#GrowYourAudience – Review Social Media Reports to Understand How Your Audience Responds to Your Content

For those of us who spend our days thinking about how to make a more significant impact on social media, it’s easy to get so wrapped up in creating whizz-bang content that we forget to take time to see if what we are creating is doing what we intend. That’s where analytics come in. Social media analytics tools, there are a lot of them, can help us understand how our audience is responding to our content. In other words, analytics let us know if our content works.

Which Tools To Use

Exactly which analytics tools you use depends on what you’re doing, your budget, and how much detail you need. There are not only lots of tools to choose from, but there are also many companies who will gladly follow your social media for you and report the results.

Let’s assume that you are like most people and you really don’t want to spend any money to find out what your social media audience thinks of your content. Let’s also assume that you are active on Facebook and Twitter. (Spoiler alert: If you aren’t using these two platforms you’ve got problems).

Both Facebook and Twitter provide built-in tools that will give you a variety of metrics on your content. Using these tools, you’ll be able to tell not only how many people your content reached but how engaged they were with it.

Let’s take a closer look at these two tools:

Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is a free tool that is available for all business pages. At it’s highest level, it tracks likes, reach, and engagement. To track engagement, it monitors likes, shares, and comments. Data is available over a variety of time periods depending on the metric. Likes, for example, can be tracked over the last 28 days. You can also drill down into how video content performs and get more detail on the people that are seeing your content looking at it by age, gender, and location.

Twitter Analytics

Like Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics is designed to help you determine which content is working best. If you have an international audience, you’ll be able to see what time of day has the most engagement as well as look at who is being reached by your campaigns based on a variety of demographics.

Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics are not the only tools available to help you determine if your content strategy is hitting its mark. Each of the social media platforms has their own analytics option for the business or company page areas. They are, however, key elements that should be part of every marketer’s toolbox. By monitoring them on a regular basis, you can make the most of content that is working and avoid spending valuable resources on content that isn’t pulling its weight.

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Hollie Clere of The Social Media Advisor is a “#BeAwesome” Developer, Social Media, Brand Builder, Content Manager, Trainer and Author in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blog, Google+, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and the tools to manage them.

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