From the
smallest independent store to the largest multi-national brand, every business
knows they need to be on social media. Having the right tools to conduct social
media analysis means you can benchmark your efforts and compare different
strategies. You can see what is working and what isn’t to develop better
campaigns.
With
internet users having an average of 5.54 social media accounts, brands often
have accounts on several networks. You can either have a dedicated social media
analytics tool for each site or have a tool that covers all of the networks you
are on.
Inbuilt
Social Media Analytics Tools
Several
social networks provide the ability to analyze your efforts from within the
platform themselves. The functionality of these tools can be a little
restrictive compared to a specialized analytics tool, but as they are free and
available to all, they are a good place to start.
Facebook Insights
Facebook
provides social media analysis through the Facebook Insights platform. This
tool is available to any of the admins of your company page once you have over
30 fans.
It displays
detailed metrics about your posts and the engagement they earn. Audience
analysis can help you understand who is engaging with you, and includes
demographic and location breakdown.
Engagement
metrics can be seen for each of your posts, helping you to understand what type
of content works best. It shows a breakdown of paid and organic, so you can
understand the value of your paid ads.
There are
also metrics on video views, actions taken on your page and the reach of your
posts.
Pinterest Analytics
Pinterest
also has a built-in analytics platform. It is available to anyone with a
business account once you have registered your website with Pinterest. This
allows Pinterest to track traffic between the social network and your site.
Pinterest
Analytics allows you to track a range of metrics. It splits the analysis into
your pin activity, your audience activity and which specific pins are driving
traffic to your website.
The metrics
covered include average daily impressions and viewers, audience location,
gender, language, total number of repins, total number of clicks, and total
likes.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter has
a built-in analytics platform, and it’s available to individuals as well as
businesses.
Your number
of tweets, tweet impressions, visits to your profile, mentions and followers
are all tracked. There are monthly stats on your most popular tweets, mentions,
and followers for that month.
Twitter
Analytics provides some simple social media analysis
You can
click on any Tweet to see the impressions, likes, retweets, and engagements.
If your
business has Twitter Cards active, Twitter Analytics will show metrics for the
performance of all of your cards too.
Instagram Insights
Instagram
Insights was recently announced but is only available in some regions. The roll
out will continue and the platform should soon be available to all businesses.
Until it is
available, there are plenty of other tools that can provide social analytics
for Instagram. Check out this guide of free Instagram Analytics Tools.
YouTube
Analytics
YouTube
provides an in-house analytics tool so anyone who has uploaded videos can
understand their performance.
The tool
displays performance metrics, engagement metrics, and demographics. It helps
you understand how people found your videos, how much they watched, if they
clicked through to your website, and who they were.
Google Alerts
While not
strictly a social media analytics tool, Google Alerts is nonetheless very
useful. It allows you to monitor the web for new content, mentions of your
brand, your competitors, or industry thought leaders. The alerts are extremely
easy to set-up.
Creating an
Alert means you will receive email notifications when Google finds new results
on the topic across blogs, forums and news sites.
Google
Analytics
Google
analytics is primarily a web analytics tool, but it provides a small but
important role in social media analysis: a breakdown of which social sites are
driving traffic to your website.
Click on
Acquisition, then Social, to see which social sites are referring the most
traffic to your site. You may find that a particular network isn’t worth the
time and expense if it isn’t driving traffic, or that a well-performing network
deserves more attention.
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