Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Analyze These: How You Aren't Using Social Analytics

It's 2015, Facebook and Twitter are two of the largest operating entities in...well, the world, and yet, people will still undoubtedly ask about ROI on social.

It's understandable. Social networks are free services so why spend money to use them? To create a strategy, to boost posts, promote tweets, etc. 

What's even more surprising than all of this, however, is that some people struggle to answer the question about ROI on social when the answer is probably right on the social network they've been using.

And, as usual, the answer is in the numbers.

No, Seriously. They're Literally Right There. 


Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube all have native analytics systems built into their platforms. Meaning, if you have any kind of business page, you can literally just go to your menu and pull data to analyze.




Look at all of those nice charts and numbers. Each of these platforms can be used to determine how your posts and strategy have been performing over a set time period. You can use these numbers to compile monthly reports and even develop new strategies! Isn't that great? There is a catch, however...

Reading the Numbers


We understand more than anyone that social analytics aren't always easy to decipher. Especially if social media already isn't your area of expertise. As helpful as these analytics platforms are, they aren't necessarily built to be instantly and readily easy to use. 

Additionally, once your figure out what all of these numbers mean, how do you put it into context with your social strategy? To go one step further, how do you then use that information to develop new social strategies? 

The answer to this one is easy...

Let Us Help 


We're not saying that you shouldn't take a stab at trying to interpret these numbers yourself. By all means, if you're ambitious enough, you should definitely educate yourself. However, by acknowledging that these numbers exist and that you can use them to your advantage, you've already done more than most pages on Facebook or Twitter will likely ever make an effort to do. 

But now that you've seen what's behind the curtain of your page, it might be best to hand out the diagnosis to a team that specializes in analyzing social data and compiling that data into reports that will ultimately help your social presence. 

And of course, this all comes back to...

ROI


We don't take an investment into social media lightly. Even in this day and age, we understand how it can be a tough maneuver to justify. And that's why we're encouraging you to take a look behind the machinery of the pages you likely already have. Even glancing these numbers over on your own will give you the sense that's there's much here to be discovered and much potential for growth. 

Moving forward doesn't have to be scary. Just click the Insights tab of your Facebook page, visit analytics.twitter.com and see what all there is to be done with a Facebook post or a tweet. Then maybe let us know if you'd like us to help take it the rest of the way.