i talk a lot about analytics and traditional business analysts and data analyst roles today we're talking about a much newer development social media analytics if you're working in a marketing analyst role supporting a marketing team or even running your own business it's important to understand how social media analytics work and how they impact the business hi i'm jen [Music] which social media platforms track analytics the answer is pretty much all of them all the most popular social media platforms have some amount of analytics built into them sometimes these require a free pro or business account to access but there's at least basic information available there there's youtube analytics facebook analytics twitter analytics instagram analytics linkedin analytics even tick-tock analytics you can manage the analytics within any of these individual social media accounts but there's plenty of other third-party platforms that let you extract information and data from those platforms and aggregate it together so you could analyze everything outside of those platforms either combined with other platforms to compare how your company is performing how a business is performing on different platforms or simply to just have everything aggregated together in an easy to read way beyond the platforms that we most commonly think of as social media and would associate with social media analytics there are other areas that are often lumped in as well specifically customer sentiment mining on forums typically is linkedin with social media analytics that is looking for information on the positive negative or neutral perception of customers as they comment about specific product or specific services on different forums often dedicated to a specific thing a company is doing what are people saying on reddit or forums that are industry or topic specific what type of data is available there's a fair amount of variation from platform to platform about what's available and the naming for different analytics or metrics can vary but there are a few key things that seem to show up on every platform even if it may be called something slightly different the major metrics that cross all platforms include the following followers or page legs how many people are requesting to see the posts impressions are reached how many people saw the post or video content how many people had the chance to see more engagement of those who saw the content that was posted how many interacted with it depending on the platform this could be video views link clicks likes etc engagement is one of the most important metrics across social media platforms because it shows if people are interacting with your posts engagement rate the number of engagements divided by the number of impressions click through rate or post clicks these aren't exactly the same metric but the availability differs by platform shares how many people shared your post retweeted your content shares are also a form of engagement beyond these universal metrics you'll also find additional metrics depending on the platform including information like how people found the content were they referred to it did they find it in search was it a suggested video on youtube these types of metrics can be very helpful for building a future strategy for how to continue growing on a channel or platform i always like to talk about practical analytics so let's talk about how can social media analytics drive business improvement tracking different social media metrics can indicate what things are working well and which things aren't and then these can clue you in as to what maybe needs to change for instance if content is getting a very high number of impressions but the engagement rate is low then you don't need to focus your efforts on getting the content whether that's video text posts photos etc in front of more people you need to focus on how to make it more meaningful for the people that do see it to make it more engaging for the people that are looking at it here it's also very important to know what your goal is for a specific piece of content a video a photo a text post for instance if you have special holiday hours and you want everybody to be aware that the storefront has different hours then you don't necessarily need people to comment or be very engaged you just need them to see it they don't necessarily need to interact with it however if you're launching a new product your goal is to probably convert people into paying customers so your goals are very different for posting a product versus posting an announcement of an hours change there are a lot of different social media metrics so which are the most important to analyze which social media metrics should you analyze track metrics that align with why the content is being made in the first place focus on what you're trying to accomplish with it and put metrics in place that you can analyze you can understand if you're accomplishing the goals of what you have sometimes the goal is awareness sometimes it may be fundraising other times it's product sales knowing these goals and form the items that are important to track it can be helpful to still periodically check the rest of your metrics maybe you find something else that would be helpful to track and it's good to see trends over time are things improving staying the same declining because these can also inform the type of information that your company may want to create going forward to increase the performance on these different metrics social media analytics should focus on action it's interesting to look at the numbers but really you should be tracking and analyzing things that help you make a change if you know that impressions are low then it's figuring out how to improve the number of impressions if engagement is low it's how do you make things more engaging i hope you enjoyed this video if you did please give it a thumbs up and if you're not subscribed please consider subscribing and turning on notifications thanks so much for watching i'll see you in the next video