In today’s Digital landscape, social media is a great tool for businesses to communicate and build relationships with audiences. In most cases, it has become an essential tool for long terms success and survival, particularly if you’re in a volatile or busy market. To ensure that your business doesn’t drop the ball on Social Media, it’s imperative that you adopt a rigorous approach to analytics and reporting.
Previously on the Koozai blog, we have looked into some great free tools for scheduling and managing a social media marketing campaign, as well as what to consider when it comes to devising a strategy. This time round we will be providing insights into the core free Social Media reporting tools to help get your analyses off the ground.
Let’s get started.
Free Social Media Reporting Tools
If your business is new to Social Media, chances are you will be less likely to invest in paid reporting. As an alternative, the core platforms for many businesses, namely Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus all offer their own free analytical platforms that will help you to start generating insightful reports.
Here’s what they offer.
Facebook Insights
With over 1.3 billion monthly active users worldwide, it’s no wonder that many businesses that branch out onto Facebook and in doing so utilise Facebook Insights to obtain their reports.
Facebook Insights is Facebook’s very own reporting tool that provides a range of interpretive data that can help businesses learn who is engaging with them, and how to engage better.
When you set up your business page on Facebook and start to build a following, the insights dashboard will track the progress of your activity on a day-to-day basis.
Typical insights include the following:
User Specific
- Total Page Likes
- Daily Active Users
- Like Growth/Decline
- Follower Sources
- User Demographics
- Referrers
- Page Views
Interactions
- Post Reach (Total impressions for posted content)
- Post Engagement (Likes, Comments and Shares)
Google Plus Insights
Similar to Facebook, Google Plus Insights follows pretty much the same approach to the level of information and data they provide to managers of business pages.
The analytics offered comprise of the following areas:
Visibility
Visibility metrics showcase the amount of views that your brand has received off the back of Google Plus over a given timeframe.
Views are broken down by:
- Post views: The number of impressions and reads that your social media posts receive.
- Profile views: The amount of visits that your full business page receives.
- Photo views: The number of impressions and views that your photo albums receive.
Engagement (Actions)
On Google Plus, standard engagement metrics are defined by the amount of comments, shares and +1s that your business’ content receives.
The report highlights the total number of engagements that your content incurs over a dedicated period of time. It also shows the performance of your content on a post-by-post basis, whether it is text-based, a link, photo or video.
Audience
The audience function provides an overview of the amount of follows/unfollows your account receives, a geographical breakdown of where your followers come from, as well as their gender and age group.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics is something that has only been recently been developed over the last year or so and offers basic, free analysis of your company’s Twitter performance.
The fundamental data provided shows:
- Tweet Reach: The amount of impressions that your tweets receive over a 28 day period, but this can also be drilled down to include a breakdown of the impressions by day, and by tweet.
- Engagement Rate – The percentage of engagement penetration (engagements vs the views) that your content receives.
- Engagements: Link clicks, retweets, favourites and replies that your content attracts.
- Follower Growth: Shows the amount of followers that your account has acquired over a certain period of time.
- Follower Interests: What kind of content is your audience generally interested in? Who else do they follow?
- Follower Demographics: Where does your audience come from? What gender do they generally consist of?
When combined, all of these insights will help you to continuously strive towards a better strategy. They’ll help you to better understand the nature of your audience and their preferences, which in turn will allow for better communication, increased engagement and a stronger approach to optimising conversions.
However, that’s not to say it’s by any means a simple task. As your channels grow, so should your approach to analytics, that’s if you want to try and drive some kind of profitable action out of this audience.
By refining and interpreting data, and understanding your followers better, you’ll be able to cast a wide net, yet target those who will be most likely to lead to a beneficial action for your business, with effective, tailored communications.
That’s where more intelligent, paid reporting tools by the likes of Sprout Social, Klout and Sendible come in. We’ll be discussing these in more detail over the coming months so keep your eyes peeled.
If you have encountered any free, useful social media reporting tools that you would recommend, please leave a message in the comments section below. Or, if you would like to learn more about Social Media Management please get in touch.
Image Credit
Social Media image courtesy of Bigstock
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