How can I use analytics to create engaging content?
With Social Media Marketing becoming more popular, nearly every social media site has their own built-in analytics tools these days. However, you may be hesitant to use them because you are afraid it will require a lot of math and graphs. Thankfully, most of the built-in tools handle the bulk of the math and graphs for you. In this series, we will be looking at the tools provided by social media sites and how we can use the analytics provided by them to create engaging content for our followers. In our first part, we’ll start by looking at the Analytics tools from Facebook called Insights.
Facebook Insights
To get to the Facebook Insights page, just go to your business’ page and click “Insights” at the top of the page. From here, you can focus on Overview, Likes, Reach, Visits, Posts, Videos, and People. Here’s what each of these are in a little more detail:
Overview – This gives you a broad idea of how well your profile is performing and gives snippets of information about analytics we can look at. At the bottom of this page, you can also see how pages similar to yours are performing. Comparing your results to those of similar companies can help you determine what types of content you should be posting in order to maximize engagement.
Likes – Viewing the Likes page will tell you how many people have liked and unliked your page in the selected period (past month by default). Using this page, in conjunction with the Posts page, can show you if there is a particular post contributing to more people liking the page.
Reach – Here you can see the analytics about how many people are seeing your posts, how they are engaging with them, and if they have decided they don’t want to see them. Use this information with the Posts page to tailor your posts to what your community wants to see. If they don’t like seeing links, consider posting less of them; if they respond positively to pictures, make a note to post more pictures.
Visits – The Visits section shows you where visitors are going on your profile as well as the sites they were directed from. This information can tell you if people are visiting your Timeline to see updates or if they are visiting your About section to learn more about you. Use this to make sure you are providing quality content in these places and make them easily available.
Posts – This page is very important as it lets you see when people are online and it gives you a breakdown of how each post has performed. Using this information, you can schedule engaging posts right before the peak of when your audience is getting online.
Videos – If you post videos on your profile, this page will break down their performance and show you the number of people that were engaged with your video. By Facebook standards, this means someone who has watched at least 30 second of the video.
People – After the Posts page, this is where you’ll find the second most important set of analytics. The People page gives you the demographics of who likes your page and who is seeing your posts. If you are finding that your followers are different than your target demographic for your business, consider changing the type of content you are posting.
With all of this information, you will be able to see what content users are engaging with and customize your content to better match the interests of your target demographic. For example, if the analytics are showing that most of your engagement is coming from 18-25 year old men, but you want to target 30-40 year old men, you might try altering your content to better capture their attention. For more information about Facebook Insights, you can read Facebook’s rundown here.
Keep an eye out for our next blog about the basics of Twitter Analytics