People new to social media marketing tend to focus on making a habit of posting. They step things up by researching what times of day they should post to optimize their content on the different social networks. This common step up is actually the first step toward understanding social media insights.
You need to understand your audience. The more you understand about the people you are reaching, the better results you’ll get from your social media efforts.
By gaining insights on your following, you will discover what types of content they like best. Do they like it better when you ask a question? Do you get better results when you post a photo or a video? Instead of searching out what someone else says is the best time of day for you to post on Twitter, look at your analytics, track your engagement, and discover the time of day your unique audience engages with you.
This is how you step up your social media efforts. By gaining more insight into your audience, you tweak your posting process and continue to improve the results of your social media campaigns.
Below are five techniques you can use to gain more insight into your following and learn how to best engage with them.
Make it a regular habit to capture web page information from social media sites. It’s not unusual for people to delete their comments on social media or for them to be otherwise taken down. Sometimes this happens with negative comments, but sometimes people are simply embarrassed by their previous post or don’t like getting a lot of notifications when one of their replies becomes popular. Whenever anything noteworthy happens, make a habit of screenshotting the event. You never know what might become important later.
When you’re evaluating your social media metrics, don’t forget to check your analytics. If you install something like Google Analytics, you can see how many of your site’s visitors come from each social media channel. You can also post links to social media using a link shortener that also provides analytics to see how well your link posts are doing.
Make a post asking your audience for their thoughts on your social media account. You can ask them what types of content they like seeing from you the most, if they have other ideas for what they would like to see from you, and whether they prefer text, photos, or video posts from you. A brief survey or just a post posing the question can gain a lot of insight from your audience.
Track your social media engagement levels and conversion rates. On social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest you can access your social media insights dashboard. Make it a habit to access this information at least once a month. When you do, put your data across all the networks you are on into a spreadsheet. How many comments are you getting on posts? Link clicks? Likes? This information will help hone your content planning strategy for social media marketing.
When you set goals, you are more likely to improve. Once you’ve evaluated your data for this month, set a goal for next to improve your engagement and conversion rates. When you set that goal, you will then be motivated to look at how to achieve that. If you need to increase the number of comments you’re getting per post, you will then look at what posts have the most comments and figure out what common factors are in those posts. Were they all video posts? Did they all pose a question? Did they cover a specific topic? Whatever common factors you can find, next month you will capitalize on that and see if you can improve your engagement rate to reach your goal.
