Wondering how to use your social media analytics?
In
our last post, we covered how to use Facebook and Twitter’s analytics dashboards – as well as what to do with that data.
This time, we’ll be covering the lesser (but still important) beasts…
LinkedIn and Google+.
But first – why should you even care?
Why Social Media Analytics Are Important
Social media analytics is a topic many marketers and brands are obsessed with.
And with good reason.
Simply put,
it’s impossible to tell if your social media strategy is working without monitoring it. And, without analyzing your posts, it’s impossible to know what’s working and what’s not.
Social media isn’t just about creating what you
think is great content. It’s about continuously monitoring that content to ensure it’s actually connecting with your audience.
Ultimately, you just want to cut out the content that doesn’t work, increase the content that drives engagement, and
send as much traffic to your website as possible.
If you want more engagement and traffic, you need to better understand your social channel’s analytics tools.
This is key for two main reasons:
- It helps you understand more about your audience – who are they and where are they coming from?
- It shows you how your followers are engaging with your posts – are you putting out content that people actually want to engage with?
By digging out the answer to these questions, you’re able to share updates that resonate with your target audience. Who doesn’t want that?!
Below, I have the lowdown on how to use analytics to check how your LinkedIn and Google+ pages are performing.
Let’s start with LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Analytics: What You Need to Know
So, how do you gauge the effectiveness of your LinkedIn activity?
Similar to the social media channels in my previous post, LinkedIn analytics are represented in impressions and engagement.
Note: Currently, you can only get insights on company pages.
Now, if you’re the administrator of your company page, you’ll have access to a significant amount of data on your page’s performance. To find that data, follow the steps below:
When you get to your company page,
click the Analytics tab. Here you’ll see an overview of your analytics, and you can delve in further by selecting the
Visitors, Updates or Followers tab from the drop-down.
There are lots of metrics here and it can get confusing. What should you pay attention to?
Well, try these on for size:
1. Within the
Followers and Visitors section, you can learn a lot about your audience. Here you’ll see demographic details, including industry, function, and your audience’s professional background.
You can use this data to learn more about what your audience may be interested in. For example, if your audience is mainly 35 to 45 year old executives of marketing companies, you’d want to share more content related to marketing, such as the content found on
Adobe’s CMO magazine.
Need help increasing social media engagement? Check out
this guide.
2. In the
updates section, you can see what posts your followers have engaged with.
You can use this data to learn what content your followers already like based on what you’ve already shared. Then all you have to do is share more of that kind of content!
3. By viewing
individual post performance, you can decide whether you want to
promote an update so that it reaches more of your followers. You can also view how many followers were gained through paid advertising.
For more details on how to use LinkedIn analytics, check out
this guide.
Google+ Analytics: What You Need to Know
Curious about how well you’re doing with your efforts on Google+?
If you want a detailed report, you’re not getting it from Google+. The data they currently supply is basic, to say the least.
Earlier this year, Google+ launched a new feature called ‘Your Influence’. You can find this on your Google+ page if you click on the three dots right next to the About button.
Under ‘Your influence’, you can view a snapshot of analytics for your profile for the last 7 or 30 days, including:
- Number of people who’ve followed your profile
- Number of people who’ve followed your collections
- Amount of times your posts have been viewed, commented on and how many times your posts have received a ‘+1’ (Google+ version of a ‘like’)
- How many times your posts have been shared and subsequently viewed and commented upon.
The pros are that it’s easy to access, and you can get a quick snapshot of all the basic data in one place.
The major negative of it is the lack of detail in the data available. You can’t see trends as there are no charts, and you can’t see any insights about your audience. You also can’t see any post level analytics, which is something that proves really valuable when deciding what content is resonating with your audience.
Also, it’s not live – the data can take up to 48 hours to update. The feature isn’t currently available on the Android Google+ app as yet. You’ll have to visit the desktop site to gather your data.
Nevertheless, you have the basic data to monitor your content’s performance on a weekly basis – so it is still definitely worth using. Hopefully, this is a feature that Google+ will be improving upon in the future to bring up to par with LinkedIn and Facebook.
Conclusion
It’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of your analytics to measure the impact of your social media
marketing efforts. You need to understand which tactics are working, and which aren’t.
How? Incorporate regular social media reporting into your schedule to analyze the data. Keep a close eye on trends, replicate what is successful, remove what isn’t and use any audience insights to inform your content plans.
How regularly do you check your analytics? And will you be doing so more frequently in the future? Comment below and let us know!
