Being an effective marketer in today’s marketing industry means you need to have the ability to decipher and integrate data into your marketing strategies. The good news? You don’t need a Ph.D. in Data Science to understand social media analytics tools. These are easy-to-use tools that allow you to get insights and use them in your content strategy.
Every social platform like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn offers some version of social media analytics. This includes metrics like engagement (likes, shares, comments), reach, impressions, follower demographics and more. Analytics serves as a feedback tool, giving you insights into your target audience’s preferences and online behavior. It gives you the ability to see what resonates with your audience and what falls flat.
Building on this, social media platforms themselves have undergone a transformation. From being hubs for personal connections, they’ve grown into powerful business tools. With advancements like influencer marketing, e-commerce integrations, and real-time engagement, the importance of data-driven content strategy has magnified.
Unpacking Social Media Metrics
Understanding these metrics in-depth can provide a competitive edge to your content strategy:
- Engagement Metrics: These are indicators of how your content is being received. High engagement suggests your content is striking a chord with your audience.
- Reach and Impressions: These show the spread of your content. While reach indicates the total number of unique users who’ve seen your post, impressions represent the total views, including multiple views by the same user.
- Follower Demographics: This data can be a goldmine. Knowing the age, location, gender, and even interests of your followers can help in tailoring content that’s hyper-relevant to them.
The real power of social media analytics is being able to decipher and then put them into actionable insights. These insights can then become the foundation of your content strategy, giving you the ability to craft content that your audience wants to see.
Using Analytics to Influence Your Content Strategy
Analytics for social media is oftentimes overlooked because marketers aren’t sure what to do with the information. However, it can be the roadmap that informs your content marketing strategy.
For instance, you can use analytics to start understanding your audience. Most analytic tools offer demographic data about your followers, including age, gender, location and language. This information can be used when determining the type of content that will resonate with your audience. For example, if your followers are predominantly young adults from Denver, posts about local events, lifestyle trends, or career advice might perform better than if your audience was a more mature, global demographic.
Content Preferences and Audience Behavior
Analytics can also provide valuable insights into the types of content your audience prefers. By evaluating engagement rates (likes, shares, comments) on different posts, you can discern what content causes a reaction.
Do your followers engage more with videos, infographics or lengthy think pieces? Do posts with a specific tone (e.g., humorous, professional, inspirational) perform better? Are certain topics more popular than others? These insights can help shape your content strategy moving forward.
Activity Patterns and Content Timing
Activity patterns are another form of data that can inform your social media content strategy. Data about when your followers are online and most active can also influence your social media content calendar . By identifying peak activity times, you can strategically schedule your posts to coincide with these periods for maximum visibility. For example, if your audience is more active during weekday evenings, it might be beneficial to release your most important piece of content during this time to maximize engagement.
Feedback’s Role in Strategy Refinement
Lastly, the value of direct feedback from your audience. Comments, shares and even DM’s can provide qualitative insights that complement the data from your analytics. If your audience asks a lot of questions about a particular topic, for instance, consider creating content that talks to their curiosity.
The overall goal is to produce content that not only reflects your brand and its goals but also meets your audience’s interests and needs. By using social media analytics to understand your audience, you can create a more targeted, effective content strategy that encourages engagement and cultivates brand loyalty.
Case Study: Storefront Stories
In 2021, COHN successfully launched two social channels for Old Town Lafayette. From zero, we grew our following to over 1,000 in just a few weeks. We used analytics as our guide, and it helped us understand what our audience enjoyed and what missed the mark. We also observed trends in engagement and reach, leading us to create content that now resonates, such as our “Storefront Stories” series.
“Storefront Stories” allows business owners to share their inspiration, fostering collaboration between different merchants. Our ability to use and decipher analytics gave us a strategic approach to content creation, we were able to amplify Old Town Lafayette’s social media presence and create content their audience is interested in seeing.
Contact COHN
Feel free to reach out to us for a discussion on how COHN uses the power of analytics to tailor our social media strategies, ensuring our clients benefit from data-driven content that truly resonates with their audience.
