To get the most out of your social media content analysis, keep these tips in mind.
Focus on the right metrics Don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to monitor every single metric. Prioritize your goals, then focus only on the metrics or KPIs that pertain to those goals.
Again, here are the metrics you should track for some of the most common social media content goals:
- Brand awareness: Impressions, reach, video views, followers
- Growth: Reach, followers
- Engagement: Engagement rate, likes, comments, shares
- Website traffic: Clicks
- Sales: Conversions
Pick one or two goals that you hope to achieve so you’re not overloading yourself with too many metrics. Trying to focus on too many KPIs won’t give you the full picture, especially if you look at data that doesn’t impact your bottom line.
Organize your data Keep your data organized by using the right tools and spreadsheets to house it. For example, instead of looking at each individual social network’s analytics, use a third-party tool that puts all your content analytics in one place.
From there, decide what format works best for your data—PDF, CSV, Excel spreadsheet, etc. Make sure to consistently export your reports in the same format so everything stays streamlined.
Pull your reports around the same time every month or quarter so you can line everything up easily. Save reports within the same folder so you can easily find and refer back to them. Staying organized is going to be a key part of maintaining consistent and quality analysis.
Use social media analytics tools Enlisting the help of
social media analytics tools like Socialinsider helps make the entire analysis process go much more smoothly. First of all, you have all of your analytics within a single dashboard. This means you get to look at one website rather than five different dashboards during your analysis.
In addition, many social media analytics tools give you even deeper insights than your built-in analytics tool can. This is because they’ve tapped into APIs of each network as well as other marketing tools you might be using.
For example, your Instagram analytics won’t be able to tell you how many clicks to your website generated sales, but if you have your Instagram and your website analytics connected via a third-party social media analytics tool, you can certainly find that information.
Look for patterns and trends A big part of your social media content analysis will be pinpointing similarities, patterns, or trends amongst your content and its results.
This is why Socialinsider’s content pillars feature is so valuable. It creates the perfect dashboard for analyzing patterns amongst your content, helping you find topics that are more engaging and relevant to your audience than others.
By also enabling you to benchmark your competitors’ content, you can further
analyze trends within your industry. Look to see if your competitors’ content patterns line up with yours. Are similar topics just as popular for them? And why does that seem to be the case, one way or the other?
Keep track of content lifespans Content lifespans refer to the length of time that a piece of content continues to get reach and engagement. By tracking your top posts each month and their growth, you can see how long your content tends to continue reaching new audience members.
Knowing your content lifespans helps you to prioritize top-performing platforms and topics. For example, if your content tends to last longer on LinkedIn than on X/Twitter, you’ll know it’s more valuable for your company to create more LinkedIn content.
Conduct regular content audits A content audit is a more in-depth social media content analysis. It looks at content performance over time, with the goal being to pinpoint areas of improvement rather than finding patterns amongst your content topics.
Conducting a content audit helps you to eliminate low-performing post types, improve content creation and publication processes, and work towards a better marketing strategy.
Present your findings in a visual report If you need to relay your social media content analysis findings, it’s always a good idea to put them into a visual report that makes it easy for others to look at and understand what they’re seeing.
Using charts and graphs, rather than a spreadsheet or list of numbers, helps convey your results in a much more digestible way.
Spreadsheets like Excel allow you to turn tables of data into graphs, but third-party analytics tools like Socialinsider also give you the ability to present your data in visual ways, with some of our reports appearing in line graphs, bar charts, and more.