In our Social Media – Your Company’s Secret Weapon blog series, we dive deep into the intricacies of social media. At first glance, social media seems relatively simple. However, it is much more complex than it appears. This series provides you with bite-sized, easy to digest content in separate blogs allowing you to retain the information better and wrap your head around how to take advantage of this behemoth we call social media. We already touched upon Social Listening and Reputation Management in previous installments. In blog #3, we will be examining the importance of insights:
Insights – Insights refer to the metrics that are tracked by social media platforms. This information includes but is not limited to the number of impressions for posts, the unique user reach, engagement statistics for posts (reactions/likes, comments, shares), follower statistics (demographics, device usage), etc. On their own, these measurements are still useful but when viewed in various combinations they are extraordinarily powerful and tell a detailed digital story.
Given how much information the insights can provide you with, checking them should be part of your daily social media strategy. Be sure to track what posts perform better than average and those that fall below numbers you tend to see. Every company’s social media pages will have different measuring points based on the platform, how long their pages have been around, their follower count, their specific industry, and more.
Let’s look at an example of a common occurrence for business social media pages. Your company’s sweatshirt posts are always performing higher than your other posts in terms of engagement. Is that because:
- people like your company’s sweatshirts a lot?
- the copy/imagery used in these posts?
- completely different reasons?
That is for you to analyze and conclude yourself with the insights! Use the data to tell the story.
Important aspects to consider are:
- what days of the week get the most engagement?
- what time of day?
- if photos or videos for certain material is better.
- if there are any trends your sales figures have in common with your social posting content.
Seeing what posts perform better than others gives you an understanding of what your audience connects with. Give your customers content that they desire at the right time – it is essential when it comes to taking advantage of potential business opportunities.
“When consumers follow brands on social media, 67% say they are more likely to increase their spending with that brand.” – Sprout Social
“50% of consumers follow brands on social media to learn about new products or services.” – Sprout Social
All the above has been addressing organic social media posts – so what about paid social? Using the same data from organic content can help us when it comes to crafting a paid social campaign. The organic insights are already providing a template for what your online customers’ behavior and profile tends to be.
Here is an example: From your daily insight analysis, you know your female followers between ages 18 and 30 tend to engage with your content at a much higher rate than other demographic groups. You know they tend to appreciate video content more than images and that posting on a weekend between 3pm-7pm is the best for your engagement. You can use all of this valuable information to create a paid campaign with the goal of getting engagement and ultimately clicks to your site.
Be sure to use as much information as possible from the insights to craft your perfect targeted audience. Too many companies go in blindly and seem to think throwing more money at a campaign is what they need to do in order to succeed. What they really need to be doing is refining their plan/targeting based on their insights and trends they observe over time. Spending wisely beats spending more 10 times out of 10!
Keeping track of the countless metrics provided to you can be an overwhelming daily task. Are you having trouble keeping up? iMedia is experienced with social media and is ready to discuss a plan to take your social media pages to the next level. Contact us today to learn more!