Category Archives: Analytics

There Are Tumblr Analytics?

Lots of businesses are turning to Tumblr blogs as a way to do some marketing. Tumblr is great for businesses that are mainly visual, as most of Tumblr is pictures and GIFs. This social networking platform is also full of teenagers and college students. If you are trying to appeal to a younger audience, check out Tumblr.

Tumblr is another social media platform with built-in analytics, like Pinterest and Facebook. There are other outside tools that will give you analytics, such as Simply Measured (which we talked about with Instagram analytics) and Numblr. However, the easiest and least expensive (some of these analytics tools charge you) way to figure out Tumblr engagement is to use the “Activity” section pictured below.

“Activities” is great because it will tell you exactly who has liked or reblogged your content, and who is following you. Other analytics don’t give you this specific information – they just tell you how many people have reblogged you. This can be helpful for a lot of reasons: you can see if your audience has expanded, rather than just the same people over and over responding to your content. You can get to know your audience a little better and cater to them, if you’d like. You can return the favor by liking, reblogging, or following them, in turn building up a social media community.

Unfortunately, Tumblr analytics still lacks a lot of what other social media platform analytics has. You can see the time when your content is being liked or reblogged, which can give you an idea of when your followers are online, but does not tell you outright like Facebook does. Your most popular posts are displayed, but you are unable to see how all of your posts compare to one another.

At one point in the past, Tumblr had a feature called “Tumblarity.” This was similar to the current “Activities,” except it would tell you how you ranked up compared to other Tumblr blogs. It would also show you who the top Tumblr blogs were, allowing you to glean some inspiration from them. It gave a fuller picture, such as the types of content you were posting, how much original content, and how much engagement you had ever received.

It’s possible that with the change of hands (Yahoo recently bought Tumblr), some improvements will be made. My hope is that it’ll be a combination of “Activities” and “Tumblarity.”

Numblr, on the other hand, looks like this:

It does give you a little more information in terms of your content type and originality. It’ll also tell you the most popular posts and how many notes you’ve gotten.

This is what the Numblr score refers to:

A Numblr score is made up of three weighted variables that end up placing a Tumblr account on a scale from 10-100. We capture every post a Tumblr has authored to calculate the score. For the purposes of this report, we rounded scores to the nearest whole number.

The most influential variable is a Tumblr’s note to post ratio. We look at all of the posts that are originally authored by the Tumblr account and then calculate an average; reblogged posts don’t count toward the ratio.

The second variable is content longevity. There’s some nuance to it, but what we’re doing is calculating the distance in time between when a post was first authored and when it received its last note. The longer that distance is, the better.

The third variable is the post frequency of a Tumblr. We calculate the time between each post and average it out across the Tumblr’s entire history to calculate a post interval. You can probably guess that there’s a sweet spot here. Post too frequently and you’re more likely to underperform because you won’t get as many notes per post. Post too infrequently and you’ve got a stale presence that people don’t recognize in their Tumblr Dashboard.

Finally, we look at the entire system’s performance (every account that’s been added to Numblr) and score an account relative to how well all of the other accounts are performing.

From: http://undercurrent.com/post/ranked-the-top-25-fashion-brands-on-tumblr/.

So like Tumblarity, your Numblr score tells you where you ranked compared to other Tumblr blogs.

That’s what I’ve got for today. Tell me how you feel about Tumblr, Tumblr analytics, and Numblr in the comments!

You Need Pinterest Analytics

Bloggers and businesses have been using Pinterest to promote their brand for a while, but only recently has Pinterest seemed to catch on to this fact and help the process. Pinterest‘s latest update has been to allow accounts specifically for businesses. This is great news for people who weren’t sure how to fill out the first and last name boxes with the name of their business. Also great because this included Pinterest analytics!

Previously on this blog, we’ve discussed Facebook Analytics, Twitter Analytics, and even Instagram Analytics. And now we’re going to move on to Pinterest!

In order to view your account’s analytics, you have to be a business account. This is kind of a bummer for anyone who’s “business” is promoting their own blog. I think, however, there are ways around this. You can say that your blog is your business, seeing how it does have its own website.

If you already have a Pinterest account set up for your business before this update happened, you can convert your account to a business one. It’s annoying, but it works. You do have to verify your website, but there are lots of tutorials available about that. You can find some awesome Pinterest tips and tricks and tutorials here and here.

Once you have your business account set up and your website verified, analytics should be available!

Like it shows in this picture, “Analytics” is under your account’s drop down menu on the right. Under “Analytics” are the subheaders “Site Metrics,” “Most Recent,” “Most Repinned,” and “Most Clicked.” Like other social media analytics, this will give you insight into what your most popular posts are. With this information, you can easily see what topics your audience is interested in and what images appeal to your audience.

“Site Metrics” will also tell you when your audience is most active. Unfortunately, this data isn’t totally conclusive. As you can see from these charts, Pinterest will not tell you when your followers are online. You’ll only see when they repinned your pins. This data can be skewed by when you’ve pinned and other similar factors. It can absolutely give you a good idea – for instance, in the above picture, the most repins were done on the weekend. This would tell you that you should pin more on the weekend.

In the section above that, you’ll see how many people pinned images directly from your website. This can help you determine your site’s functionality. If you aren’t getting a lot of direct pins but an oddly disproportionate amount of repins, then you know that your content is fine, but your website isn’t very Pinterest-friendly. Try to find ways to optimize your website for Pinterest, such as adding “Pin-it” buttons on your pictures.

It’s also nice because you can see how many people saw your pin versus how many people clicked through to your website. This can tell you that you need to make your pins more alluring. Look up some methods that other successful pinners have used, especially one how to optimize individual pins.

Have you used Pinterest analytics yet? What do you think of this new tool? Has it been helpful for your business? Let me know by commenting below!

Using Instagram Analytics

Many businesses these days are venturing into Instagram to promote their brand. This is most useful for companies that target younger audiences, sell clothing or similar products, or sell photography services. Lots of popular musicians and bands are also using Instagram. Actually, tons of restaurants and retail merchants use it, too – they ask customers to check in at their location, take pictures, tag their company, etc. Instagram is a great, free piece of mobile marketing that’s really easy to use, so why hasn’t your company boarded this train yet?

Once you’ve created an account and started posting, check out Instagram Analytics: http://simplymeasured.com/free-social-media-tools#report-170. (I linked back to this same site in my post about Twitter Analytics.) This website will generate an analytics report for you for free, but you do have to follow them on Twitter. Small price to pay, in my opinion.

Your report will look something like this:

It honestly doesn’t tell you a lot that you don’t already know, seeing how you can look at the pictures you’ve posted on your Instagram account and see how many interactions they’ve generated. But it does help to have it all graphed out and compared side-by-side. It does tell you the most popular post, the most popular location that you’ve posted at, and the most popular filter effect you’ve used. If you share your Instagram posts on Facebook and Twitter, it can also give you information about your post on those platforms.

The biggest difference between Facebook & Twitter Analytics and Instagram Analytics is that Facebook and Twitter can tell you how many people have seen your post, as well as interacted with it. When one person likes a picture or status on Facebook, or retweets a tweet on Twitter, it is shown on their profile where all of their friends can see it. Instagram does not have this option. Users can only see your posts if they are following you or if they are looking at the hashtag your picture happens to be listed under. Even then, those views are not tracked.

Questions, comments, concerns, pictures? Share below!

How to Use Twitter Analytics

In the last post we talked about Facebook analytics. I discussed how valuable a tool analytics is, and how it can really help guide your posts to a more successful place. This time, I want to talk more about Twitter analytics.

Just like Facebook analytics, Twitter analytics will give you data on how many people viewed your post, how many times your post was retweeted/shared/replied to, and how many times your links were clicked on. This is important for businesses that are trying to generate traffic to their website.

For Twitter analytics, go to ads.twitter.com. This is the website where companies can buy promotions for their posts as a form of advertising. However, you do not need to pay any money or buy any promoted posts in order to view your analytics. Just enter your account information, and wonderful data should appear in the “Analytics” section on the top right of the page. (Data should appear. Of the 3 Twitter business accounts I manage, on one of them the “Analytics” tab does not show up. I don’t know why that is yet. If you know why, please comment below and let me know!)

The “Analytics” section gives you information about your posts and your followers. If this isn’t working, Simply Measured will give you a free report on your Twitter followers here: http://simplymeasured.com/free-social-media-tools#report-20. I have yet to see any other Twitter analytics tools that are free, but I also haven’t looked very hard.

It should look something like this:

Twitter analytics is a useful tool because it can tell you optimal times to post and hashtags that generate a lot of interaction. Without this tool, trying to create successful tweets is a shot in the dark. This removes much of the guesswork. You can also find out which posts work well and which ones don’t. It might be a harsh reality for those who think that they are funny, but actually aren’t. But it will help your business.

Your followers data will look like this:

Knowing who your followers are will help you create better content. In this picture, most of the followers are interest in technology and tech news. From that you can gather that tweets about technology generate the most interest. The “Your followers also follow” allows you to check out your competition. Research them a little and copy their successful methods.

So I hope that helps! Good luck with your tweeting. And please comment with questions, suggestions, corrections, success stories, or jokes about Twitter below!