If you look up “what are social media insights” you’ll see a list of answers that may leave you more confused than when you first started your research. So instead of going technical and writing a long-winded sentence, I’ll break it down for you step-by-step so you can actually understand:
- What are social media insights
- Why are social media insights important
- How to analyze social media insights
- Which social media insights matter for growth
What Are Social Media Insights?
Social media insights can be simply defined as a helpful report that contains information about your content and social media accounts, to help you understand who your audience is and what content is helping you gain the most traction.
This information can include things such as
- Your audience gender
- Your audience age range
- Your audience location
- Where on the platform your content is showing up at
- Which content your audience engages with the most
Why Are Social Media Insights Important?
Although it can be tempting to avoid your social media insights due to the overwhelming amount of information they can provide, keeping track of your insights is key to growing your audience and reaching your goals faster.
While your social media insights are a great way to see exactly who and where your audience is, they can also help you gauge the overall success of your content and determine if you are on track for reaching your overall goals or if you need to adjust your strategy.
How To Analyze Social Media Insights
Before you can start to really analyze your insights, you will need to lay out a strategy that is determined by your goals. If you have no clue how to do that, you can read more in our last blog post about how to create a Social Media Content Strategy.
Once you have your strategy in place, you will want to locate your insights on the platform you are analyzing.
Ex: YouTube insights can be found in your YouTube Studio under Channel Analytics.
Instagram Insights are located on your profile page labeled ‘Insights’
Pinterest Insights can be found on your Business Account under ‘Analytics’
Each platform also gives you the ability to dive deeper into your analytics/insights by filtering through the different metric pages, or by selecting ‘see more’ to bring up a more detailed insights page.
You can also invest in tools to help you track and analyze your metrics such as the Social Bluebook’s Valuation tool that has social media insights integrated into the tool for YouTube and Instagram.
This tool is available for all paid Social Bluebook members and can be found under your dashboard menu.
Which Social Media Insights Matter For Growth?
One of the more intimidating factors of social media insights is the overwhelming amount of information they can provide and not really understanding which to track. Of course, the social media insights that matter for growth really do depend on what your goals are, but it also has a lot to do with what platform you are on as well.
Remember, social media platforms are also a business with their own goals, and the creators that grow the fastest are the ones that align their content strategy with the social media platforms goals. So the insights you want to look at, that matter the most for growth, are the insights each platform monitors the closest themselves.
For example, YouTube is all about getting people to the platform and keeping people there, for this reason, the two metrics to really keep an eye on are CTR, also known as your click-through rate, and Audience retention. The higher you get these two metrics, the more YouTube with promoting your content.
For Instagram, their business goal is to help users see more content they enjoy from “friends and family” which is why Impressions and Engagement matter the most for growth. Instagram wants to ensure when a user comes across content, they are actually enjoying that content. So if someone saves, shares, comments, or likes your post, with saves having the biggest impact, then Instagram will promote your content more which increases your Impressions.
Once you know which metric to track for growth, you will want to analyze those metrics with each post, this way you can easily see if you should continue to post that particular content because your impressions, CTR, engagement, or audience retention is high, or if you should change your strategy because your metrics are low.
Conclusion
Now that you know what social media insights are, why they are important and which ones to track for growth, it’s time to get out there and make your content strategy that aligns with your goals. Don’t forget to use your Insight Tool in your Social Bluebook account to make analyzing your social media insights easier!
Let us know in the comments which platform you create content for the most.