Analysis is an essential part of every social media strategy. It will help you to learn about the performance of your content and optimize your strategy to maximize results.
The metrics related to each social profile are growing in importance and it is not enough to take a quick look at them… you must analyze and compare results to draw insightful conclusions.
WARNING
Before you get started in the social media worlds, you must define your objective to direct your strategy to one direction. Once you have done it, you must analyze the performance of that strategy and see if it is helping to reach your goals.
How to analyze your social networks: What to measure
Social networks differ to each other but in general, most metrics are very similar when it comes to understanding the performance of the content.
In order to discover how your social networks are doing, there are two important aspects to consider: The evolution of your community and the performance of your publications. With the right information about them, you will know what works well on social networks and what is failing.
Community Evolution
As of today, there is a community on each social platforms, that is, all the people who follow you on the different social networks. This explains why it is crucial to know the amount of followers gained across time and what attracts them towards your account.
If your objective is to build a large community, it’s important that you analyze the evolution of its growth across time
The growth of your followers is a metric that you shouldn’t neglect. It allows you to get a clear understanding of at what pace your brand is advancing.
Within this analysis you don’t have to limit yourself by only checking how many followers you gain or lose over time. You should cross different data extracted from your social networks:
- Does the number of followers increase the more you publish?
- Does the publication of certain content have a negative impact on the number of followers?
- Does specific content format (videos or photos) have better performance in relation to the evolution of your community?
Apart from analyzing if your community grows or declines, it is also important to learn about your audience and know its demographics. It will provide priceless clues about where to focus your content strategy.
With demographics we mean information related to the country, gender, age range, etc. of your audience. This knowledge will help you define your content and understand the type of audience your content is directed to.
- For instance, if most of your audience is based in the US, you should share content in English.
- If you have many followers in their twenties, you will have to adapt your content to attract a younger audience.
Performance of your publications
We have already reviewed the first aspect that you must include in your social media analysis. The second part that you must consider is the performance of the content uploaded on your accounts. It will help you understand the type of content that your audience likes.
- Spend time observing which types of content have better performance: photos, videos or carousels.
- The time when your content is more successful: Analyze the best time to publish.
Important metrics to understand the performance of your publications
In order to find out whether your publications are getting the results expected or on the other hand, if you are losing your precious time, check out this list with the most important metrics to track the performance of your posts:
Reach
This metrics shows how many people have seen your publication. That is, the specific number of people who have seen your content. This number doesn’t change if the same person has seen it three times, it counts as one unique person.
You must consider different parameters to calculate the reach of a publication:
- Number of followers
- Number of impressions
Engagement
The engagement represents the loyalty of your followers towards your brand. It is the level of interaction that your account has with your followers.
Depending on the social network that you are analyzing, the engagement formula differs slightly. Even this formula can vary depending on who is doing it. Either way, the most important thing is to be consistent in the calculation to analyze the evolution and see whether your strategy is working or not.
In short, the engagement is calculated taking into account the interactions received on each social network with respect to the number of followers or people reached with your content. Some of these interactions are:
- Likes: It means that your followers enjoyed the content that you have shared, it shows that your publications had a positive impact on your audience.
- Shares: retweets or shares. They could be considered recommendations, your followers shared your content because they liked it. It’s very interesting data to understand the impact of your content.
- Comments: Comments are similar to likes. If your publications get comments is normally consider something positive.
- Mentions about your brand: when you are mentioned on any social network, you will receive a notification. Other accounts talking about your business is something positive: they are recommending you, it gives you visibility and helps you reach more users.
The importance of analyzing social networks
Now you know how to measure your performance on social networks. In this section, I will explain why it is so important to do it periodically and which benefits it will bring being consistent with your social media analysis.
You will never discover whether you are doing things right or wrong if you don’t analyze their evolution and impact, this applies to either social networks or any other field. When you don’t know the results, it’s difficult to design a successful strategy since you won’t be able to identify what needs to be changed.
This is why it is necessary to know the results of your social media strategies. Truth is it’s difficult to know how a publication is going to work. You might think that it will have a positive impact on social media and afterwards realize that you didn’t have the success you were expecting or vice versa.
It is crucial to keep your strategy under control, know what you can analyze.
Social media analytics will help you with different aspects:
- Optimize your strategy and maximize its performance.
- Reach a larger audience
- Know if your objectives have been achieved or if you are on the right path to accomplish them.
- Learn how social networks work, which content succeeds and which not.
- Understand your audience and their interests.
At the end of the day, if you carry out a thorough social media analysis, you will save your time because you will know what, how and when something works well. It won’t be necessary to spend hours creating content that doesn’t work.
Tip: use social media reports
Analyzing is not a one-time thing. If you want to keep getting good results, as everything in life, you must be consistent.
This is why I recommend you that you analyze your social networks periodically, once a month, every three months,… this is up to you. By being consistent in your analysis you will be able to understand the evolution of your strategy and compare different periods of time to draw even more insightful conclusions.
Social media reports come in very handy when we want to carry out periodic analysis and compare results. They are a great summary with all the relevant information about what’s happening on your social media accounts. A great way to improve your daily job, understand and measure the impact of your social media amongst your community.
Keep your social media accounts under control.
Measure the return of investment of your social media activities.
Apply changes or replicate content depending on the performance of your publications.
Each social platform offers their own section about analytics to check the main data relative to your social accounts and keep track with your main metrics. This is an example of Instagram insights:
There are also external tools that can help you analyze your performance and download automated reports with all the information. This type of platform is very useful when you have multiple accounts on different social networks and you want to have all the information in the same place, they will save your precious and limited time.
Now you know how to analyze your social media activity and learn some valuable tips that will come in handy when you get started.
Do you have everything ready to start measuring your performance on social media?
