Your analytics have so much to tell you about your social media and your audience – you just have to pay real attention to them and learn from them as they provide a wealth of information on what works and what doesn’t. And if you go beyond the obvious – like number of clicks or engagement levels – there’s even more important information to learn, information that will actually help you improve your social media strategy.
In this blog post, I’m going to talk about social media analytics and share 4 tips to help you get more out of your analytics.
Set up conversion goals in Google Analytics
If you’re a business or entrepreneur using social media for marketing purposes, then you most likely want to make more conversions. You want to drive traffic to your blog and website and you then want your audience to take action, whether it’s a smaller action like signing up for your email list so that they can keep coming back for more, or actually getting your visitors to buy something from you or make an appointment with your service.
The easiest way to track these conversion is with Google Analytics; simply head over to your account, click on Admin and then Goals to create goals in Google Analytics:
As you can see above, these are several templates that you can use, although you can also create your own custom goal.
- Revenue-based goals are those goals that bring in real money, such as visitors making a reservation or appointment with you, buying something, or becoming an affiliate partner
- Acquisition-based goals mean getting visitors to sign up for something/creating an account
- Inquiry-based goals are those goals that show the interest of the visitor in your business, such as visiting your Contact Page or actively searching for product details.
- And finally, there are media-based goals, for those cases when viewing a certain piece of content make up a conversion (for example, a product video from one of your landing pages)
You can create up to 20 of these custom goals and then easily track them for all of your traffic, including of course social media traffic as well (see it clearly by going to Acquisition > Social -> Conversions). And you can even set custom monetary values to each of your goals to give you a better idea of how much money social media is bringing into your business and actually measure your social media ROI.
Add UTM parameters to your links to track your traffic
You’re likely sharing the same links on various platforms, including multiple social networks. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to accurately track all of this traffic and see exactly which sources brought in the most traffic, as well as further track the behaviour of your social traffic?
That’s quite easy to do – you just need to add UTM parameters to your shared links and you’ll be able to quickly track this traffic in real time.
UTM parameters are, as Wikipedia puts it, “URL parameters used by marketers to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across traffic sources and publishing media” and they look something like this:
https://www.example.com/page?utm_content=buffercf3b2&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
To add such links, you can use a tool like Agorapulse (a social media management tool) that allows you to easily add UTM parameters to all of your shared links:
All you have to do is turn on UTM tracking and set up your parameters to start automatically tracking the links you’re publishing or scheduling. Then, use this information to learn about your audience’s behaviour and make decisions on where to focus your resources online to boost your results.
Find out what your best posts are and reuse them
Which of your social media posts generate the best results?
This is an important question because it helps you:
- Understand what types of content your audience prefers so that you can create more of the same
- Find out which of your website pages or content generate the most clicks and traffic
- Save time and money creating new content, by repurposing and re-using your best posts
There are several ways to find out which of your updates performed best; the best method will differ based on your goals.
For example, if you’re more interested in generating brand awareness and engagement, then you’ll be more interested in the posts that generated a lot of engagement, such as shares, retweets, and comments.
Then, use Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, and other built-in social media analytics to find out what your top updates are over a certain period of time:
Or, if your focus in on traffic, head back to Google Analytics and click on Acquisition -> Social -> Landing Pages. Here, you’ll be able to see a list of your shared links and their performance:
Then, find the corresponding updates where you shared these top-performing links.
All of these top-performing updates (both in terms of engagement and in terms of traffic generated) can then repurposed and or/reused:
- Share them out regularly on your social media to keep driving results to these updates
- Re-promote your best links with different updates to keep driving more traffic
- Use elements of your top performing social posts in other posts; for example, the same image but with a different wording or share similar updates on the same subjects
Who is sharing your posts?
How much do you know about the people sharing your posts? Namely:
- Are there any social media influencers sharing your updates or links?
- Are there any fans of your business and/or social media accounts that are regularly retweeting or sharing your updates or links?
These can potentially be very powerful connections for your business, especially if you discover any potential brand ambassadors (people who are consistently helping you promote your business and products on social media) or any social influencers with larger followings.
Not only would these stats look great in your social media reports, but you can also built on these relationships to take things further; for example, reward your brand ambassadors with gifts and offers to encourage them to keep sharing and supporting you online, and reach out to the influencers sharing your content to build a relationship with them that will hopefully lead to even more shares and, possible, an actual collaboration on an influencer marketing campaign.
So, how do you find out who shared your posts? There are several methods, for example:
- If you’re using a social media management tool, make sure to set up monitoring for your brand name and check it regularly to see who has mentioned you/shared your content/etc.
- Use a social media listening tool like Brand24 or Mention to set up alerts for your brand name and find out as soon as someone mentions you on any major social network
Conclusion
As you can see, there are so many different ways to leverage your social media analytics and based on your results, improve your social media strategy time and time again. Go beyond the obvious to learn more:
- Track your social media conversions and your ROI by creating conversion goals in Google Analytics
- Add UTM parameters to your links to track them
- Discover your best posts and updates to keep reusing and repurposing them
- Find out who is sharing your content on social media to start building relationships with top social influencers and brand ambassadors.
