These days you’d be hard pressed to find a job in media that doesn’t list “analytics” as a required skill. You may be applying for a copywriting gig, a job as a social content producer or even a reporting role, yet your creativity and ability to communicate a message are no longer enough.
You probably won’t be asked to develop complex models and forecasts in these roles, but at the very least you’ll be expected to analyze the performance of your work across major channels.
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Considering the important role that social media plays in driving traffic and engaging your audience, being able to analyze your social performance is enough to confidently show that you know “analytics.”
While the term sounds very official and math-y, there’s no need to be intimidated. If you know how to read numbers, ask the right questions—and make a plan of action based on the answers to those questions—you can learn to analyze social media data.
However, before you can create actionable social analytics reports you need to recognize and understand the difference between metrics and analytics. Here, we’re breaking it down so you can turn your social metrics into insights that will help you focus your efforts and improve your social marketing success.
What are social metrics?
Metrics can be thought of as The What—What did this social post do for the business? How many people saw it or engaged with it?
There are a number of social analytics tools that can provide you with metrics. Each social platform has its own built-in analytics tool. The terminology used and metrics provided differs from channel to channel, but for the most part they can all fall into one of three categories:
- Reach (impressions, # of people who saw your post, # of times your brand was mentioned, # of followers)
- Engagement (likes, shares/retweets, comments/replies, clicks, video plays)
- Conversions (downloads, sign ups, sales, new followers)
Social Reporting Tools
Not all of these metrics are native to the various social platforms. However, there are third-party tools like the web analytics system you use on your website, or tools that consolidate reporting from various channels. Regardless of where you get your metrics, it’s important to understand that these numbers are just that, numbers. They are simply data points.
They are useful for letting you know what is happening and what is changing over a period of time. These numbers and trends are fairly easy to access and it’s also quite simple to put them into a clean report with a bunch of official looking graphs.
The built-in tools on the most popular platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, provide these reports out-of-the-box, which you can easily export. While these built-in tools are given names like “Insights” or “Analytics” they aren’t actually analytics reports or insightful at all. They are just social metrics reports. And the problem is that there isn’t much value in tracking or reporting on these numbers if you’re not going to analyze them or act on them.
What is analytics?
If metrics are The What, analytics is the So What? Knowing if a number is high or low, or if it went up or down since the last time you reported on it is not enough. You need to be able to answer: why? So what if more people clicked on your content than last month? So what if you got fewer likes on your tweets? Why did this happen?
The true value in collecting social media metrics is knowing what you can do with the numbers. It’s less about pulling the numbers together and more about making sense of those numbers and how you’ll use them to make more decisions. This is social media analytics.
How to analyze social media data
The first and most essential step to measuring social media success is to determine the goals of your social marketing strategy. Are you trying to drive traffic to your website? Increase brand exposure? Drive sales? If you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, it doesn’t make sense to measure anything.
Once you know what you’re trying to achieve, you’ll know what metrics matter for your goals. This is important because some of the platforms, like Facebook, give you so many data points that you can waste a lot of time examining and reporting on numbers that have nothing to do with your goals.
It is a waste of time to report on metrics that don’t support your goals. The ones that do matter are called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). If you know what you’re trying achieve, you’ll know what KPIs to pay attention to. For example, if you’re trying to drive more people to your website, reporting on your follower growth is pointless. Your number of followers may not translate to website visitors, so you’ll want to consider if this number is necessary to track.
Ask the right questions
Now that you know what KPIs to pay attention to, you can start to ask the questions that will help you make sense of (and take action on) the data in your social metrics reports. Here are a few questions you might want to ask (and answer) when reviewing each report:
- Did my plan work?
- If it worked, why?
- If it didn’t work, why not?
- What should I do differently?
- What should I do more of?
- How can I do better?
The answers to these questions are not in the numbers. The numbers can help lead you to the right answers. But you’re going to have to put a bit of thought into it.
If your numbers went up from the previous period you need to try to answer why this happened. Did you do something differently this period vs. last period? Is there a common thread amongst the posts that did well vs. the ones that didn’t?
There’s no guarantee that you’ll answer correctly, but the answer will lead you to a plan of action and that’s what you really want out of social media analytics. There’s no sense in tracking metrics, or reporting on them if you’re not going to try to influence them with future actions.
For more in-depth lessons on this topic, check out this 4-part Social Media Analytics course.
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