When it comes to social media for your business, you’ve got it going on. You’re Tweeting and updating your Facebook status regularly. You’re posting, you’re interacting, you’re keeping your audience engaged! Everyone loves it! Or do they?
Fortunately, both Twitter and Facebook make it relatively easy for you figure out exactly what you’re getting right and what could use a tweak or two. Taking advantage of their free tools is a smart bet for enhancing the effectiveness of your social media.
Twitter’s Tweet activity dashboard is designed to help you discover how your tweets resonate with the audience. Specifically, here’s exactly what Twitter support says the dashboard allows you to do:
See how people engage with your Tweets in real time
Compare your Tweet activity, and see how it trends over time
Click on any Tweet to get a detailed view of the number of Retweets, replies, favorites, follows or clicks it receives
Download your Tweet metrics
To get started, just log in to analytics.twitter.com with your Twitter username and password to turn analytics on for your account. To access Tweet activity on your desktop, visit analytics.twitter.com and click on Tweets. On your mobile, tap one of your Tweets to get to the Tweet detail, then tap View Tweet activity. (Make sure you have installed the latest version of Twitter for iPhone or for Android.)
For more detailed information about how it all works and to see some visual examples, visit Twitter support.
Similarly, Facebook offers Facebook Insights, a tool that helps track interaction and determine the best time of the day and best day of the week to post, as well as what content is most popular. Insights constantly updates to reflect changes in your page and any emerging patterns, so checking frequently is important.
To access Facebook Insights, just click on the gear wheel on your Facebook Fan Page and select View Insights.
The main Insights dashboard features a graph reporting the following:
total likes (and whether they are increasing or decreasing)
total number of friends of fans (people you can potentially reach)
how many people are actively talking about your page
the number of people you’re reaching weekly
You can also learn about
which of your posts are most successful (virality)
how popular they are by category, since you can sort them as “all post types,” “videos,” “photos,” etc.)
demographics (age, gender, etc.) and location of fans who “like” certain posts
A second graph even allows you to see “Likes” and “Unlikes” by date.
Yet another section shows you page views and unique visitor views (those who searched for you specifically), and you can see how many people you reached through organic, paid or viral searches.
If you have a physical location, you can see how many people “check in” when they visit your business and view their demographics. You can even view and export pages of specific tabulated data on Excel spreadsheets.
For a more detailed explanation of how to use Facebook Insights, complete with visual examples, check out this excellent Beginner’s Guide.
Researching and understanding your market is the first step toward making social media work for your business. Take advantage of these invaluable tools from Twitter and Facebook and get to know your audience!