Social media analytics
As you develop content for social media, you will want to analyze your results and adjust your strategy to best reach your audiences. You may be asking, "How do I do that?" If that's the case, social media analytics are your answer.
Each social media platform has their own backend to pull data on top posts and audiences. Most of these backends will pull just about any sort of data you are looking for, so it's best to focus your analysis. In the College of LAS, we generally track:
- Followers - The number of unique people actively following your page. Generally, these are the people who have clicked "like" or "follow" on your profile.
- Reach - The number of unique people that see a specific post. Reach differs from but is related to impressions—impressions are the number of times a post shows up in someone's feed. For example, you may have a reach of 50 with 100 impressions. This could mean that 50 users each saw a single post appear twice in their feed.
- Likes/reactions - One of the driving forces behind engagement, reactions are when a person interacts with a post by clicking the "like" button. This can include reactions as well, such as the "care" or "wow" reactions on Facebook.
- Comments - Comments are a good indicator of particularly engaging content. When a user comments on a post, they are taking extra time out of their day to write out a response, rather than simply liking and moving on.
- Shares - Similarly to comments, shares are a good indicator of engaging content. A share occurs when a user reposts (or retweets) something to their own feed. The user is essentially saying to their own audiences, "Check out this interesting content!"
- Clicks - Clicks are one of the most important responses to a piece of content on social media. Often, a click will indicate that someone is clicking through a URL, often over to your website, to find more information related to your post.
Pulling analytics
If you are interested in pulling your own analytics, you can use the following steps. Please note that social media changes rapidly, so some of these steps may change.