Reading Time: 2 minutesWhy is tracking your social media analytics important as an influencer? Viewing and analyzing analytics regularly can provide a holistic view of your social media performance. By keeping a record of social media analytics, you will be able to identify growths and weaknesses and implement different strategies to benefit your business as an influencer. It’s tempting to think that beautiful content is all it takes to be an influencer. Still, without a clear plan and analytics to guide your social media content, you will be stuck playing a guessing game.
What are social media analytics?
The term analytics is overwhelming, but it’s simply an umbrella term for the many metrics of social media such as reach, impressions, engagement, clicks, and more. Depending on your business and social media’s overall SMART goals, you will likely focus on a few of these metrics, not all. For example, if you want to see a spike in overall engagement for social media, you would pay extra attention to your likes, comments, and shares. You might also want to look at your audience demographic to see what kind of content they enjoy and when they are likely to be present online. Keep track of these numbers weekly and monthly, and after a few months, you will likely pick up on trends that relate to your social media accounts.
The best practice for increasing analytics is to track them over time. Taking a look at them once or twice, memorizing the trends in your head, and winging your social strategies will not last very long. An active presence on social media used to be considered additional and not necessary, but it has increasingly become vital for businesses.
How to access these analytics
Most social media apps already have an analytics tab. For example, Facebook has Facebook Analytics, and Instagram has Insights. Both of these are useful to get a bird’s eye view of performance. Instagram only keeps Insights for one week, however, before updating. Facebook analytics is a powerful tool, but if you want insights into all social media apps in one place, a secondary management tool like Later or Hootsuite would be the way to go. These tools allow you to better understand the analytics by offering more services like competitor analytics and best posting times according to your network demographic.
Now you know what analytics are and how to access them — what’s next? Track, analyze, and change. It’s always good to have a plan, so start your own excel spreadsheet and continue to update the metrics weekly and monthly for your social accounts. By doing this, you will notice a pattern of growth, decline, or plateau. From there, changes can be implemented based on data, not solely intuition.
Overall, keep an open mind with social media and be ready to change up your social media tactics and try new things. Audience, taste, and many other things change over time. With that in mind, be sure to have a malleable digital self.
