Conducting your own social media content analysis can help you gauge how your marketing strategy is doing. Let’s walk through a step-by-step guide on how you can make sure your content is performing well, and which types of posts your audience most wants to see.
Step 1: Define your objectives As with any marketing analysis, you need to have your objectives laid out. What are your goals for your social media content? Knowing what you hope to achieve is important before you begin your analysis so that you know if you’re on the right track or not.
Common goals and objectives from social media content include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- Growing your online presence
- Engaging your audience
- Sending traffic to your website
- Generating sales
The objectives you have for your marketing strategy will directly correlate with the metrics you measure, which brings us to our next step.
Step 2: Choose your metrics for your social media content pillars You don’t want to look into every single metric related to your social media presence as you do your content analysis. It will take too much time and won’t actually tell you anything related to your goals.
Instead, you need to choose a select few metrics that actually pertain to what you’re hoping to achieve through social media. This way, you’ll be able to understand if your content is doing its job or if you need to pivot.
Some of the metrics you might choose (and the objectives they relate to) are:
- Increasing brand awareness: Impressions, reach, video views, followers
- Growing your online presence: Reach, followers
- Engaging your audience: Engagement rate, likes, comments, shares
- Sending traffic to your website: Clicks
- Generating sales: Conversions
Step 3: Collect data for better analysis Next, you need to collect your data. There are a couple of different ways to do this:
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Built-in analytics tools on each social media platform, which you get access to when you sign up for business accounts on each platform. Think Instagram Insights and TikTok Analytics. You can simply use your app to access data about your audience, content performance, and more.
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Third-party social media analytics tools that let you see all of your social media analytics at a glance from a single dashboard, while also providing you with the tools to get in-depth data and insights.
The former option is free as it comes with the social media app. Some analytics tools have free limited plans, but you’ll likely need to set aside some of your marketing budget to get access to more in-depth
social media content analytics.
For example, Socialinsider offers a 14-day free trial, then our
paid plans start at $99/month, as we offer a wide range of social media insights that help your brand make better decisions.
Step 4: Categorize your content Once you’ve chosen your data collection method (we recommend a third-party tool to make it easier to compare all platforms at once), you’ll need to categorize your content so you can really dive into your
social media content analysis.
There are three options available when using Socialinsider to categorize your content.
First, you can have our AI tool automatically generate content pillars for you based on the content you typically publish. This is a quick and easy way to categorize your content if you want a more hands-off approach.
Next, you can head to your posts and do a manual search by keyword or hashtag to see how often you’ve posted about a specific topic, event, or campaign.
Or, you can create an Auto Tag based on your keyword or hashtag search that gives you a quick way to filter content based on topics you know you post about often, especially if there’s a specific content type or topic you want to analyze consistently.
Once you set up your Auto Tag, all past and future posts using the keyword or hashtag will be categorized with that tag.
Give your Auto Tag a name so you can easily find it when you analyze your content. Because your social media content analysis centers around different content types and topics, having these categories set up is a key step you can’t miss.
Step 5: Analyze social media content across platforms Next, it’s time to dive into your content analysis. Using Socialinsider, this means you’ll head to your dashboard, and click Content Pillars in the left sidebar before choosing your topic from either your own content pillars or the AI-generated options.
Once you’ve selected your content pillar, you can then choose your social media platforms.
Use the dropdown menu at the top of the screen to choose your date range. You might conduct a monthly or quarterly analysis to check in on your performance. Then, you can scroll down to start looking at performance.
Step 6: Analyze engagement patterns As you look at your performance across platforms, start paying attention to any engagement patterns you might see.
For example, Socialinsider provides you with data like:
- Number of posts within the pillar during your selected time frame
- Growth in follower count
- Average engagement (i.e., the number of comments, likes, and shares your content saw)
- Average engagement rate by followers (i.e., the percent of your followers who engaged with your content)
- Your top 10 posts
- Number of engagements per post
With insights like this, you can pinpoint your most engaging content pillars so that you can prioritize creating more of that content and increasing performance with your audience.
Step 7: Benchmarks against competitors Socialinsider also gives you the ability to identify the social media content pillars for any profile, not just yours. Add social media profiles from your competitors so that you can see what their most popular topics (and the posts within those topics) are, so you get other ideas for how to engage your audience.