#9 Monitor And Analyze Your Performance
To monitor and analyze performance on social media, businesses can utilize the following best practices:
Set clear goals and metrics: Define specific goals for your social media strategy, such as increasing engagement, driving website traffic, or generating leads. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with your goals, such as reach, engagement rate, click-through rate, conversions, or customer acquisition.
Use social media analytics tools: Take advantage of the analytics features provided by social media platforms, such as Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, Instagram Insights, or LinkedIn Analytics. These tools offer valuable data on post performance, audience demographics, engagement metrics, and more.
Track relevant metrics: Focus on the metrics that directly align with your goals and provide meaningful insights. Key metrics to monitor include reach, impressions, engagement (likes, comments, shares), click-through rate, conversion rate, follower growth, and sentiment analysis.
Regularly review and analyze data: Set a regular schedule for reviewing your social media analytics, such as weekly, monthly, or quarterly. Look for trends, patterns, and changes in performance over time. Identify high-performing content and understand what resonates with your audience.
Compare performance across platforms: If you're active on multiple social media platforms, compare the performance of your content across different channels. Assess which platforms drive the most engagement, reach your target audience effectively, or deliver the best results based on your KPIs.
Conduct A/B testing: Experiment with different content formats, posting times, captions, or visuals to understand what works best for your audience. Conduct A/B tests by publishing similar content with slight variations and compare the performance to optimize your strategy.
Listen to audience feedback: Pay attention to comments, messages, and mentions from your audience. Analyze the sentiment, feedback, and inquiries to gain insights into their preferences and needs. Address customer concerns and use their feedback to improve your social media approach.
Benchmark against competitors: Monitor your competitors' social media performance to gain industry insights and identify areas of opportunity. Compare your metrics to competitors in terms of engagement, follower growth, or content strategy to understand your relative performance.
Use third-party social media monitoring tools: Consider utilizing third-party social media monitoring tools like Social Marketing from Get Local. Tools provide in-depth analytics, performance reports, competitor analysis, and sentiment tracking to help you gain a comprehensive understanding of your social media performance.
Iterate and optimize: Based on the insights gained from your analysis, make data-driven decisions to optimize your social media strategy. Continuously refine your content, posting schedule, targeting, or messaging to improve performance and better meet your goals.
Regularly monitoring and analyzing your social media performance allows you to understand what content resonates with your audience, make informed decisions, and continuously improve your social media strategy for better engagement and results.