twitter Analytics. Facebook Insights and Analytics will measure your post engagement, reach, and the demographics of people who have liked your page. Likewise, Twitter Analytics gives you the chance to see the amount of Tweets, the impressions of the Tweets, your profile visits and your profile mentions, but will only show the information from the last 28 days.
Discover and Identify Your Followers
Have you thought about how your words might be construed by different people? A type of language that you may use for one following might not be the one that you would want to use for another. One of the easiest ways to discover how to place your product or service is by using demographic information.
Demographics are the statistical data relating to the following of your social media, and it will be able to give you some insight as to who you are most likely to influence. Demographic information includes, but is not limited to: age, gender, race, marital status, education level and religion.
For example, if you look at your demographics and see that 85% of your social media fans are females with children, you will want to gear your posts to speak to mother’s and why this product or service can help them and their children. Likewise, if large percentage of your following is male, you would have to change your voice to gear more towards what they would be most interested in hearing.
Create an Ad – and Use a Lookalike Audience
Are you looking to get more likes on your social media, or do you want people to come into your location to try something out? The best way to get the word out there is to create what Facebook refers to as a “lookalike audience”. A lookalike audience can identify common qualities of people who like your page, and Facebook will find people who share the same demographic information or interests so that your business can reach new, potential clients that you might not have exposed yourself to.
Smaller audiences for lookalike audiences can more closely match with your current following. While people think it might be better to create a larger audience so that the reach is higher, it reduces the amount of similarity between the lookalike and the source audience. You can also have multiple lookalike audiences per ad if your product happens to have two major audiences of completely different demographics. The options are almost limitless!
Keep an Eye on the Latest Reports From Social Media Platforms
Social media platforms change so quickly that it keeps those who work with social media on our toes. Earlier this month, Instagram announced that it would add a polling feature to the platform’s “Story” platform, which lets users (and businesses) use an interactive poll to ask a question and receive answers in real time. Over on Facebook, the platform has recently released a new feature that lets you run your Facebook ads through Messenger. Were you aware of these changes?
This is one of the reasons it’s crucial to make sure you know what’s happening behind-the-scenes at your favorite social media hubs. A post or an ad that may have worked last month might not work the same this month, which creates a pleasant challenge for those whose job it is to decipher analytic information and create a proper plan based off of that information. By seeing the changes that are coming from places such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, it will help them make a plan that is fresh, fun and useful to the audience.
At Pulse Marketing, we go above and beyond for our clients when it comes to social media. By using analytic information, we are able to carefully craft specifically-targeted social media posts and ads that will be seen by those who are most interested in the product or service. If you would like more information on how Pulse Marketing can help your business excess, contact us today to schedule your free one hour consultation.
