5 Steps to Understanding & Using Analytics to Create Content

Remember when you wanted to move to The Big Apple without considering moving costs, high monthly rent, transportation fees, and grocery and dining out expenses? Well, having an online presence for your business has similar underlying fees that are going to hurt you just as badly if you don’t consider them.

Your business’s social media presence depends highly on who is viewing your content, interacting with it, and following you for more. The best way to make sure you are targeting the right audience and getting their attention is through analytics.

A lot of businesses understand that you need to look at analytics, which is why they sign up for Hootsuite, Later, Buffer, or other management tools. Facebook and Twitter even collect data and offer analytics directly to users from their platform which are valuable assets to consider.

All of these are great tools for organizing content and getting analytics, but there’s a difference between understanding that you need to look at analytics and understanding the analytics themselves.

Analytics is a key component to adjusting content creation and engagement methods, so understanding them makes a huge impact in terms of account growth and credibility. According to how your current strategies are playing out, and how often you’re checking your analytic performance, you will see an increase in sales.

Let’s take a look at the 5 steps to understanding which analytics are important, why they’re important, and how to interpret the analytics to produce future content.

Step 1: Why Are You Using Social Media?

You need to know the purpose behind your social media presence. Social media can be used for a number of different marketing purposes such as driving brand awareness right before launching a new product, directing sales by offering discounts and promotions that are being pushed on social, and creating an engaged community so your consumers can feel a part of the brand’s mission.

Identifying your social media goals will drive how you interpret the analytics. Knowing why you are online will guide you towards what to analyze and how to improve your social media presence.

Step 2: Some Analytic Data Will Be More Valuable To You Than Others

You can start to isolate which key metrics are essential to achieving your goals now that you’ve identified them. While each analytic data is a component to your overall performance, some data will be more valuable to you than others. Take a look at these examples:

GOAL ➡ drive brand awareness

ANALYZE ➡ follower count, impressions, and reach

GOAL ➡ direct sales and purchases on your website

ANALYZE ➡ website clicks and dm engagement from users

GOAL ➡ create an engaged community

ANALYZE ➡ engagement rates, comments, and saves on a post

When analyzing the performance of a defensive soccer player, you don’t need to focus on how many goals they’re making, but rather how many breakaways they’ve prevented and how they’re supporting the goalie.

Depending on what your goals are, certain analytics will become crucial indicators of your performance. Once you understand why you are building your social media presence, you can figure out what analytics become most valuable to analyze how well you are achieving those goals.

Step 3: Track Your Goals With Analytics

The best way to track your achievements is to track your analytics. And the best way to track your analytics is to consider them at the nano, micro, and macro level.

Nano Level: Weekly Micro Level:Monthly Macro Level: Quarterly

By tracking your analytic data at these levels you are analyzing your progress clearly and accurately, and can assess whether the work you’re putting in is paying off in the long run.

Compare this to how you would track a goal as an athlete. If your goal is to run a six minute mile in three months, you can track your progression by timing yourself weekly, monthly and quarterly so that you can identify whether or not you are on track to reaching six minutes.

How will you know that you are making progress if you aren’t timing yourself weekly? If you are not reaching your goals at a nano level, how do you expect to achieve the macro goals?

When it comes to tracking your goals, analytics are too valuable to be taken for granted.

Step 4: Analyze The Analytics

This is the perfect occasion to quote Mufasa from The Lion King, “It Is Time.”

Now that your social media has been social media-ing and your analytics are being tracked, it is time to take a look and understand what the analytics are telling you about your current performance.

REMEMBER that you have certain goals in mind, so the analytics you are analyzing should pertain to which data you decided was most important.

We’re not saying to ignore the other numbers that aren’t directly related to your goals because all analytic numbers and information is important to your overall social media performance, but at this moment, certain analytic data is more important to achieve your goals.

As you analyze your key performance indicators, you’ll want to look at what types of content correlated with those numbers. A tennis player would evaluate how much sleep they’ve been getting if they feel exhausted during practices as opposed to training less often. Training less won’t help them maintain their competitive edge, but sleeping a sufficient number of hours will.

The same goes for your business. If there was a day you had a massive increase in website clicks, you’ll want to note what content, posts and stories went up that day. You can hone in on creating successful content in the future since you know what type of content performed well versus which content fell flat, which leads us into step 5…

Step 5: Create Content Based On What’s Performing Well

Social media is all about creatively producing content. An equally important part to maintaining and growing your presence is listening to your audience.

Let’s simplify this: You’re not going to keep producing banana graphics if your audience is interested in oranges. Right?

As you create upcoming content, it is so important to take a look at what’s performed well in the past, and use that knowledge to your advantage. Figure out why that content performed better than others and generate similar ideas for upcoming content.

Consider these steps as the secret ingredients to understanding analytics and using them to your advantage. If you follow these steps, we guarantee that you moving to The Big Apple will be manageable after all.