While it’s really fun to run reports with a click of a button, easy clicking isn’t enough to get marketers and small business owners thinking critically about social media. Real data analysis means you’re not just monitoring how your feeds are doing, you’re figuring out why. You’re coming up with hypotheses and testing your assumptions. You can approach social media analysis right inside the MavSocial platform. Let’s get started with some reports that will allow you to really analyze your social media analytics.
Analyzing your Social Media Engagement by Time and Day
For every platform that you link to your MavSocial account (we support Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Tumblr, and YouTube) you can access a variety of reports. One of these is engagement both by time of day and by day of the week.
While the most obvious suggestion is to make sure you’re always posting to those key times, you’ll also want to dig a little deeper. You’ll want to use your social media analysis to figure out why those are the best times. That will lead you to a better understanding of your audience.
Just think of the difference in sleeping hours versus waking hours for teenagers on a Saturday versus their parents. Make assumptions about your audience using these key social media analytics and then test them with customer surveys to learn more about your demographics.
You may also like: How to Analyze Social Media Performance
How to identify your champions on each platform
Hooray! People like your brand! Isn’t that a great feeling? For each platform, we identify your top 10 followers or fans (based on comments or replies and mentions).
Marketers know it’s really important to know who to turn to when asking for UGC for a new campaign or even that very first review for a new product.
Basically, these top 10 people are your insiders. Whether they’re influencers or not, you can likely get more social media love by sending extra attention their way. Comment on their posts, reply to them, make their day. Keep the relationship going. Don’t just ask for favors, but provide rewards too, by offering discounts, early product releases, or by reposting their photos (and tagging them of course).
Figuring out which type of post performs best with your audience on each network
Each network has its own permissible formats, and they can change with time (we’ll get to what to do about that in a little bit).
It’s so important to know what your audience cares about. You’ll want to be sure to give them what they’re after. Retweets are a sign that your audience liked what you did enough that they felt it represented them as well.
People share and retweet to show their followers something about themselves. If you’re inspiring that action, then you know you’re truly hitting home with your audience. You are what they want to reveal.
Of course, you’ll want to increase your usage of what performs well, but be sure not to overdo it. Variety is still necessary.
You’ll also need to take this opportunity to analyze your efforts. If your links get far fewer comments than your all-text posts to your Facebook page, that could be a sign that you aren’t finding or creating links your audience cares about.
On the other hand, if images perform the poorest on Twitter, you should rethink your visual style.
Spying on organic versus paid versus viral reach for Facebook
By analyzing your social media reach analytics, you’ll have a chance to see just how much organic reach pays off. If you craft a Facebook post that your audience resonates with immediately (commenting and liking and sharing), then Facebook will increase your organic reach. The Facebook algorithm will pick it up as a buzz-worthy piece and give it a viral boost.
Social media analytic graphs never create a straight line. They always have peaks and valleys. Look at your graphs for any major slumps or any unusual highs. Then create hypotheses for why they exist.
If you have a seasonal company, you may find that you’re not strategizing well enough. You’re struggling to engage your customers in the off-season.
Paid reach will also help you decide on how your Facebook ad budget is performing. Is it paying off? Is it worth it? Should you increase your budget or does the evidence support that you should put your resources into organic content?
Compare your organic reach and paid reach with how much you spend on creating each and how many click-throughs you receive to your site.
Discovering the number of Twitter followers of your Twitter followers
Think of this as #socialinspo.
You have a potential reach of millions upon millions of people. If that doesn’t inspire you to get to know your audience enough to create retweetable posts, then we don’t know what will.
Here’s what to do when you find out this number for yourself: spy on the followers of your followers. See what they like. This is your greater community and your greater audience. When your followers do retweet your posts, ask yourself why. What are they trying to reveal to their circle of influence?
These insights are how you expand your understanding of your ideal customer and include complimentary or unforeseen markets. Remember: while a target customer conceptualization must be unique and specific, that doesn’t mean you can’t have more than one.
Analyzing growth of Twitter followers for further growth
You’ll likely have steady growth in the number of followers for your business, but if you have spikes or dips, it’s time to super-sleuth out the reason.
Unless you’re already famous or have a well-known brand, you don’t get something for nothing. One hypothesis is that once you start really putting time into Twitter (following the right people and replying and mentioning in addition to posting your own content), your number of followers will increase.
Most influencers and businesses find that it takes an initial burst of activity to get their account going. Test to see if your commitments are paying off. If they are, schedule more bursts of activity at key times for your brand.
Viewing Linkedin follower demographics for both marketing and sales targeting
For B2Bs with Linkedin business pages, this is especially useful. You can discover more about who is following your brand.
What level of rank are they? What industry are they coming from—IT or health? These stats are super easy to uncover with MavSocial’s reporting. You’ll know more about who is interested in your business, which will help inform not only the links and updates you post to Linkedin but potentially your sales and marketing strategies.
The job titles of your audience on Linkedin can help your sales team know who to target at organizations on your prospecting list.
Discovering how and where your YouTube videos are watched
Because YouTube pulls a lot of profile data, it’s easier to get a lot of information inside of MavSocial. The social media analysis in MavSocial allow you to identify what percentage of your audience is male or female, from what country your audience is coming, what devices they use to watch your video, and how they found your video in the first place.
If you find any inconsistencies between who’s watching your videos and who you want to watch your videos, clearly it’s time to make some changes.
You’ll also benefit from reviewing your traffic sources. While external links are major sources of traffic for videos that go viral, most videos are discovered by searches right inside of YouTube. This reinforces the idea that each network is a search engine in itself, which will help you stay on course with creating content for your user and coming up with accurate, attention-grabbing video titles.
Why you don’t need to up your sample size (but how to do it easily anyway)
Having a small data set (say a month of Twitter activity) doesn’t mean that any statistics will be wrong or worthless. It’s still worthwhile to conduct analysis with small data sets. Just be aware that small sample sizes will have greater differences and deviations because there isn’t as much padding.
If you want a broader view of things, however, just change the default range to a custom range. A two-year range will give you insight into many phases of your social media efforts, the busy times, the slumps, the successes, and the lows.
How “event data” analysis can change your life
Many of the above ideas can (and should) be thought of in terms of event data.
This simply means that you need to identify a point in time: when a network made a major change, when you rebranded, when you changed your YouTube strategy, or when you hired a studio for your visual content.
Take that event and then split time in two—before and after. Simply run the reports twice with the correct time ranges.
Let’s take Twitter’s character change for example. With links and videos no longer counting, you might be tempted to make the most of that 140 character space.
If you start maxing out the majority of your tweets, how will that change perform with your audience? Make the assumption that longer tweets will perform better (or worse) and then review the data side by side.
When using this method to identify the success of new brand messaging, try to have an open mind. It’s easy to find what you’re looking for, so be prepared for anything. Because you’re pouring resources into your new campaigns, you’ll want to know honestly whether they’re resonating or not.
It can be hard to make the time to conduct analysis and apply it to your social media campaigns. When you start playing around with your social media analysis though, you might just become addicted! Seriously.
