Insights from the article:
- Social media analytics is a key component in campaigns. Without analytics, you will not be able to assess our performance.
- There are hundreds of metrics you need to learn to become adept in social media analytics, but you’ll only need to understand a few to start analyzing your performance;
- Consider the performance metrics that are important for your business growth, and align your goals in social media towards improving these metrics.
Doing social media without social media analytics would be pointless. It’s harsh, but let me tell you why.
Social media marketing is supposed to be a constant, continuous process. It’s a tactic that reaps rewards in the long-term. If you’re continuously doing something without looking whether your efforts are working or not, then you won’t be reaping much of the long-term rewards that you’re supposed to attain with social media marketing in the Philippines.
Therefore, social media analytics is a key component that you should be doing for your own small business marketing. It’s not just to know how many followers and likes you have for your page and posts, but more importantly, it’s to know whether you’re getting results that are helpful for your small business.
What Encompasses Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics encompass everything that you can measure for your social media marketing. If your objectives are to generate enough engagements to be able to acquire business inquiries via social media, then you need to look at your posts and see if they are getting engagements, and if people are sending you inquiries from those posts.
In the same example, you would want to know which type of posts are getting the most number of engagements and inquiries, and double-down on those types of posts. With this, you would compile all of your post data and from there, you can compare and check which types of posts are performing better than the others.
There are so many ways and angles of looking into your social media analytics and how it can help your business. The only limitation is your creativity in asking the right questions that data can answer – and your knowledge in the metrics involved.
What Are The Social Media Metrics You Need to Know?
Your social media analytics exercise is only limited by your creativity in asking the right questions and your knowledge of the metrics. If you’re just starting out in handling social media for your small business, let’s shed light on some of the basic ones that you definitely need to know.
Impressions vs. Reach. One of the most common questions I get from clients who are hearing my analytics report for the first time is the question about the difference between impressions and reach. Impressions are the number of times that your post or ad material was displayed in a social media feed. Note that impressions do not consider whether a person has successfully viewed your post or ad material – it just counts the number of times that your post or ad has been displayed.
Reach, on the other hand, counts the number of users that has viewed your post or ad material. The amount of time required for a user to be counted as a reach is still unclear, but there are assumptions that it ranges from milliseconds to a few seconds that a user has stayed in your post or ad material to be counted as a user reached.
That is the difference between impressions and reach. Impressions count the number of times your content was displayed; Reach counts the number of users who saw your content.
Engagements. Engagements take different forms in different social media platforms, but the overview definition of engagements is that it is the aggregate count of all interactions users have performed on your content. The types of likes and reactions are different in Facebook, compared to Twitter or LinkedIn, but all types of interactions in posts are counted as engagements. Engagements signify how involved users are with your content, and it often represents how much interest you are generating for your brand.
Another related metric is called Engagement Rates (or Engagement %). This simply pertains to the percentage that a user that was reached by your content has actually interacted with your content. This metric represents the effectiveness of your content to engage with people who have seen it.
Clicks. This metric is almost self-explanatory. It represents all of the clicks on your posts or ad material. There are three basic types of clicks – post clicks, link clicks, and photo clicks. When you have a “Send Message” button in your post or ad material, clicking that button is counted under link clicks. Post clicks include clicking the “See More” text that displays the entirety of the post or ad caption.
And there’s this one notorious metric – Conversions. Ahh, conversions. The crux of social media analytics. It has come to mean a lot of different things, from measuring just how many website or Facebook shop purchases you have acquired from your content, to literally every achievement of your different objectives. Conversions now depend on your overall objective – from selling online to generating leads or business inquiries. However, a lot of other digital marketers in the Philippines would disagree, and would insist that conversions are still just about purchases.
But what do you think? Let me know in the comments section!
Let’s Make Your Digital Marketing Easier
Like what I said earlier in this article, in social media analytics you are only limited to how creative you can be in asking the right questions and in your knowledge about the different metrics. There are more advanced disciplines in this, such as comparative metrics and performing diagnosis and optimizations from your performance data. If you need a consult on what your data means for your marketing and your business, contact me here.
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