Good morning and welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing podcast. I'm Esther
and I'm Melanie.
And today we're talking about analytics. How to read your analytics in social media platforms, where to find them, and why it's important.
So why do you think it's important to actually look at your insights and analytics, Esther?
I think it's important because you can see where people are coming from, what's enticing them, what they're looking at. Which of your publications or your tweets or your posts that you put up has more appeal to them. Is it a specific hashtag or word or image, or is it more appealing that they watch a video? You know, what is it that your audience is looking for as well as their age and their demographics? I mean, you might think that your audience is one image, but actually, it's more younger people or older people that are looking at your stuff. So it's important to know where they're coming from and why. So then you can tailor your information to what they're looking for or change it if they're not the audience that you want.
No, absolutely. But I wonder if we were talking to our audience right now face to face and said, when was the last time you looked at your insights? Or your analytics for each of your social media platforms. I wonder how many of them would actually be able to say in the last week or even in the last month?
Yeah, I'd say it was very few.
Yeah,
Very, very few, because it's important to look at them frequently. But I mean, there's no magic number, is there, Melanie?.
Well, I wouldn't have thought so. I mean, it's sometimes fairly obvious even without going into analytics, because you can see somebody, you know, somebody had their post picked up by, you know, a great crowd of people. You can see the engagement soaring. You'll see a proposition from certainly from Facebook saying this is doing really, really well. Would you like to pay to promote this further? And so that gives you instantly the idea that it's doing really well, but not every platform does that.
No, no. What you were talking about. There's Facebook. So let's talk a bit more about what Facebook does in terms of analytics and what you can see.
Well, as you know, there's only analytics of any real sort on the Facebook business page, which is what we would encourage everybody to have for their business and not use a personal page. So if you're going to use a business page at the very top when you're in your business page, you'll be able to see an area called Insights. Now, for some people, this may have dropped down to a drop down menu. Off the top it normally and more so. Have a look. You might see on the very top row or in the "more" section, it will immediately take you to the overview for the last seven days. And you can change that over to a month if you'd like, but it'll only go up to a month and no more. And what I do like about this particular area is you can export data from there into a CSV file says debt handy, especially if you've got a very busy page.
Yeah,
And the areas I tend to look at first, I mean, they're all worthy of looking at. There's a section on the left hand side where you can tap into each parts and select different parts to view of your insights. And the various I go to you first would be people and posts and the people would tell you hopefully what age range and gender your audience is. And you can straightaway see where most of your audience is. And that will really, really help you confirm what type of people are following you what age range are following you. And slightly further down, you'll be able to see where they live or where they say they live.
Yes, two different things to different things.
Let's remember, this is all based on the fact that the Facebook page owned by the person is being kept up to date. Now, obviously, it's not always kept up to date. I've got several fans on my Facebook page from very obscure, weird and wonderful places in the world, and they very likely have moved over here maybe to work full time or have settled here. And they just haven't changed where they are based now could be something as simple as that. And then I normally head over to posts afterwards to check that area. And that gives you a seven day roundup of how many people visited your Facebook page. And you'll see like a graph area where normally it tends to go down around six o'clock, six to nine pm, because most people are eating or socialising and not spending as much time on their social media. But it's different for each page. It depends what type of business you are.
Yeah, that's very true. And it depends where you are in the world. If it's a page that is international, then you could have people coming on at all times of the day and night weekends. Exactly, doesn't make a lot of difference to people, if it's a more local pitch than it's going to have its highs and lows and more obvious ones. And that's the same across all social media platforms. So, talking Instagram, Instagram as well are called insights and probably because they're owned by Facebook and Facebook just likes to keep things simple. But again, just like Facebook, you can only get the insights if you have a business Instagram page. And you can see over the last week how many stories and posts you made. They'll give you a percentage of you went up to this week or down to or, you know, how many more you've done. And they'll show you how many times have been viewed by different people. So it could be that, you know, you have a small pick just starting out. It could be in the tens, twenties, all the way up to the thousands or millions. If you're one of the celebrities and you can see your stories that you've done previously over the last twenty four no sorry, 28 days. And they're stored there as well as to how many people viewed them. So, yes, your story disappears from your Instagram after 24 hours, but the analytics can still be viewed up to twenty eight days later. So in a way, we were saying at the start that it doesn't really matter or there's no magic number as to when to view your analytics. But obviously within twenty eight days in terms of Facebook and Instagram. So you can see what has happened in those four weeks to see what you need to do to improve in the next four weeks would be a good idea. You can also see in your audience and Instagram how the audience has grown and where the applications are by cities, by countries and again, the demographics of the age and gender. They're all very useful information to have as well. Again, with Instagram, you can see over the last week on what days work best, what hours work best. Again, that could all change from one day to the next. When we started our podcast, it was pre coronavirus times and there were certain times that everybody was online. You know, you'd almost be guaranteed that people were online during the rush hour commute in the morning and in the afternoon and know that they're working from home. There is no set time. So you could, you know, what you thought worked pre-coronavirus might not be working right now, so you'd need to go back in and review your analytics again. And we're also, there's also analytics on Twitter. They do call them analytics. And, "laughs" it can get a bit confusing as to the different platforms that you're on, which word you have to use or what you have to call them different things. So Twitter analytics are found in the "more" button on your homepage and you can go back previous months again at the top. Choose your twenty eight day summary of the last twenty eight days, but you can go down through all the previous months and see what worked best, how many tweets you sent out, what impressions they had. That's how many people saw them, how many profile visits you got out of those. If anybody mentioned you, if you can get new followers, you can see all that. You can see your top tweet, your top mentioned your top follower. If they have thousands of followers, you might want to follow them back, a top media tweet, which usually has a video or an image on it. And it'll give you a little bit of an insight into your Twitter ads if you're running any. But again, over the top, it's a graph, if it's going up or if it's gone down as to percentages on numbers. So it's all very interesting. But some people might turn around and just go. It's all too overwhelming. There are I'm not mathematical. I don't like numbers. You know, I understand if something goes up and it's green, it's great if it comes down. It's red, it's bad. You know, it might just be that that's enough to get you started to know that, OK, this worked or this didn't work or this worked better than other things. Maybe it's a case of your tweet worked, but maybe not to the extent that you thought it would. What can you do differently? Can you ask people to retweeted? Can you mention other people in your tweets? The same with your Instagram and your Facebook. What else have we got, Melanie?
Well, I also want to mention, because you made a very valid point there about a starting point. I also think what should be first and foremost when you're doing your analytics is benchmarking. And by that I mean putting up on a whiteboard somewhere on a sheet of paper, somewhere that you're going to find, again, essentially
very important
And write down exactly where you started from, even if you've been running your business for the last eight years, if you write down today where you are starting from and you can actually work out from then what, whether you've gone up or down, you can see what's worked for people. What hasn't worked? Was it the image? Was it the wording? Was it the link? Was it the call to action? All these things can actually be decipherable within your analytics and all of your social media platforms. Now, I'm going to mention another social media platform now, Esther, and it's one that's just not used enough, in my opinion. It's Google My Business.
Yes, definitely underrated, but very, very necessary. And people generally turn around and "but that's not a social media network because you're not interacting with people on it". So
I disagree. I completely disagree. In fact, most decent website designers these days will actually automatically set you up on a Google My Business account. They may never, ever do anything else afterwards, but it's just an automatic go to for a lot of website developers to set up your business Google My Business account purely for no other reason than to give you a map and to give you a way to be found in directions and local searches. And that's a fabulous start. But to be honest with you, if any of you have got a Gmail address, then you already have a Google my business account. You just need to go find it, open it and fill it in. And this is yet another product of Google and most people certainly in Ireland. I can't speak for other countries, unfortunately, but certainly in Ireland use Google as a search engine. Actually, you've got experience with other countries, haven't you? Do you know if other people use Google?
Yes, most countries that we work with would use Google. It's just I mean, it's even become a verb. You know, you Google it.
It's in the dictionary now. There's no getting away from Googling.
So absolutely. It's essential that you get some, you know, more and more products being used by Google. And this is an obvious one. I mean, you can get Google reviews, which are akin to TripAdvisor for people for holidays, you know, is a trusted source for honest and open reviewing because you have to be yourself to do a review. Then you've got directions. You can put up posts, you can get messages through it. I mean, I share all of my blogs, personal Google My Business, because this is a formidable search engine optimization tool. So if you go into your Google business account and open it up and fill it all in, once you're in there, there's a section again called Insight's Unsurprisingly. And you can find out from there what kind of queries people were finding your business on. This is Google AdWords fundamentally. And then you can see how people found doing searches. Was it direct? Was it through discovery? And you can see how many people viewed your page on listings or in maps, obviously, again, because of your Google map. And it'll even tell you how many people clicked onto your website or called you directly or looked for directions. I mean, it really is a formidable tool and it's very, very, very underused.
Yeah. And we'll be talking about it again next week in more detail, all about Google My Business and how to set it up. And even if you're not in a physical location and a need of a map, then you can also use Google My Business. But for now, if you have any questions about reading analytics, if where to find your analytics, why you need to find your own analytics. Do get in touch with us. You can find us on all social media and on our website themondaymorningmarketing.com. And we hope you can turn back in again next week.
Thanks for joining.