Tag Archives: social media

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!