Despite the proven power of social media for reaching prospective students, some higher education marketers spend little time tracking their social media efforts. Considering the amount of insight that marketers can derive from analytics, I would argue with anyone who says, “Who has the time?” that tracking actually saves you time—and money—in the long run. Without measuring, tracking, and analyzing, you’ll never know if your social media initiatives are helping your institution succeed or pushing you further from your goal.
To jump start your efforts, here’s a primer on tracking for three common platforms, as well as how to interpret what these metrics mean and how they can inform and improve your digital campaigns.
- Twitter Analytics: Twitter gives marketers a look into audiences’ consumer and lifestyle preferences. In addition to generating metrics on impressions, engagement rates, retweets, and likes, Twitter Analytics paints a vivid picture of your audience. It generates a report that shows your audience’s top interests, most-used languages, lifestyle type, and consumer behavior. Analyzing these trends is key to driving your social media strategy and engaging your audience with their desired content. Tailoring your posts to fit your audience’s interests and likes can do wonders for your digital brand. For example, if your report shows that your followers’ top interest is comedy and that they like to shop online for premium brands, you might consider punctuating posts with pop-culture references and offering gift cards to high-end retailers as incentives for social engagement.
- Instagram and Facebook Insights: Even though Instagram and Facebook do not provide as clear a picture of your audiences’ interests and content preferences as Twitter does, these platforms do offer a breakdown by location of your audience, which can be helpful for advertising and recruitment efforts. In addition, they provide an engagement rate per post, which can be analyzed to determine what content is (or isn’t) working. For example, a quick comparison of posts within a month will show you which types of content outperform others. For Facebook, these metrics can be accessed through your brand’s page by clicking on the “Insights” tab. Similarly, for Instagram, they can be accessed through your brand’s Instagram account by clicking “View Insights” under each post. (And since Facebook owns Instagram, you can also pull your Instagram report from your Facebook Insights tab.)
- Snapchat: Snapchat is beloved by teens and college students, but its lack of free/affordable analytics services can make it hard for cash-strapped marcom departments to dive very deeply into their audiences’ Snapchat interactions. If Snapchat analytics services don’t fit into your budget, there are still ways to track audience trends. One way is to keep a spreadsheet of the number of views, responses, and screenshots each snap receives. Once you begin to track this information, you will start to see which types of stories get the most interactions. Tracking is crucial: without it, you could miss these trends altogether and keep posting content that is simply unpopular, or worse, causes students to disengage or question your authenticity.
- Email Marketing: While email marketing is not considered social media, it is a direct digital communication that produces helpful data. Most mass email services provide some type of measurement of audience engagement, with metrics on open rates and click rates among the most important. The higher the open rate, the better your campaign performed. What really drives up the open rate? The subject line. If you look at your recent subject lines and analyze the ones with higher open rates, you may see trends in topics or subject-line formats that pique your recipients’ interest. Additionally, click rate (also called “heat mapping”) will show the actual content that your audience is clicking on to get more information, providing useful insight for planning future content—both for email and social media.
By analyzing and consolidating these insights and trends across platforms, you can develop a clearer picture of your audiences’ consistent behaviors, motivators, and desires—a powerful tool that can help you truly optimize every social media post.
Lexi Verret is a Project Strategy Intern at SimpsonScarborough. She is a second-year MBA student at Louisiana State University (LSU), where she specializes in marketing analytics.
