Transcription
So, hi, and welcome to this Big Blender session about how to understand the analytics part of things. Because when we use social media, um, we just may be looking most of the time at how many likes we get, uh, if we may be gaining new followers, but there's way more around us. And in order to succeed in marketing, it's very, very important to make sure we know how to read the numbers.
Um, I remember when I started to work in a big corporate, and and I was trying to understand the numbers. And once I was like seeing what my bosses wanted me to see, then I, I was learning how much you can actually learn through that; how much you can learn on what what not to do, what to do, what to replicate, uh, what's going to give you better results, and through that to really grow our business, uh, increase awareness for our brand, and of course, through that, grow social media.
So I want to start first by mentioning why it's very important to make sure we understand, um, the analytics part of things. Um, because by understanding those numbers, we can actually learn about—sorry, it stopped recording a second or not—so maybe it's just on my side. Looks like, um, so I'll do it again. So why it's important to understand it? It's really going to help us first to understand our audience, their behavior, um, on what are they clicking on, and what are like what type of audience we're getting. There's a lot of information, uh, in some platforms as well, is to learn about their, uh, for example, what are the different uh roles that they are participating in, their interests, and so on.
It's also going to help us to refine our content strategy. It's going to help us to learn what's working and what's not, and as for that, to do the fine tuning and see what we want to change, what we should change, uh, and what we actually maybe just keep on doing because it's working for us. It's also going to help us to improve engagement because by us reading the analytics and understanding it, we know which type of content our audience really, uh, finds relevant, is uh valuable, and through that, we can create more content like that that's going to help us to improve our engagement as well. It's going to help us if we're doing uh marketing campaigns to—it's also going to help us to measure the effectiveness of the campaign, uh, to see like what was it, for example, that we invested versus what we got. And also, it's good to identify opportunities and challenges, okay, to see what we're struggling with, what our audience is struggling more with, uh, maybe something changing in their behavior, and through that, we can find maybe new opportunities. So there's a lot of things we can gain out of us, um, and I know a lot of people don't really like the numbers, but the social media platforms are really focusing on making it much more easier for us to read and work and analyze, and they really categorize it so in a better way. So I do recommend to go and check and learn the analytics.
So I want to give you a bit of a guide on how to look at the social media analytics, okay, like I have a better understanding of like what needs to be done. So first, it's important to make sure that we're choosing the relevant metrics in each and every one of the social media platforms. Uh, you've got different options, uh, different metrics, and you need to choose the ones that are also relevant to you, for what you're actually looking for. Um, so for example, are you looking to see how you can improve your engagements? And then you look at likes, shares, and comments. Do you want to check about the reach, okay, like the exposure that you get, uh, like maybe you feel that you're not getting the right exposure or not enough exposure as well, with the impressions, which is the total number of times that your content was displayed? So maybe you want to increase that and get it to, to be displayed more, so more people can reach, to reach out to more people through that, and through that, to improve that engagement. And as you can see, they're all linked in certain ways, but each and every one of them is telling something else. But if you combine them together, they tell a full story. More metrics: the click-through rate, which is something we use in paid marketing; follower growth; and conversion rate, which is, uh, for example, also on our website, or also if we bring people from social media to tap on our website and try to get the sales from that. So it's very important to choose the relevant metrics and really focus on what's your goals, what you're trying to achieve, and which one is relevant to that. It can be more than one; it can be a mix of them. But for example, if it's just for organic marketing, so the click-through rate, not always that relevant, depends like if you maybe done it as opposed to trying to generate more leads, um, for example. But as you can see, this is more than just the likes and that's it; there's more than that.
The second part is like to understand like the key performance indicators, the KPIs, uh, which is something that like in big companies, it's always been used; it's something you actually been reported to, uh, but this great thing that we can also use for our business as a small business, okay, to understand which metrics are actually most important, like for to help us measure our success, okay? And of course, it needs to be as per our goals, as per our strategy, our business strategy. Um, and then like from that data that we're getting, we can analyze it, and through that, we can see what are the most uh effective key performance indicators, okay? Because this is going to help us with our social uh media campaigns, um, and the strategy. And necessarily, when I mean when I say campaign, it's necessarily need to be a paid campaign; it can also be that you're launching a new product, a new service, um, and you maybe are joining a new platform and you just, you know, create a campaign through that, and that can be also organic. Um, it also, like by you figuring out and looking like what are the top key performance, you want to make sure that they're in line uh with the specific business objectives that you have. That's why it's very important to plan. So for example, if you know you're trying to reach out to X amount of people, or you're trying to increase sales by this percentage or by this quantity, so it needs to be in line with this; it needs to make sure that it's connected because the purpose of it is to really help you to make sure that you're looking at the numbers the right way, getting the right conclusion, making the right adjustments, and after that, you can start seeing growth in your business. So it's very important to consider factors such as engagement rate, the conversion rate, okay, which is like uh also good for organic and paid, actually all of them, uh, reach, overall impact on your target audience. And by focusing on those metrics, you can really focus on optimizing your social media efforts because the purpose with social media is not to work hard; it's to work smart. It's not about posting every day; it's about posting the quality content, the content that your audience finds as valuable. And those things like putting KPIs, we're really going to help you to make sure that you know how to track it and make sure that you are achieving your goals, achieving your objectives.
Benchmarking and comparison, okay, so this is also very important. I don't like to use the word competition because I don't really believe in it, like I think everyone has their own unique voice in your own unique way, but you do want to look at others in your industry. So benchmarking is something that's like going to help you um to look at like what is what others are doing; it's going to help you to make sure that you're not just on a me-too strategy, but you actually can use it to help you lead, okay, the industry and not to be in the back of it. Um, it's not just about comparing the numbers; it's really about understanding, and and that's in general when we look at the numbers, it's really understanding the story behind that data. What does it tell you? What's working? What's not? Your audience is telling you everything you need to know, and the same they do it for your, for your, um, followers as well, like for you as well; they tell you everything, everything you need to know. So by digging, digging very deep into the why, okay, behind your metrics, and really, you can uncover lots of valuable insight that's really going to help you to take your social media to, to the next level, to the next stage, to a place that it actually brings you the results you're looking for. It needs to be uh something that's going to help you to redefine your social media strategy and make sure that you are either leading the market or you are still maintaining competitive in the market.
I want to go over on to like we can interpret the different metrics. Uh, so for example, one of the things that we do when we interpret the metrics is we're looking and analyzing the audience demographic. We are checking uh who's the audience we're reaching out to, their age, gender, location, interest. Um, it's in LinkedIn, for example, it can also be what is their profession, well, you know, uh, what's their role and the current company, and so on. And we want to make sure that we are looking at the data and be trying to really see is this the audience we're reaching out to or not so much? Are we trying to reach to women, and then we have more men following us? Are we trying to reach to like 20-year-olds, but we are somehow reaching out to 40-year-olds? Um, we are trying, for example, to reach out to people in a certain location, but we are not. So through that, you can actually learn more because the purpose in it is that when you create content, you create content that's in line and is relevant to your target audience. So you want to make sure that the target audience you're aiming to is the right target audience that's also following you and uh engaging with you on the different social media platforms, and of course, it's also relevant to your website.
Next thing is to track engagement. Okay, so as I said in the beginning, you want to make sure that you're choosing um engagement uh metrics that are relevant to your goals, to what you're trying to achieve. Once you do, you look at them. If the engagement is high, that means that your content is relevant to your audience, that they find it as valuable, it's interesting, it's something that they are really want to learn more or read more about or watch the video. But the thing is that this is not something we can check by itself. You'll see in one of the examples I'm going to share in a bit is that you want to make sure that I'm getting a low or high rate of engagement, but it cannot be standalone; it also needs to be with the reach. Maybe it's a low engagement, but it's because I don't really get much impression and exposure, or maybe I do get high exposure and it's low, and that it means that the content is not relevant. So that's why it's very important to make sure we're tracking this because, as you can see, it's going to help you to see where the problem is, and if there is a problem, of course, and through that, to make the right changes. You want to monitor as well, as I said here, like the reach and the impressions because that will show you how many people saw your content. And as you can see, it's both in line, so you want to make sure that you are reaching out to the right people, you're reaching out to more people, and those people have a higher engagement rate, uh, through that, and that will show you that it's really working. Evaluate, for example, as well, the click-through rate, okay, which measures the percentage of users who clicked on a link, okay? So for example, uh, it can be a website tap; it can be if you put an uh an ad, um, and then you want to check like how many of those people that came, how many of them are actually um clicking on it, okay? So that's also going to really help you with like creating more compelling content that drives traffic to your website. So as you can see in all this slide is that it's very important to make sure that you're tracking the engagement by telling the story to make sure that like it's a high engagement, but it's coming like what's also the impressions, okay, and the reach and the click-through rate. For example, if you're not reaching to many people or you're not reaching to the relevant people, so the click-through rate, of course, going to be low. So they are really telling a story together.
It's also important to assess the followers' growth. The follower growth also indicates on the effectiveness of your social media strategy. If you're growing, it means you're doing something right. If you—it doesn't matter if they come on the organic side, on the paid side, but if you look at this, and the nice thing that in some of the platforms you can see, uh, for example on Instagram, you can see who followed you because of a certain Reels. On YouTube, for example, you can see who subscribed to your channel, to which video, okay, which one's the one that got them to subscribe. And that's why like it's also a great thing to make sure that when you're looking on the follower group is to see from where they're coming because if you see a certain type of content that helped you to grow more followers, it is something you want to make sure um that you're replicating and using more. But if there's certain videos that got you nothing in their results, so there's no point of them. So you want to analyze the rate of growth uh and correlate it with the content. So as you can see, it all really comes together. So you want to make sure that also you are reviewing the sentiment analytics part of things, which when we look at numbers, um, it's easy always to look at this from like the side of just the data and how much money got in, okay? And if I'll go back to the slide that I spoke about the ROI, return of investment, um, it really showed you that ROI is not just about the financial part. So for example, I once needed to convince uh my boss to invest like half of a million just to redo the website, but the thing is that I couldn't bring results goals from this, okay? There was no money that would have necessarily come in because we were selling our products through distributors, most of the in most of the cases, but I knew that by changing this, I looked at other metrics, I looked at other things, I looked at the uh sentiment part, I looked about uh the relationship that we're going to build with distributors, how we can maybe generate leads to them, how we actually upgrading ourselves and aligning ourselves with our brand identity with like we're a global company, so we need to do that. I had other reasons to why we should. So that's why when we look at the analytics, it's not just about how many likes, saves, shares, follows we got; it's also about to look about the feedback and the review we're getting for them. Is it positive? Is it negative? What are we getting? We can see it like through like different comments or DMs or sales or private messages we're getting, and a lot. And sometimes I know a lot of people think that like if someone didn't really did click any button, so it means they don't really like your content are not following, but that's the opposite. Half of the people that look at your content necessarily going to react, but they will remember you, and they will come to you after. I remember when I was even like participating and to get my dog on a Netflix TV series, and I used to get lots of messages after from people that I've never met; I had zero clue about them following me, and they said like, "Oh, I've been following you for so while, and then I saw you on Netflix. How crazy is that?" And that's the thing, so you're getting positive feedback. So look at that because, as I said, your audience will tell you everything you need to know; you just need to learn to listen. And they can come to you in two ways to tell you what they think. One way is the sentiment part, which is like they'll give you the negative or positive feedback or neutral feedback, but there's the other part that comes from the numbers themselves, which is the conversion rate, um, the engagement, okay, the following, your audience, who they are, and so on. So it's very important to make sure we're leveraging our uh the data from our social media analytics, okay? Because by us following that, even if it's sometimes on a daily basis, necessarily on a monthly basis, um, I do work with certain clients that we do have like a monthly uh report that we check it, but during the day, even when I do it for myself, every post I create, I check their analytics. I want to see what's working or not. I don't want to create a certain type of content, things like, "Oh, it's probably went well," then create something similar to that, just to find out that it wasn't really working that well as I thought. And instead of investing my time and energy on creating something similar, I could have invested my time and energy in something else that could have brought me better results, okay? So make sure that you're also uh getting the analytics in line with your strategy and and test it out, okay? Test it, like see like maybe the timing. I always play with my timing, okay, uh, for example, when I started Instagram, my time was 12:00 during the day, like 12:00 p.m. Now it's more like 6:00, 7:00 p.m. If I look at my TikTok, so either I need to post early in the morning or late at night, nothing in between during the day. So test it, play with this, see what's working, what's not, play with different tactics, see what better way to connect with your audience and get your message through, okay? And through all of those insights that you collect, make the right changes.
So I want us to uh analyze certain things together, um, so you're more than welcome if you want to unmute yourself after there, but I'm going to show you examples from different social media platforms, okay? So this is, for example, for Facebook. So if you remember in one of the slides I spoke about the benchmark things, so Facebook actually helps you with the benchmarking. If you go to the Meta Business, you can see how you're doing versus like others as well. So for example, here you can see that the published content here, it's 15, but I don't—it's this is not relevant, the number as it is like this, okay? It could have been 10, it could have been 20. This is what's relevant, that it's higher than others, okay, which means that this account is posting more than others in their industry. Is it good? Is it bad? It really depends on their results, okay? And then, of course, as I said, like it is a story, but then I would look down here and I look at the Facebook followers, okay? It's similar to others, so I can see that typically the average is 670, okay, it mentions here, okay? So you look at this and I say, okay, we're average; we're similar to, to everyone else, so so we're kind of in a me-too strategy. Now if I want to lead the market, I need to see how I'm growing this, but definitely not losing followers, so I'll become less than others, okay? Um, then I can see the follows; I can see it's also like the average is similar to others, eight versus five, so it's even like a bit higher in this two, but content interaction not that good versus others, okay? It's slower than others, so does it really help me? And that's an—I look at the data—does it really help me that I'm publishing so much content, but I get low in the content interaction? So clearly there's something here that we're missing, okay? And that's how I'm going to get even deeper and deeper in the data and see from where the issue is coming, how can I improve the content interaction to be making sure that I'm either similar to others as a start and then becoming higher than others. So that's, for example, Facebook.
LinkedIn, um, LinkedIn has a different type of looking at things. Uh, so for example, you can see here, and I'm, I'm on purpose, I'm showing like good and bad luck, okay? So we can learn from all of them. But visitors, so for example, you can see that it's like zero page views, the unique visitors, the amount of new people that coming to check are actually in a, in a, and then I can see on the bottom clicks that it's not that high, okay? And then, of course, from here, from that visitors, I want to can check like how was my engagement, so at least to know if I'm reaching out to the right audience or not, but I also want to see what am I missing that I don't get enough exposure, I don't get new people, but I also want to look at this together with the uh job function, okay? What are their roles? Are this my audience or not? Are this the type of people I'm reaching out to or not? So this is, for example, one of the things that really helped me to grow my LinkedIn because when I first used LinkedIn, all of my connections were for my corporate lives, uh, from different from different companies, different places in the world. And then when I started to have my own business and I was starting to work with LinkedIn, one of the things that helped me to make sure that I'm on track and sure that to see is that all the time, for example, when I wrote an article, I always look, or like on the business page, I look at the end, and I see who are the people, and through that, I actually could have seen the shift that I'm getting from working with people, but like having connections that are mostly like into the corporate life to more business owners, okay? And that's a great thing because it tells you 40 people, 44.4 percent, you can actually get lots of information, so you just to look and analyze it.
I want to also use YouTube, for example. So this is actually, for example, for my channel, and this is, for example, here I'm going to share one of my struggles. If I look on the left side, I can see that most of my views are coming from YouTube search, which is amazing; that's what I wanted—people that are Googling, searching on YouTube, and then they're coming across; that's how they're watching my videos because they were searching, which means that I, if they've searched for this, there's a higher chance that my engagement range will be better, okay? So that's why I've been focusing on this, which is amazing, but on the other hand, it brings me at top of a problem as well, especially like in a platform like YouTube, that my audience is not exactly my audience. If I look at the female versus male, the gender, I'm reaching to more male, which is not my audience. I understand why it's because of my face, and I sometimes get a lot—and that's how when I do the deep in, and you can laugh, but when I do the deep in, I see that I love Indian and Pakistanis and all that, and that's why they're also sending me messages and trying to make a move on me, like, "Please, ma'am, please, ma'am," like that. That's, for example, I've removed my WhatsApp uh number from all social media platforms; you have no clue—you're laughing, but you have no clue what I received on my phones and middle of the night, video chats, people call me; they think that I'm actually going to answer. But now I know that this is one of my problems that I want to change it, so I'm trying to also check it together with the geographic side and see where's it coming and where I can improve it. I see you're still laughing; that's good. You can imagine what's happening. But I also look at the audience, which is not again exactly fully my audience, okay? And it goes in line because of certain content. So now I know what I need to improve because now I'm reaching out to them through YouTube search, which—
This is what I wanted, but now I need to figure out a way to do fine tuning to make sure that I'm increasing. I must admit that in the last few months I have been increasing more female versus male, but it's a work in progress. This is why I want to make sure, and this is why it's very important to look at the analytics. Because if you're trying to work with a specific audience, make sure you're doing it and see where the problem is. Go deeper and deeper and deeper.
So I want to share two more examples, two of them from Instagram. Okay, and this is, for example, one of the things that I do to learn what's working and what's not. So first, you can do it from organic marketing, but sometimes I like to take certain types of my posts and boost them. Okay. And through the boosting, because I have a specific audience that I use all the time—it's not something that I change—I have one audience that I work with. So through these campaigns, I'm checking which ones work for me and which ones don't. And through that, I know which type of content to replicate and which one not. And by the way, you don't necessarily need to have a big budget. You can even do, as you can see, the one was 171 Rand, the other was 228. So it's not like big amounts, and that's what I like. Because if your campaign and your audience are accurate, you're still going to get results. So it's just going to show me that if I invest more money in this, I'm going to more than double it and triple it and so on, and so on.
Look on the right side. So I've done this campaign, and I can see not much: eight profile visits, seven profile visits from the ad. Only one external link, but not from the ad, and they didn't gain any followers. And it cost me 8.47 Rand, which is a lot. Yes, it's not a lot in general, but it's a lot for this campaign. Then I look on the left side, and I'll see profile visits: 90, 82 are coming from the campaign; followers: 12 that came from the campaign. I also had two external tabs, and I'm not even looking at the data that appears about the saves, the shares, all of that—just looking at the goal. And as I said in the beginning, it's important to learn what the different metrics are and choose the one that's in line with your goal. This goal was to increase my profile visits so I can increase exposure to more people and through them improve engagement. And then you can see that: seven profile visits versus 82, and that cost me 2.78 Rand. You can see the difference. So this was a successful one. So this is the type of content I want to replicate. I want to do more from different angles, different designs, in Reels, in Carousel, whatever it is, but that's what works. This wasn't so much. Okay, so I replicated it; it wasn't that bad, but it wasn't good. Okay, it wasn't helping me to achieve my goal.
One more example that I want to—oh, okay, this is the example, the second example that I wanted to share, and this is the one when I look at the upper part, okay, at the engagement. Okay, so I don't only look at how many profile visits I got, how many new followers; I want to see how many people are actually engaging with it. So one of the things that you can see on the left side is that this post was good; it wasn't bad. It got nine saves; it's not bad at all, but versus the amount of people that liked it, I would have liked to have more saves. So which means the post was good, but not that good to make me want to save it. So I can still do stuff like this, but I'll maybe prefer to post less but create posts that brought me results like this one. So you can see 69 versus 54, so which means that either most of the people that gave me a like also saved it, or you have people that just saved it without giving it a like. And then I see four shares. So this one was the better result. So this is something that I will want to replicate. And it can be because maybe the design was easier to read. Okay, it can be because of the text itself, the content itself. And that's how you keep on testing, and that's how you keep on trying. And that's why it's very important to really learn. And if I'll go on purpose to the first slide, the reason why it was very, very important to know the data is it's going to help you to understand your audience behavior; it's going to help you to refine your content strategy; it's going to help you improve engagement; it's going to help you to make sure that you're measuring the campaign effectiveness and succeeding with this; it's going to help you to identify opportunities and challenges. And that's the thing, that's the important part. Like once you do that, once you understand that, this is why it's super important. As you can see, there's so much we can actually learn from the insights; so much. It's just like to get that mindset on how to look and read and really work deeper. I prefer for businesses to spend more time on reading and analyzing the data versus creating more content that's not necessarily going to give the result. The purpose is to work smart, not to work hard. Okay, so that's the part of it.
So if I'll go back to the examples, okay, so you can see it's not about posting more here. Okay, it's not about me posting more; it's about me improving the interaction. If I improve the interaction, there's a better chance for them to buy my product or service. So that's nice to have, but this is more important. So waste and put your time and energy in making sure you're reaching out to the right people, you're improving more clicks, okay, you're reaching out to the right audience, you're getting more impressions, you're increasing your exposure. And if you do a paid campaign, it's about spending less per click. Okay, that's the conversion rate. Okay, you want to pay less than that, and that's okay to stop a campaign. This is, for example, a campaign that I've stopped; I didn't wait for the full run of it. Okay, I saw I spent 60 Rand, and that's what I paid—still not par, no, it's not worth it. So I've paused this. I've done it. Okay. But this one, for example, that brought me good results, I can keep on boosting it, and it's going to keep on helping me grow. But it's not just to grow; it's to grow with the right people—people that really put in an effort, okay, that saved it. And I want to come to this next.