Measuring & Analyzing your Social Media Presence
In my last post, Getting to Know your Social Media Audience, I addressed the significance of getting to know your social media audience. This is the next step in my 2-part series, and in this post, we’ll be talking about the tools to help you analyze your social media audience.
You’ve created tactics, strategies, and marketing plans to develop your social media presence and reach your goals. You’ve researched, written documents, and brainstormed impactful strategies and campaigns. But how do you know that all your hard work paid off? How can you tell if it’s working? Let me introduce you to Metrics.
Measuring and Analyzing your Social Media Presence
You can begin getting a better picture of your social media impact by using metrics and analytics tools. So what exactly are metrics? Metrics are defined as standard of measurement by which efficiency, performance, progress, or quality of a plan, process, or product can be assessed (according to BusinessDictionary). Simply put, metrics let you know if what you’re doing is working, or not. It also provides you with new insights in identifying trends and correlations that you may have not yet considered. In order to get the most out of metrics, you have to know not only what the statistics mean, but more importantly, which stats are meaningful for your nonprofit's social media plan.
Know what you're tracking.
Once you start tracking your stats, you’ll see a variety of metrics and numbers. In order for you to be able to focus on the ones that are meaningful, you first have to determine what you want from your social media marketing. We talked about setting goals in my last post, and it really is the key to unlocking opportunities that good social media marketing holds. Once you determine the goal (email opens, donations, subscriptions, followers growth, engagement,…), you can start to determine which metrics matter on your journey to achieving that goal. Here are some of the most useful measurements to look at when beginning to identify metrics:
Useful Measurements
- Conversions = the number of people who achieved a desired result. It can include a like, subscribe, sign up, follow, or any other goal you have that they did.
- Engagement = the total number of likes, shares, and comments on a post. Add them all up, and that is your engagement.
- Engagement rate = individual post engagement divided by overall followers.
- Leads = potential conversions. Anyone with the need or interest to pursue your product or service.
- Reach = the number of people you are communicating with.
- Impressions = the number of views your post received.
- Audience growth rate = a comparison of your audience today to your audience yesterday, last week, last month, etc.
The above are common useful measurements, but it’s up to you to determine which measurements are meaningful to your social media plan. Not every measurement is important to your overall goal. It’s fine to look at vanity numbers, which show jumps and increases in the stats, but they do very little to influence your overall plan. If you’re not using metrics to make changes and to learn, then you’re not really measuring your performance effectively, and therefore, you won’t get accurate and meaningful data from your measurements.
Social Media Analytics Tools
To begin measuring your social media's performance, you can use these informative, free tools. Each tool provides you with metrics and data that show you how your channel is performing according to your social media goals. I recommend checking these on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis, and entering those stats into an excel spead sheet. This way, you can have one place where you and your team can view and compare your growth over time.
(*Most of these free tools have upgrades that provide more in depth insights into your social media performance.)
1. Hootesuit |
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Basic, beginner’s measurements. This is an all around great tool for measuring basic metrics. It’s fantastic for beginners and experts alike, with clear and organized data. |
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2. Keyhole |
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Measures, in precise detail, your nonprofit’s impact on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It gives you access to an intuitive and shareable dashboard, tracks hashtag, keyword, and campaign metrics in real-time, including reach, impressions, periods of high activity, and more. |
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3. Google Analytics |
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While it's often used to measure web analytics, Google Analytics is also ideal for evaluating certain social media metrics. You can use it to measure the value of traffic coming from social sites, determining how visitors behave and if they convert. |
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4. Cyfe |
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An all-in-one business dashboard app that helps you easily monitor all your business data from one place. |
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In addition to the tools above, there are also channel-specific free tools that are made to measure specific metrics in a specific channel. For example, TweetReach, Klear, TweetStats give you insight on Twitter, while Iconsquare measures your performance on Instagram, and Facebook Insights for Facebook.
Remember, metrics and insights are only as good as you use them. You can use them proactively, and make changes from them, or you can use them as a basic guide. It really all depends on what you want to know, what you want to measure, and what you’re willing to change.
I hope you find this post useful!
All my love,
Blondie
