- Reading time: 4 mins
- Topics:
- Social Media
Imagine if your boss asked you to give him an update on the company’s social media accounts. Where would you begin? You know how many people like your page, but do you know if your posts are reaching them? Thankfully, there are free social media analytics tools that can greatly assist you with measuring the success of your online outreach and learning more about your audience—even if you have several accounts.
Hootsuite.
The benefit of using Hootsuite to track your social media analytics is that you can do it all without having to log-in to your separate accounts. It’s simple to set up, easy to navigate, and the free version (with the option of upgrading to Pro or Enterprise) allows you to manage up to 5 social media accounts through one dashboard. You can schedule messages in advance, which makes it easy to keep up with your social media calendar if you are out of the office. Even with a free account, you have access to basic analytics reports, which enhance your knowledge of the effectiveness of your posts. You can see, for instance, your top ten most engaging Facebook posts, and how many people those posts reached. Hootsuite also provides easily interpreted graphs and charts, which can be exported, printed, or emailed to others. This is a great tool if you are required to report the status of social media—and show the value of the time you put into interacting with your audience.
Twitter Analytics.
If you’re not ready to use one dashboard for all of your accounts, there are analytics tools built into many social media platforms already. For Twitter, you can usually get a good grasp on the content your audience likes just by noticing your mentions and retweets. What you can’t easily discover, though, is the basic demographic information of your followers and their interests. By connecting Twitter Analytics to your account, you can easily find this information and make better decisions based on it. After logging in to the analytics platform, you are provided with an abundance of statistics including your audience’s geographic location, the common profiles they follow, and their top industry interests. You can also track your follows and unfollows, which helps you gage the effectiveness of your campaigns and show possible issues with your content. It is very important to keep track of analytics in order to avoid following trends that aren’t working, and test new ways to get your audience’s attention.
Facebook Insights.
Once you are set as an administrator for a Facebook Page, you have access to several pages of data regarding your audience, likes, reach, and more! If you’ve never taken a closer look at this information, the time to start is now. Facebook has recently changed the way your audience sees your posts—making your organic reach almost non-existent. This is part of their strategy to get more users to pay to expand the reach of their posts. While it doesn’t cost much to use this option, it is important to note that you can still reach your audience effectively without paying—this is where social media analytics comes in. Use Facebook Insights to check the status of your posts on a regular basis, especially when you’ve introduced new content—such as video—to see how your audience reacts. Facebook Insights even tell you the time of day your audience is online! You can use this information to plan what kind of content you should post and when to post it in order to reach the highest number of people.
Social media marketing is a must in today’s world, but like any other marketing effort, you need to be able to measure your success. Whether you use one or multiple social media accounts, take advantage of the free social media analytics tools that can help you monitor your effectiveness online.
