Further to last weeks post Website vs Social Media, like your website you need a way to measure the success of your social media program.
Do you know what types of posts get the most engagement on your social media platforms? For Facebook, what works best? status updates, photos, link shares or videos? Do you know what gets the most “Shares, Comments and Likes”? For Twitter, what gets fav’d and retweeted the most?
Many of the software apps on the market can give you reports on this information. You won’t find one that gives you everything though.
We’ve used LikeAlyzer to check the stats for our Facebook page and not only does it tell you what’s working, but it also tells you what’s not working.
- How quickly do you reply to comments?
- How often you are posting?
- Page performance
- Posts by page
- Posts by others
- Page comparison
Bonus: LikeAlyzer is FREE!
Update: LikeAlyzer is no longer available and here is an article that explains what’s happened.
If you are using Hootsuite, as of right now, there are some basic analytical reports included with the account, you can buy additional reports. Sprout Social has one of the best reporting features available, but you need one of the higher paid plans for it.
You can also check your Facebook Insights and your Twitter Analytics to get an idea of what’s working and what’s not.
By now, you may have seen articles online telling you what the best times are to post on Twitter or Facebook. Personally, I don’t believe in one person tell me what the best time to post is. Why? they don’t know who my fans and followers are and they don’t know when they are online, so how can they tell me what time I should be posting? One expert says I should be posting at 4 PM every day, when in fact most of our Facebook fans are online at 7 PM.
You will eventually see a pattern as to when your fans and followers engage with your content. Things to keep in mind:
- seasonal changes: in the summer, your fans may be online more in the evening, but in December, they may not because of the holiday season.
- time zones: depending on who you are targeting, you may see spikes in traffic through Facebook Insights at strange hours
- if there are any special events or holidays taking place, your fans may not be online at that time.
An economical way to gather stats is to use a spreadsheet and by day, write down what you posted, and to what platform. Check the stats after 7 days, list it in the spreadsheet and after a while, you may see a pattern developing.
The goal is to “do more of what’s working” and “less of what’s not working”. The only way to reach that goal is to experiment and that goal will be changing on a constant basis because our fans and followers change as well.
How are you tracking your social media performance?
I use LikeAlyzer Joe, but find it confusing that their information on the timing of my posts keeps changing. The best analysis that I can think of and which provides a lot of value for me is to check Facebook’s Insights and then adjust my timing to that of the rest of Facebook. Challenging at times because I am working on IST and the reports are in PST.
Yes time zones are always a big issue when it comes to analyzing reports. We have the same problem being on EST.
I’ve used Likealyzer & take results with a grain of salt. Often times, FB doesn’t post a comment for many hours after its left. If its during my sleep time, I can’t respond. Likealyzer tells me to reply to comments- I am 100% committed to responding timely to comments which has me on Fb too frequently. I use insights & from 9:30 am to pm my fans across time zones are on. No dips or valleys.
I honestly think all the gurus who say do what I do to get more reach & engagement are not small, so the first batch of people who see a post is not 10 people but hundreds. Its frustrating cause we put tremendous effort into every days posts & I post 6 a day- I’m currently running a 5 day ad for our Endless SummerSale but still FB says boost this to get more reach & they only showed posts to 10 people. Forgive the rant- Just venting.
With Facebook you have to pay to play. Gone are the days of posts getting a high reach. This was a big problem for Gisele in the beginning, she was spending all day posting and commenting. Also looking after our clients social media accounts, she would not have been able to complete everything on a timely basis. You would need 48 hours in a day to get everything done. She currently uses Hootsuite (she left Sprout Social) and her schedule has become a little easier to manage. She also designed her own editorial calendar which helps a lot.
The only low time I have with FB visitors is between 3 and 5am. That’s when my artsy fartsy followers are sleeping 😉
I like Likealyzer and agree about the engagement. They are looking for comments made by the owner of the facebook page, not your personal profile.
Hmmm…hadn’t heard of Likealyzer. Think I’ll give it a try. Thanks for great info, Joe!!
Your very welcome Deb.
I hadn’t heard of Likealyzer either and just tried it to test it out. I keep track of what works and what doesn’t pretty closely and do use Hootsuite as well, so have access to their reports. I work a lot on intuition to as far as what and when to post. Like you Joe, I don’t count on someone else to tell me the best time to post and usually chose times that correspond to when I have found people are online and engage. Thanks for the new tool to play with and for the great info!
Glad you enjoyed it Beverley, have fun with Likealyzer.
Hey Joe,
What a great tool! I have never heard of it. Thanks for sharing how to utilize it for seeing where your best posts are 🙂 Very valuable info!!
After reading your blog post, I tried LikeAlyzer first time. Great information! Thank you very much Joe. I didn’t know about LikeAlyzer at all. Thank you for sharing great tips too 🙂
Hi Joe,
Great review of Likealyzer. I have used it in the past and agree that it is a valuable tool
Hey Gusele,
I have to agree with you that no one person can tell you exactly when to post on social media. I’ve read on one blog post that it’s best to post on the weekend, but I get the most traffic from Monday through Thursday. So it’s to each his/her own.
Now as far as tracking performance on social media, I haven’t been doing this. I have a decent number of fans bUT I don’t check my fan page as often as I should. I only been focusing on blogging, getting shares, generating traffic and subscribers. It would at least be good for me to track other sites as well.
Thanks for the share and have a great weekend!