ICYMI: Using Social Media Analytics to Grow Your Audience
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Editor's Note: Learning from data and user feedback is an essential part of our work. ICYMI, we wanted to highlight these tactics for leveraging data to expand your social media reach.
Are you getting maximum impact from the social media platforms you’re using?
If you want to grow your audience, it helps to know if you’re spending your time and resources on platforms that attract your target audience(s). Here are a few tips on using analytics from some major social media channels to understand and grow your audience
Are you getting maximum impact from the social media platforms you’re using?
If you want to grow your audience, it helps to know if you’re spending your time and resources on platforms that attract your target audience(s). Here are a few tips on using analytics from some major social media channels to understand and grow your audience
Facebook’s InsightsExit Disclaimer feature lets you determine the optimal times and days of the week to post. It also lets you know what type of content is most popular with the platform’s users.
- The Insights dashboard shows the total number of likes, friends or fans, how many people are actively talking about your page, and your total weekly reach.
- It will also show you your posts (by type), and you can see how many people have seen and shared a particular post. Knowing the “virality”--how widely and rapidly a post is shared--can help you create more content your fans like, which can increase your reach and, hopefully, your traffic.
- Clicking on Likes lets you see your fans’ demographics, including their sex, age groups, and locations. This information lets you build personas of your ‘typical’ followers, which can help you with overall marketing and creating landing pages and homepage copy.
- Reach will show you what channels (organic searches, paid ‘boosts,’ and viral) are most effective.
- The Talking About This section can also provide valuable data about who is discussing your page, including demographics and the percentages of people in different age groups.
Twitter AnalyticsExit Disclaimer can help you understand how the content you share on that platform can expand your audience.
- Account Home provides high-level statistics that are tracked month-to-month. It shows your top-performing tweets and lets you know the influencersExit Disclaimer in your network.
- Twitter also gives you access to multiple dashboards. The Tweet Activity Dashboard gives you metrics for each tweet, letting you know how many times Twitter users have seen, liked, replied to, and retweeted your tweets.
- The Audience Insights Dashboard contains valuable information about your Twitter followers, including their interests and demographics.
Instagram’s InsightsExit Disclaimer feature was launched in early 2016 to offer Facebook-like business profiles that allow commercial and organizational users to see data on how their posts are doing. Like Facebook Insights, Instagram’s feature provides valuable data about who your followers are, when they are online, and how many people viewed your posts.
- Instagram provides follower demographic analytics so you can see where your followers are located, their genders, and their ages.
By letting you drill down into your audience demographics by age, sex, location, usage habits, and other rich information, each of the platforms lets you know to whom you should target your content, the most effective content to reach them, and which social platform to use to share specific types of content.
Finally, we asked Franny Peabody CenterExit Disclaimer how focusing on social media analytics helps their outreach. Here's what Katie Henderson, Director of Development, shared: “We look closely at social media analytics to gather demographic information about our most engaged audiences, and provide insight into how we can target posts to benefit other populations. We use a varied mix of images, articles, and partner posts that our audience is likely to share. For fundraising and HIV-testing events, we will often boost a post (even with just $5). To maximize our engagement and reach, we post at times when our most engaged audience is online, use Facebook’s audience targeting, and take advantage of affordable, user-friendly design apps to create attractive images.”
Finally, we asked Franny Peabody CenterExit Disclaimer how focusing on social media analytics helps their outreach. Here's what Katie Henderson, Director of Development, shared: “We look closely at social media analytics to gather demographic information about our most engaged audiences, and provide insight into how we can target posts to benefit other populations. We use a varied mix of images, articles, and partner posts that our audience is likely to share. For fundraising and HIV-testing events, we will often boost a post (even with just $5). To maximize our engagement and reach, we post at times when our most engaged audience is online, use Facebook’s audience targeting, and take advantage of affordable, user-friendly design apps to create attractive images.”