Information for this blog was found on Sprout Social, Social Media Examiner, and HootSuite.
In today's day and age, social media marketing has skyrocketed in importance and value. Every single day millions of users are logging into Instagram, X, TikTok, and other social media sites to interact with businesses, influencers, and peers alike. These platforms have been vital in the new age of marketing. Using these apps and utilizing them to their full capability is important for marketers to optimize their performance when using these tools to attract engagement and attract potential customers.
So why do marketing analytics matter? Most people understand marketing from the advertising and digital marketing side of these social media platforms. What may be even more important is the analytics side to determine how well these posts, campaigns, and videos are doing. The analytics side of marketing acts as the coach, sitting behind the screens and studying how the players can improve their performance using real-time data. Marketing analysis offers insight into the numbers behind the scenes and can be utilized to refocus a campaign, align a plan to improve the marketing department, as well as detail and find what strategies are working the best.
Digital marketing and creativity stand out on all of these platforms, but how do we conduct an analysis on how our accounts are performing from an analytical standpoint? Fortunately most of the everyday social media sites we use provide options for users to get a grasp of how well they are doing by pulling in various statistics including engagements, new viewers, and followers +/- over a period of time. Here's how some of these platforms provide free and easily accessible data.
Instagram is the second most popular social media used for marketing behind the established media juggernaut, Facebook. The massive platform changed the game for social media marketing by making pictures the focus. Content creators blew up on Instagram, with companies utilizing other notorious platforms to market to millions of people with the single click of a button. Remarkably famous Kylie Jenner Kardashian, who owns the fifth most Instagram followers totaling 399 million followers, gets paid 1.8 million dollars per sponsored post. On the analytics side, Instagram offers a unique tool to gather details about how your account is performing by using "insights." To access this, follow these steps:
Step 1: Make sure to convert your account to a professional account in the settings portion of Instagram
Step 2: Select Professional Dashboard, this allows you to see categories involving Accounts Reached, Accounts Engaged, and Total Followers over the course of a month.
These various tools allow creators and businesses access to direct statistical outreach with the click of a couple of buttons. Instagram offers various charts to help a marketer or marketing analyst assess the growth and productivity of what you are sharing on the app. This a huge asset to see how your pages are performing.
Twitter/X
Beginning in 2006, Twitter/X has established itself as a platform useful for mass communication in a short period of time. The sharing model "retweeting" has allowed posts, memes, and videos alike to spread like wildfire on the platform. With 450 million active users in April of 2023, Twitter has no intention of slowing up. New CEO Elon Musk has made a lot of controversial decisions since his abrupt takeover of the former Twitter platform. Most of his tweaks and changes have been met with frustration, although his vision for marketing and advertising has improved X in those departments, and accessing those numbers is simple, useful, and clear. Musk's incorporates a subscription to 'Twitter Blue' for $8 a month which boosts reach, prioritizes tweets, and offers other perks to boost your account's connectivity on the platform.
Twitter's unique model allows for a great opportunity to market and normal accounts can collect payment based on interaction on the app. Twitter's marketing strength lies in the ability of a tweet to spread rapidly. From an analytics standpoint, this provides a marketer with a lot of opportunities to track and understand what's working and what isn't. Twitter's analytics department offers a website that gives you a breakdown of your account's statistics. Follow this link will lead you to a free analytical breakdown of your X posts, following, and engagements.
One of the interesting components on the analytics page is the 28-day summary offering the user a graph based on impressions and followers and is filled with tips and tricks to generate more engagement by adding pictures or even signing up for advertising on the app. Another unique feature of X/Twitter is its analytics and impression numbers on a single tweet.
As you can see, 533 thousand people ran across this tweet in their feed and 44,766 people clicked and interacted with the tweet, leading to 15,611 people looking further into this user's profile. These numbers here indicate a successful tweet in terms of outreach and provide numerical statistics as to exactly what the post did in terms of other users seeing and interacting with it, simply by pressing the 'View Analytics" button provided by the platform itself. Accessing this direct expansive information regarding a tweet is a useful tool for marketers utilizing Twitter to advertise and promote.
TikTok
The explosion of TikTok has turned the platform into a massive titan in the world of social media. The app filled with viral dances, life hacks, and shopping hauls has flipped the social media marketing world on top of it's own head. The app boasts 50 million daily users in the United States alone, which equates to about 18% of all mobile phone owners using the app every single day. The platform's unique video style brings in users to create videos on any topic imaginable. Influencers building massive platforms and establishing a niche army of followers is feasible on TikTok and the addicting process of scrolling through videos promotes retainability. The high daily user rate combined with the high potential to go viral creates a perfect storm for marketers.
Marketers can utilize TikTok's model to garner viewers and followers by doing tutorials, utilizing influencers, video reviews and ride the trends of whatever is popular at any given moment. All of these use-cases can boost the engagement of a business or marketers page but what tools does the app provide to determine if these posts, collaborations, or videos are working?
TikTok offers an account setting called "TikTok Pro" which essentially works like Instagram's business account. Next, click on the "analytics" tab and click "overview." By doing this, users are granted access to free charts, statistics, and numbers from an overall account perspective and an individual post outlook as well. The visuals offer breakdowns involving video views, profile views, and a follower breakdown. These charts can give you a solid reflective understanding of statistical performance from a marketing standpoint.
Facebook has been the number one marketing platform used for social media marketing for over a decade. The site hosts the largest user base and was the first legitimate powerhouse of a social media platform. Facebook holds roughly 3 billion monthly users but the growth rate is dropping off likely due to their issue bringing in new and younger users to start using the platform. Although they are having issues generating new users, they still stand number one in terms of social media marketing.
Facebook excels in the business page department, with Meta Business Suite allowing page managers access to many functionalities, including assessing analytics.
Conclusion
Analytics in marketing has become more and more important with the uprising in social media marketing. Tools offered by these platforms can give any user the ability to see and interact with analytics and use them to shape and improve reach and efficiency in their organization's marketing efforts. Before these tools became available, countless hours were spent using Excel and other tools to track all of this information and data to improve marketing efficiency. The tools provided by these platforms provide free, safe, and simple access to this information and are an extremely important component of a social media marketer's skill set today.
For more information understanding metrics and analytics read this article by my colleague, Mike Chen.
Resources
Instagram analytics: How to analyze and use your data. Sprout Social. (2023a, August 3). https://sproutsocial.com/insights/instagram-analytics/
Pederson, R. (n.d.). How to Use TikTok Analytics for Business. Social Media Examiner. https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-use-tiktok-analytics-for-business/
Twitter analytics: How to analyze and improve your Twitter data. Sprout Social. (2023b, September 6). https://sproutsocial.com/insights/twitter-analytics/
Inc., H. (n.d.). One platform for all your social media marketing. Social Media Marketing Tools and Solutions. https://www.hootsuite.com/solutions/social-marketing
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