The use of various social media platforms is becoming established as a part of a business marketing strategy in the 21stCentury.
But how many businesses use data to monitor the results of their efforts, to check it is working and then to use the feedback to modify their activity?
We recently asked delegates at a business conference how many of them had ever seen Twitter or Google Analytics and were staggered when from an audience of around 120 senior executives only one put up their hand. Yet in a global marketplace the digital world is crucial to successful business.
Over the next few weeks we will be looking at the data you can collect from Twitter, Google and Facebook and how you might use it.
First, finding Twitter analytics
If your business has a Twitter account you can use it to login to https://analytics.twitter.com to find the data collected on your activity, known as Analytics.
You can also access analytics direct from Twitter by clicking on logo picture top right then select Analytics from the drop down menu.
You will find:
Home – a month by month summary and a last 28 day summary.
Tweets – a tweet by tweet summary of engagements, which is how many people have acted (commented/liked or shared your tweets) and reach, which is how many people your tweets have been sent to. Top tweets help you identify what works and what doesn’t.
Audience – you can review your audiences’ interests and compare to other audiences. Top mentions help you find out who your fans are, who is promoting your business, who to thank.
You can change the date range if you want to look at how a particular set of tweets has worked.
If your business runs its own campaigns in-house rather than using a social media marketing expert this information is essential to assessing how effectively you are communicating.
Once you have collected the information the next step is analysing whether or not what you have been doing has achieved the results you had hoped for and if not deciding how to alter your activity so that it performs better. That’s the subject for another blog.
For the moment it is worth just looking at the rich data available and considering how it might benefit you and your business. Should any of it become one of your KPIs?