5 Tips on How to Analyze Social Media Performance

Analyzing social media performance is definitely not the easiest nut to crack. Some marketers simply admit that they have no skills or time to put metrics under the magnifying glass. However, you don’t have to be an analytical pro to be able to read and understand some statistics.

There are literally millions of posts that you can use to extrapolate data. Buried deep within these posts and interactions are invaluable insights that can prove to be a gemstone to a person who knows what he is looking at. Most of the time, this data is the difference between a successful business and a failed venture. However, what metrics should you keep in mind? Where should you start? What should you take into consideration to analyze your social media performance in the right and most effective way? 

To help you use social media to your benefit, I have gathered 5 tips from people working in the field to give you a competitive advantage over others.

Prepare a Structure of Audit

The first thing you need to do is to decide on certain standards you need to maintain during a social media audit. You can make a neat, organized template in Excel or just use some pre-built templates available on the Internet. 

Recognize metrics that you will take into consideration first, those ones that align with your strategy – explains an expert from NapoleonCat. Look at all metrics, but choose a few that will be the main indicators of your performance. Don’t forget to take a look at your competitors and check some of their statistics – while you won’t know everything; you can still learn a lot and oversee their strategies.

Analyze Suspicious Peaks

Have you seen some posts that gained unusual reach and engagement? Was there a day when 10% of your audience just stopped following your profiles? Those you can call “suspicious peaks.” The sooner you find out the reason why your audience behaved in this or other ways, the sooner you can adjust your strategy in order to avoid such situations. Or, if the situation is actually desired – to find out how to repeat and scale it. Even a single conclusion may be extremely helpful for the entire marketing communication.

Check Out the Completion of KPIs

Social media KPIs, or, more precisely, social media key performance indicators, are those metrics that should matter to you the most. You set them up in your strategy and regularly evaluate whether or not you met some set criteria. Generate some reports using social media analytics tools if you have some problems with reading statistics yourself. This way, you can save a lot of time and get data insights in a more transparent form.

Performance reviews can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your social media strategy and help you identify areas for improvement and optimization.

For example, if your goal is to raise brand awareness, you may look at engagement and reach in your target group. However, if you care about sales, look at CPC or CPS and rely on your remarketing pixels.

Check Paid Ads

Social media performance metrics are not entirely about organic reach. If you run some paid campaigns on social media like real estate ads, you should also take into consideration the results gained from those campaigns. Were they satisfying, or do you rather consider them as a waste of money? Is it better to invest in social media ads or rather to invest in the competencies of your team? Not everyone has a flexible budget they can simply burn.

Take a Look at Social Media Monitoring

To complete your audit, find out how the sentiment to your brand looks like. Take a look at social media mentions, comments, and posts about your brand. Why is it so important? Sometimes numbers won’t tell you everything, and you need to look at some context to understand why your audience decided to purchase something or not. 

If your brand has to deal with an avalanche of negative comments, sales may have dropped, or the general overview of your brand could be harmed. Without a deep analysis of both positive and negative feedback, recognizing areas that work well and areas with some room for improvement can be very difficult or even impossible. This different level of social media analytics will nicely complement the other parts you conducted earlier.

Conclusion

In this age of information, data is everything. Followers, mentions, tags, posts, engagements, clicks/traffic are some of the most important things to consider when analyzing your social media performance. Streamlining your social presence and developing a social media marketing plan can go a long way towards achieving the audience and reach you want and deserve.