4 Things to Pay Attention to in Your Social Media Analytics

With any type of marketing effort, you should be viewing your analytics at least quarterly, if not monthly, to ensure that your strategy is actually working and not doing more harm than good for your online presence. But with so many data points and numbers available, how do you know which ones you should pay attention to and what they mean for your growth?

Take a look at the four benchmarks you should refer to when understanding the success of your organic social media campaigns.

Quality of Follower Increase

Sure, getting new followers is great… but do those followers actually qualify as an ideal client or customer? If yes, that’s great–you’re growing your audience with the people who would be likely to purchase from you in the future! If no, then truthfully, the growth doesn’t mean anything–and having inflated numbers with people who aren’t likely to buy from you or refer people to you means that your data is skewed and likely inaccurate.

What type of follower growth would you say is “good” or normal? Just like everything else in marketing, it depends on a lot of factors. A 5% increase each month is typically what we see for our clients, but this all depends on…

• How long they’ve had the account
• How much they post
• The quality of the content
• How many followers they have to begin with

Don’t get discouraged if your follower numbers aren’t increasing as much as you’d like them to, because it’s much more important to have a smaller group of people who are consistently engaging with your content than a big group of people who are barely seeing your content.

Website Traffic from Social Media

Hot take: organic social media isn’t responsible for your sales. Your website is.

Social media, however, acts as a vehicle to drive people who find you through those online platforms and become interested in your product or service to your website, where they can then make that purchase. So, even though social media won’t necessarily bring you new business, it’s crucial to use social media to drive people to your website, which will.

You can drive website traffic from social media by sharing links to your:

• Blog posts
• Service or product pages
• Homepage
• Contact form or consultation page
• Press page

How do you track your website traffic from social media? There are a few ways that we do it:

1. Use a link shortener tool, like Bit.ly, to track how many times a link has been clicked from social media
2. Set up Google Analytics to see how much traffic comes to your website from social media specifically

Why is this important? If you’re getting a lot of website traffic from social media but little to no conversions, this is an indication that your social media marketing is doing its job, but something is wrong with the website that’s preventing people from converting.

Best Performing Posts

Another hot take: your best performing posts aren’t the ones that get the most amount of likes or reactions.

Why’s that? It’s ridiculously easy for anyone to mindlessly scroll through their feed and double tap a photo or hit the like button, without putting much thought into it. This means their reaction doesn’t hold as much weight or importance.

How do you know which posts perform the best, then? You want to look at:

• Comments
• Shares
• Saves
• Follows
• Website Clicks

If someone took the time to leave a comment on your post, that shows that they put a lot more effort into their engagement than someone who just reacted to your post, which instantly qualifies them as a better lead.

What do you do when you know which posts perform the best? You identify the trends that made them perform so well so you can imitate that success moving forward. Was it…

1. The visual that was used?
2. The topic?
3. The cross-promotion?

Whatever it may be, you want to understand what performed well and why it performed so well so you can plan similar content in the future to achieve those same results and keep that traction going.

Least Performing Posts

It’s just as important to consider the posts that are tanking as it is to understand the posts that are excelling.

Why? If something isn’t working, why continue doing it if you know it’s not going to bring you the results that you want?

Taking note of what isn’t working well allows you to adjust your content strategy as needed to ensure you’re creating and publishing content that’s resonating with your audience. It’s important to remember, however, that traction does take time–so if you post something once and it doesn’t perform well, that isn’t enough data to cross it off the list completely. Test it throughout a 90-day period, and if you see that it still isn’t performing well throughout those three months, then you can remove it from your strategy.

Getting into the habit of consistently referencing your analytics will set you up for long-term success and ensure you’re creating quality content that brings you closer to reaching your goals.

Ready to take things to the next level with your social media presence? Request a consultation with us.