Social Media Analytics 101
Obviously, you know by now that social media is one of the most important means of digital marketing. You can directly reach your audience, run advertising and get great returns, find new customers, sell things directly and build your reputation all on the same place. Starting out can be a bit intimidating, and running the analytics seem to be a mish-mosh of graphs and numbers.
We get it – you’re quickly searching to see if the numbers are in the green and then moving on, but it’s important to understand what’s happening back there in order to have a successful social media strategy. Luckily for you, we’re here to break down social media analytics so that you know exactly what you’re looking at when you click on that super scary Insights tab.
Reach vs Impressions
Reach and impressions are extremely important metrics to understand when it comes to your social media. Reach is the total number of people who see your content, and impressions are the number of times your content has been displayed. This means that one person (reach) can see your content more than once (impressions). An impression doesn’t need to be engaged with to count as an impression, either. It quite literally means the number of times it has hit a news feed, and reach is the amount of people’s news feeds it has hit.
In a perfect world, 100% of your audience would be looking at 100% of your posts. However, due to good ol’ algorithms, that is not the case. Only a small fraction of your audience ever sees your posts.
Engagement vs Reactions
The best way for you to get more of your audience to see your posts and improve your position in their algorithm is to get to work on your engagement. Reactions mean all the little faces that happen on your Facebook posts, likes on your Instagram photos, retweets on your Twitter posts and the like. These are all individual reactions, and reactions all help your overall engagement.
Total engagement is calculated by combining all points of engagement and dividing it by the total reach of the post. If your post has reached 25,000 people, you might think that this is a good number. However, if only 20 people like your post or reacted to it, that is an extremely low engagement rate of only .08 percent. Anything between 3 and 6 percent are good engagement rates, and anything above 6 percent is considered to be very high. If you’re not falling in these numbers, take a look at your content and see how you can make it better for your followers to engage with.
Followers
Understanding your followers, what they like, when they’re online and who they are is extremely important when crafting your messaging. You might be surprised by what you find when you take a dive into your follower analytics. If your followers are mostly online around 6pm, but you’re posting at noon with low reach and engagement, you may have just cracked the case to your low numbers. Try posting later and see what happens.
Perhaps you’re finding that your demographic is a little older than your target audience, they are mostly women, or they live in a different area than your service area. Whatever you might find, it will help you to craft your overall message and brand awareness to get the right people to you.
If you’re still confused with social media, digital marketing and crafting the right message, give us a call. We can help you!
