The Social Media Analytics Compass Framework

There is a thin line between success and failure on social media. Without proper measurement, everything that you do quickly becomes a guessing game that drains your time and money.

Are you using the right social media analytics tools to monitor, assess, and optimize your social media performance?

Do you know what you should be measuring and which metrics will give you the social data that matters – one that will help you make impactful marketing decisions?

If you answered "no" to either of these two questions, then you need to use the social media analytics compass for guidance.

The Social Media Analytics Compass

The social media analytics compass includes the most essential areas to monitor for your social media channels. It’s impossible to monitor everything on all channels simultaneously, so you’ll need to determine what areas are important for your business and find a tool to provide relevant reports.

Let's go through each section of your compass.

Audience Size

The size of your audience matters, but only if you are building a relevant audience. You need to continuously grow and evolve your audience and there are two ways to approach this.

You can either grow your audience organically and at a slower pace, or use tools and paid advertisements to speed things up. If you are using paid tactics for audience growth, make sure to have a process of converting that audience (see our PRISM funnel).

Don’t forget to compare your weekly audience growth vs. your competitors.

Audience Profile

As you grow your audience, making sure that you have the right audience profile will be a worthy time investment. You can use different tools to analyze your audience across platforms, or use a more traditional approach and conduct audience surveys.

For example, Twitter allows you to run a report to see what types of people (entrepreneurs, marketers, etc.) are part of your profile.

Reach and Engagement

Monitor your social reach to see how much of your audience pays attention to your content but don’t respond to it. Lack of response doesn’t necessarily mean they are not interested and they won’t buy from you.

You also need to monitor engagement metrics to understand how well you’re interacting with your audience. If no one is engaging with your content you have either the wrong content or the wrong audience!

Traffic

Typically you will want to generate inbound traffic to your website from content you share and you’ll need to measure the impact of that traffic.

Content Analysis

Creating and sharing quality content is an expensive and time-consuming task. You need to analyze your content performance on a regular basis to find out what's working and what's not, and adjust accordingly.

Community Responsiveness

If you’re not responsive to your community they’ll stop interacting so it’s important to measure this, especially if you are using social media as a customer service channel.

Competitor Benchmarking

Compare your content to your competitors by monitoring important metrics, including their engagement stats, audience profile, audience size growth, etc. Insights you gain from this active monitoring will give you new ideas and directions for your own content.

Sentiment Analysis

This is where you analyze positive, negative, or neutral mentions of your product or service. Sentiment analysis tools are not 100% reliable but they can give you a good indicator when there’s a problem.

What type of tools can you use?

There are three main ways you can approach social media analytics. Using platform specific analytics, social media management tools that include analytics functionality, or standalone social media measurement tools.

For my selection of the tested social media analytics tools, read The Social Media Analytics Compass: What and How to Measure