Stories Your Data Tell on Social Media

As you run a social campaign, you'll want to gather feedback to find out how you're doing. While it's always better to reach out to followers with surveys and consider their comments on social posts, you can also look to your social analytics for help. The numbers tell stories about the topics that interest your followers and the subjects you should write about in posts.

If you manage a blog, you can start tracking your visitors with a tool like Google Analytics. The service captures a wealth of information — pages visitors are reading, how long they're reading and what keywords they're searching on your site. Based on your data, you can start to make educated guesses about what's working and what's not; you can refine your content strategy to accommodate audience interests you never imagined. It's fascinating to see what your audience will tell you simply by visiting your page … or not visiting it. To learn more about how to interpret Google Analytics, check out this handy web guide.

On Facebook, you'll call on Insights for help. You can track how your audience is growing, what posts your followers are engaging, and what time of day followers are seeing your stories. You can also use the new tool, Pages to Watch, to compare your audience growth to the audience growth of similarly-sized agencies.

To learn how you're faring on Twitter, check out Twitter Analytics. The easy-to-use interface lets you track link follows, retweets, replies, and favorites, and export up to 3 months of data. If you're running special campaigns on Twitter, such as live tweets or townhalls, you can also call on supplemental analytics tools, such as TweetReach, Hashtracking, and SocialBro.

Related to: 

• Data
• Social Media