Key Takeaways Covered In The Podcast
- When using Facebook for Business you need to click the Insights tab in order to reach your analytics. This will show you the actions on your page, your page views, your page previews, your page likes, your post reach, your post engagement, your page responsiveness, your video views, your page followers and your orders.
- In most cases, post reach is a vanity metric as you could be reaching thousands of people but none of them may be engaging with your post. Instead, consider what your engagement is as a percentage of your overall reach.
- Facebook Insights can also give you an idea of what posts perform the best, giving you an insight into what kind of content you should be publishing regularly.
- In the top right-hand corner of Twitter, you will see an option to view your Twitter Analytics. Whilst Twitter Analytics are often incorrect, you can view your Twitter highlights, a summary of your month, how many Tweets you’ve done, your Tweet impressions, your profile visits, the number of mentions you have had and the number of new followers you have gained.
- When it comes to Instagram there are two ways to look at your insights. The first way is to tap on one of your posts and click ‘view insights’. This shows you how many people have liked it, how many comments you’ve had and how many people have saved it. It also shows any actions that have been taken from the post, where your post was discovered and whether anyone has visited your profile.
- The second way to use insights on Instagram is to click on the hamburger menu right hand side of your profile and the click ‘Insights’. The first section shows an overview of your content including feed posts, stories and paid promotions. The activity section shows who is visiting your profile and what they’re doing whilst they’re there and the final section shows an overview of your Audience. This includes their location, age range, their gender and when they are most active.
- You can view Instagram Story insights by swiping up on your own stories. It will show if they clicked your links, if they tapped on your stickers or if they exited your stories at a certain point.
- When it comes to Google Analytics you can use the audience overview to show you most of the information you need. You need to select a date range first, but the first thing you will see if a graph that will show your overall visits to your site. Under the graph you will be able to find your total website users, the new users to your website, your website sessions, the number of sessions per user, your page views, your average page to sessions, the average session duration and your bounce rate.
THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…
One of the biggest fears people have when pitching new clients is that they’re worried about rejection. There are no industry standards or ideal numbers when it comes to analytics for your business. Whilst you may have personal goals, it’s much better to focus on how you can improve, rather than what numbers everyone else has. Look at where you are today, see where you can improve and then go back in a month’s time to measure your progress.
Highlights You Simply Can’t Miss
- Using Facebook Insights – 06:25
- Using Twitter Analytics – 13:52
- Using Instagram Insights – 16:40
- Using Google Analytics – 23:00
- External Sites for Tracking – 30:50
Links to Resources Mentioned in Today’s Episode
Transcript below
Hello and welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. How are you? Know what? I have just had the busiest few weeks. So much travelling speaking training and don’t get me wrong I love every minute of it. But sometimes it absolutely wears me out and it gets me so super tired so I have to be really careful to take care of myself and I don’t know about you but when I travel all myself care goes out the window. I am a very social person so when I’m away I really like to go out and see places and meet people. Normally have several glasses of wine or a few gin and tonics and like I said I don’t end up looking after myself very well. I don’t get to bed very early. I then do long days. And if you do a job where you’re having to present yourself it’s quite hard work and I know that sounds daft because I feel like I’m very genuine when you see me and hopefully if you’ve met me recently because I met some amazing people at Atomic Con 19 and a few podcast listeners which was awesome. So if you have met me then hopefully you think I am the same as I am here. But sometimes when you’re trying to be just on form all the time, it can be really really tiring. So I’m a little bit tired. I have to say recording this podcast and I’m trying to batch ahead because next week I’m off to Social Media Marketing World which is gonna be fabulous and wonderful and really good fun. But again it’s going to be full on. It’s going to be long days. Lots of learning, lots of meeting people, lots of catching up with people that I’ve had on the podcast, my friends. Hopefully, I’m going to get to see Amy and Pat and Rick and Jasmine and all those lovely people. So it’s gonna be a really good week. But it’s gonna be totally full on.
Of course by the time this podcast episode comes. I’m actually will be back from Social Media Marketing World. Sometimes it all gets very confusing. But anyway enough about me. How has your week been? And also how is the first three months of the year gone? Can anybody actually believe we’re through the first three months? Because I can’t. I don’t know where this time has gone but it’s gone way too quick. And even though I achieved some things that I wanted to and I have made progress on other things. Actually there is still things that I think “Okay I’ve not progressed as I should have done.” And also sometimes things just change. So you might have a plan and you might have a direction in which you think you’re going. And then something in your world or in the business or someone you meet or something someone said then makes you just readdress things and actually over the past few weeks I’ve really had this and you’ll know quite a few weeks ago on the podcast I said to you that I might be taking a slightly different direction not massive but I was going to be focusing the podcast more on all aspects of digital marketing and selling online rather than just a really specifically social media.
Now don’t worry I am still going to talk lots about social media. We still have some great guests coming up but also I want to… I want to see it with everything else because you know what that’s how I’ve always seen it. Social media is just one of the many tools that as marketers and business owners that we have in our tool belt in order to market our businesses. So I don’t know about you but hopefully you’ll agree with me that actually adding in these other elements make complete sense and hopefully is going to give you a better and bigger more rounded way to approach your own marketing and more skills, more tools, more tips, more strategies and hopefully you’re going to love it even more because I love the podcast.
I love doing it. I love hearing when you guys send me DMs or when you put things on insta story or you tweet me and you say cool stuff about the podcast. It really does help because sometimes you sit in a room which I’m doing now on my own wittering on myself so it can feel a little bit odd and lonely at times. But when I get those messages back it just makes me feel like, yes this is working and you guys are getting some real benefit from it. So thank you. Also while I’m talking about that is it terribly awful. If I ask it’s going to give me an iTunes review I would really appreciate that. It’s just that if you are on iTunes and you’re trying to move your way up the charts, one of the things that help is reviews. So if you are happy to go give me a five star review I would love you forever. Thank you so much.
Anyway on with today’s episode and enough of me wittering on. Now we’re at the end of this three months, aren’t we? So we’ve done first three months the year and I know we did a review at the end of 2018. If you haven’t done that review if you didn’t see it I’m gonna hook up to that episode in the show notes so you’ll find the show notes at w w w dot TERESA HEATH WAREING all one word no hyphen dot come forward slash fifty eight as in the numbers not the word and every episode’s exactly the same. If you’re listening to any episode anyone find the show notes, it’s always forward slash and the number of the episode but I’m going to link up to the previous episode that I did back in the end of 2013 where we reviewed our entire year. And even if you didn’t get a chance to do it then there’s nothing to say that you can’t go ahead and do it now or do it whenever you’re listening to this episode.
But what I wanted to focus this episode on is some of the analytics and the stats that I look at in my business to see how well my business is doing and I’m gonna talk you through, especially on social media what some of these things mean. So I’m going to talk you through the Facebook analytics and I’ll talk you through Twitter and Instagram. I’m also going to do a teeny bit of Google Analytics and just let you know the sorts of things that I look out for when I look at my own stats to see how well my business is doing. And I’m gonna explain to you what it all means. So you can work out whether actually your effort is having an effect on your own social media and your own traffic and your own marketing.
So hopefully this is going to be a really really good one for you today. And I often get questions around this so unready excited to dive in and explain all.
Okay we’re going to get started with Facebook and we’re going to be looking at the insights tab. So if you have a Facebook page which if you’re running a business and you’re using Facebook for business then you absolutely should have a Facebook page. But if you have a page you will see there is an insights tab and I am just going to go through the page summary in terms of what they’re tracking and what that means. Okay. So the first thing it shows me is actions on page. This is your call to action button which is underneath your cover photo on the main page. So it shows you how many people have clicked that button and taken the action you’re asking them to take now. Okay I should probably said something in the beginning as a prerequisite then I’m not going to give you ideal numbers because basically there is no ideal number. There is no standard, there is no level in which I can say you should be achieving this. The thing that you should always be tracking with your own stats and your own social media on your own website is can you improve it so it doesn’t matter where you’re starting. It doesn’t matter if you’re getting one like a month or you know 20 likes a day. It’s all about improving from the next step. So like I said there is no base level here. Do not say here thinking I am going to say you should have this number of likes or this number of impressions or whatever. It’s all about looking at where you are today, seeing what you can do to improve and then looking at where you are in a week or a month or six months. So it’s all about going forward and improving not about comparing yourself to someone else. So don’t do that.
Anyway. let me go back to where I was so like that actions on page. The number of people who have done the action underneath your cover photos of the call to action than the next one I’m going to go it’s a grid and I’m going from left to right and then down the next page views. So this is the number of people who have looked at your page. Now this can actually be quite an encouraging figure in the sense of you might find that you don’t have a whole lot of engagement but you might find that actually quite a few people have looked at your page they just haven’t chosen to interact with you for whatever reason and if they’ve looked at your page the chances are they’ve seen that big cover photo. And as I’ve mentioned lots times before you should be using that cover photo at the top of Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn in order to promote who you are and what you do so that people know instantly what you offer. So the page views is a really good one. The next one is page previews. Now what this will be is sometimes if someone comes up in your feed and you hover your mouse or your honor for works on your finger it actually but if you hover over their picture or their name it will bring up a little preview box of who they are. That’s what that is. So I’ll show you how many people have previewed this and also sorry these stats they default for the last seven days. You can turn it into the last 28 days as well.
Then the next one down is page likes and obviously that’s the number of people who’ve come and like to your page then post reach. That’s the number of people that have seen your posts. Now these could be multiple people or these can be some of the same people but it’s the number of people who have seen the posts that’s been put in front of them. Recommendations if anybody’s recommended you. That’s the next thing it just tells you how many people did that. The next one down is post engagement. Now reach an engagement that interesting because reach is a little bit of a vanity metric because you could reach thousands but if no one engages the wrong people. And it’s a waste of time. So in post engagements. That’s the key bit. You want to be able to see that for the number of people it’s reaching that you’re getting a good engagement. And I like to see the kind of percentage difference between them. So what kind of percentage people are engaging based on the number of reach I’ve had said that might be something that you want to track or keep an eye on because you’re going to be able to tell whether you’re targeting the right people and if they’re interested in what you’re actually putting out there.
The next thing is your page responsiveness. And this is based down to how responsive you are. Often comes down to things like Messenger and stuff like that. Not too much to worry about here. Obviously you want to try and be as responsive as you possibly can. But we’re all realistic and we all have lives to lead so don’t worry too much about the videos that’s the next one. I’ll tell you how many video views you’ve had in those last seven days and it’s a three second view. So even though it might seem you’ve had a few hundred video views and it doesn’t have to be of a video you’ve put up in the last seven days it could be people going back and watching old videos but it’s only telling you people who have watched past three seconds. So that’s something to bear in mind that it’s not necessarily really long views that you’re getting on those videos and then the next one down is page followers.
Now people ask me what the difference is between likes and follows. Now you can like a page and it shows up on your own profile and also it might recommend that page to some of your friends because you have liked it if you follow a page. It doesn’t show up in your likes. So it’s almost a little bit like you’re following it secretly which means you’re seeing their content but you’re not liking that page. And one of the things that’s really interesting about this is there’s a few different businesses and industries that actually this would probably work well for. So for instance I once did some training with a company that do a diet product and they were saying that they really struggled to get likes on their page and I kind of said I’m not surprised because who wants to be seen to be liking a page of a diet product. It’s not really the sort of thing what my friends and family to see even if I was looking at it. So I might follow it instead of liking it. So that could be the difference. Also you can like pages and not follow them. So obviously that will show up as alike but you’re not going to see any of their content and then the last one on this insights is orders. And obviously if you have a set up then you’ll see your orders but I don’t. So mine’s at zero. So also under the insights tab there’s loads of other things you can look at but I just wanted to give you an overview of those things what they are and obviously remind you again that this isn’t that you should be having a certain number. It’s purely a case of. Okay that’s interesting. That’s where we’re now today. And let’s see if I improve my content or do something different or if I start life videos then let’s see what effect that has on it. So this is a bit brief but hopefully that gives you an idea of the sort of things that I look at on Facebook also very quickly the other thing that I look at on Facebook is the types of posts that go down really well. So if you carry on scrolling down you’ll see the posts and how well people react to them. And that will give you a good insight as to what posts your audience like and therefore the idea is try and do more of those posts. Now obviously don’t flood it with just those posts but just try and do more of them because you’ll find that that helps increase your overall engagement on the page.
Okay. So let’s talk Twitter now. As you know I am a big Twitter fan. I love it. It’s where one of my biggest audiences are. However there’s something really wrong about their analytics. It often shows incorrect figures and it really drives me crazy. So if you’re on your Twitter profile and now I know how to do this on a desktop you’ll be able to do on a phone but I’m just on a desktop so I’ll explain that way. If you’re in a Twitter profile go to the top right where your little face is click on that and you’ll be able to click analytics and it’ll open up a new page and show you your analytics.
Now if you’ve never looked at them before I think if I remember rightly it was some time ago. You just have to have a click a button say yes turn them on however what should be wonderful isn’t because like I said inevitably the stats are wrong. So for instance just to give you an idea how wrong they are. My 28 day summary i.e. what I’ve done over the last 28 days it’s telling me I’ve done 10 tweets quite honestly I think I’ve done tend to it’s today. So this is absolutely wrong. But when it does work great. So for instance it gives you each month and it gives you the stats for each month. So first of all tell you your tweet highlights your top mentions and give you an example of a few of your tweets your actual tweets that you’ve done. And then on the right hand side it gives you a summary of the month. So it will tell you how many tweets you’ve done. It’ll tell you your tweets impressions so your impressions of very similar to reach in Facebook. And that’s how many times it’s been put into that feed. Again it can look lovely when you’ve got you know and I’ve had it some months where it’s like hundreds of thousands of impressions. But it’s the engagement. That’s the key thing. So like I said focus on the fact that even though impressions are grey you really really want the engagement.
So like I said the next thing it has to be impressions after that. This one’s really nice. It shows profile visits again. And actually my profile visits on Twitter are always really good in terms of some of the other things. So I’m always really happy with my profile visits in terms of how many people are coming and looking at my profile. So again that’s a really nice one to see even if you’re not getting the engagement then the next one is the number of mentions you’ve had. So who is mentioning during their tweets. And again this is great. You want to be seeing that people are hopefully mentioning you and then the number of new followers you’ve got. And if you scroll down you will just keep seeing for each month that kind of summary. Okay so check this out. This is totally wrong. I’m looking at mine for February and it’s that I did two tweets the entire month of February. I absolutely did not. Two tweets the indictment February. So it’s really frustrating that for whatever reason it just doesn’t seem to be quite working well enough.
Anyway one thing I’m going to talk about at the end is a system that actually does show reporting and hopefully is more reliable than Twitter. Let’s go on to Instagram now. Instagram is a bit different. Whereas the other platforms are really good at giving you historic data. Instagram doesn’t give you the best analytics. So again using external analytics system could be really really helpful unless you’re happy to go in sort of every seven days then it can be hard to keep track of the progression really but anyway let me talk you through what they do. So there’s two ways to look at some of your insights. The first one is if you obviously I’m on an iPhone so obviously if it’s Android it might be slightly different but if I go to my Instagram account and I had to my profile my own profile so your actual account where you see all your own posts the first thing I can do is tap on one of my actual posts and click View insights and then it brings up a little tab at the bottom and if I scroll up then it’s going to show me some more information in that section it shows you how many people have liked it how many comments you’ve had how many people have shared your post with someone else and how many people have saved it.
Also there’s a interaction section which says actions taken from this post and it says profile visits. So basically it might have appeared in someone’s feed and they then clicked on my profile page to have a look at my profile. Also if you were discovered anywhere so it’s showing you how you were discovered. So whether you were discovered from impressions from your home as in people who follow you or from hashtags that you used or from your profile or from other. Now I don’t know what other is. I will see if I can try and find out actually but I’m not entirely sure what that other is and what that covers. But obviously the key thing here to look at is again reach and impressions are important. So just so you know on Instagram the difference between reach and impressions are reach is the number of people impressions are the number of times. So for instance I’m just looking at a post I put up an hour or so ago and my reach is currently 253 but my impressions is 372.
So they have shown that to 253 people more than once or some of them more than once.
So I bet it’ll probably work out about a one point three average views or something that is showing. I hope that makes sense. If not let me know because I want you to understand what I mean by that. But basically like I said reaches the number of people impressions is the number of time. So. And the other thing is when it says from home likes that these are people who are following me. So in this case most of my impressions are from people who have following me to their own timeline. But I have had a little bit of impressions from some of the hashtags I used in that post. So that’s quite interesting to see when you’re looking at particular posts. Now obviously you can go down to review each post in turn and see how it went. However you can also click at the top right there’s like the hamburger menu the three dashes and when you click that it will open up a side window and insights as at the top of that those options are is for me on my iPhone. And when you come into here you can see a more overview in terms of activity. So what’s kind of happened on your account the interactions have happened. How many profile offers that you’ve had. How many website clicks you’ve had from your bio link. How many people have found you in the discovery bet you’ll reach your overall impressions and likes that it’s showing me for the last seven days then under content this is going to talk about my feed and again it’s going to show me each of my posts and what’s gone well and what my kind of reach is on that. And then it’s going to show me some of my stories and I’m gonna be able to have a look at whether my stories have had a good reach. When you go into each story it’s going to show you how many impressions your story had. So again if your stories only just come impressions are going to be low but again you can look down and see the sorts of things that go down really well. So for me organic content goes down really well sometimes if I’m speaking to camera it can start off okay. But then it can kind of fizzle out. So I try not to make them too long. If I’m doing an insider story went on camera I tried to do sort of one or two of them okay. And the other one you can view here is your audience. And it’ll tell you how many followers you’ve got whether that’s gone up or down. And then it’ll give you the locations. So obviously my locations are fairly local UK and then some in the States. So you can see the kind of top locations by cities and then the top locations by countries and then the age range whether it’s broken down between men and women. So mind 70 percent women 30 percent man. And then the type of followers when they’re online so you can actually have a look at the hours they’re online and unsurprisingly it works really well kind of. First thing in the morning or kind of later on in the day as well. So it does give you some insights but they’re not amazing. I have to say now the other thing you can do is if you’re doing insta stories is when you tap on an inside story if you swipe up then it’s going to show you your impressions again. So it’s going to show you who’s watched your story and then it’s going to say in the Discover. How many people have seen the story. If you had any follows from it. And then the navigation. So did the exit at this point or did they tap to go forward. So again if you’re seeing on your stories that at some point people are tapping and everyone’s tapping forward then you might want to think about the content of your stories.
OK so they’re the main ones I look at in terms of tracking the results from them. So like I said I tend to definitely look at obviously followers. I look at the reach and look at the engagement. I look at what posts are going wow and I try and write those figures down fairly regularly so I can see what movement I’ve had in them. And then once I can see the movement I then go back and dig a little deeper in terms of what was it that I did in particular during that time period that might have had an effect or what didn’t I do that had an effect. So it’s really really useful to keep an eye on these things to know whether they’re doing anything. And also sometimes when you’re thinking Gosh that page is hardly getting an interaction but then you see that you’ve had people come to the page and view. It just makes you feel a little bit better which is good. So the next thing I want to just quickly talk you through is Google Analytics. Now hopefully you’ve got Google analytics on your site if you haven’t go back to the person that set up your sites and ask for Google Analytics to be plugged in. It’s like a free thing. They should be able to do it with ease. I don’t know why start talking about that because I literally have no idea how that works.
Obviously I have a tech guy in the team and he sorts over. Not going to say or give you advice on how to get it to work on your website. I’m sorry said Megan there anyway. Once you have Google analytics on your website I want you to just quickly run through some of the things that I track and keep an eye on.
So when you go in and view your data I tend to go into audience an overview and that’s where I get kind of the main stuff from. And again there is no hard and fast rule in terms of how many website visits you should have how long they should stay on your site. It’s all about tracking against yourself and seeing the results that you can have month on month and what difference you can make. So the first thing it shows is in the top right hand corner it will select a date range for you. So I like to spread that date range eggs it’s normally the last like 14 days or 28 days. So I like to do over a few months because I like to see the difference. But obviously you’re right in these results day and monthly then you just need to do the last month. So it’ll then show you a nice graph and you’ll be able to see visually how your kind of visits and things are coming on and how busy the site’s been underneath that graph. You’ve got a few different options that I’m going to talk you through. So the first one that it’s going to show you is users and this is total users total people who have been to your site. Now obviously this isn’t going to include you in this. However this is the number of different people so you are only going to be one of these people. And then the next thing on is going to show you how many of them are new users. So obviously depending on your type of site this could be a good or a bad thing. So if you want people to keep coming back and reading your blog then you don’t want a high percentage of new users. However if you want to keep growing your site the new users are important. So again I can’t sit here and go This is a good amount or not a good amount because it entirely depends on what you offer what your site for and how you are using it.
The next one is sessions. My sessions are the number of times your site has been visited. So when I said he uses other number of people sessions are the number of times. So obviously you’re always going to have more sessions than users think about yourself and how often do you go into your own website. Obviously you’re going to sort of count a number of times for one use there. So again in terms of the number of users against the sessions know kind of hard and fast rule it’s just interesting to see how many times people are going back into the site. And again you’d expect that Sessions to be a really big percentage higher if you are getting lots of returning visitors but if you’re getting lots of new visitors then obviously the number of sessions is going to be closer to the number of users. The next one that you’re going to see is number of sessions per user. So all it’s done is average date. So mine is sort of one point four six so it’s saying that you know they’ve come to my site one point four six times for each person. But of course like I said you’ll have me going to pretty much daily. And then loads of other people who have only ever visited once. The next thing you’re going to see is page views. So it’s a Hey many pages that have been viewed by all those people. So for instance let’s say you’ve had 5000 people come to your Web site or 500 whatever it might be. Let’s say about 5000 people come to your website but they’ve viewed 10000 pages on your site meaning that on average each visitor is viewing two pages.
Again you kind of have to think about your site and what you’re asking them to do. So if you’re a shop for instance you might want them to view lots of pages because they’re looking at products. If you do a blog the chances are you’re going to send people directly from your social media or wherever you promote your blog direct to your blog.
They’re going to read it and come off again. So therefore they won’t necessarily go through loads of different pages or view loads of pages. So again just thinking about actually is that sensible. Does that make sense. The next one is obviously your average page two sessions so like I just said if you’ve got 5000 people viewing your site and you have ten thousand page views then that’s going to be two views per person so it just gives you the average and then it gives you the average session duration. Now this is the amount of time that people are spending on your Web site. It can and I know I keep saying this you need to think about what your Web site is offering and therefore how long do you expect someone to be on there. So like I said if it’s a product let’s say if it’s a source or marks and Spencers or Amazon then obviously you want people to be on there quite some time because they’re going to be looking at things. If you’re sending people to read a blog then they might be on a minute or two or a few minutes if you don’t have a great deal of content on your site then you can’t expect them to be on there very long.
So again it’s not that there is a set length of time that they should be on there. It’s just an impression of. Okay. So that’s interesting. They’re spending on average two minutes on the site. Can I get that improved or is that right. Or has that changed. It’s just about reviewing the kind of things that it does now and what it can do. And then the last one is your banks rate and your banks rates. What this means is the number of people who have gone to your site viewed one page and bounced off it. So they’ve literally gone to your site and come back again. Now a high bounce rate is seen as not a great thing because of the fact that it’s almost implying that the content they’ve seen when they get there is not great and therefore they’d bounce straight back off or it wasn’t appropriate to them and they’ve bounced straight back off. However if you are sending them to one page to look at that one page and they view it and then come back off again then that bounce rate might make sense. So again it’s looking at that rate and thinking can I improve it. Why might they be bouncing off where am I seeing those people come from. And am I putting on social media the thing that they’re expecting to see when they get to the website. Also depending on site is built. If you’ve got a one page Web site then your pants rate will be really high.
Obviously that’s affected by how your sites build. And I won’t even try and pretend to go into like I might know what I’m talking about because I absolutely don’t. In terms of building sites so I’m going to stop right there in terms of talking about that. So like I said those kind of things are great in terms of your overview of your analytics and some of your basic data to make track of on and look and see how it’s moving over time based on the stuff you’re doing. Now obviously all these platforms have so much more information. It’s amazing and they do this from medical staff especially analytics and you can track things and you can put yourself objectives and stuff but if you are just starting out. I just wanted to give you the kind of headline rates so that you can track how well your marketing your social media and your efforts are actually getting you the other things that I look at from a tracking point of view is obviously the podcast. That’s my favorite thing. Literally every morning first thing I look at. And then what else do I track. Also things like inquiries number of people going into my email less the size of my email list. So I do keep an eye on all those other things as well but I just wanted to give an overview in terms of social media and Google Analytics. Okay so as I said there are other external sites that can track and report things for you which if you want to. Then great but there normally is a cost associated to them. There are free ones but it depends what you want to get from it but the ones I’ve used there’s a cost associated to them so I do do a lot of tracking within the platform themselves. So one of the ones I used was called a dash this and this platform is particularly good if you are a social media manager and you are managing social media on behalf of other people. And the reason this is so good is you basically go in and build your report. So you pick which platforms they use. You pick what you want to track and then you literally go in every month and just kind of rerun the report. It then puts it into a PDF if you can email it straight to the client or if you wanted to you can give the client live access to their report and anytime they go in it will just automatically update all the stats. It was a really really good system I did really enjoy it. It was really simple however. Well once you’ve set up there’s a bit of work in setting up but once you’ve set up it was ace. However it’s not cheap. And if you have lots of accounts which we do then it’s soon answer. So that was the reason I stopped using in the end but definitely have a look at it. I will link up to in the show notes. It’s called Dash this dot com.
The other one I’m now looking at and I’m just starting to use it. So you’re going to hear me talk about it on the podcast. The future is Agorapulse so agorapulse is a system that basically schedules social media. It listens. It monitors, you can reply to where it is. It’s a really really good tool for all round management of social media. But one of the things it does as well is reports. So I’m going to be looking at that and hopefully I think I’m gonna be getting my reports from there which were really helpful. So like I said I’m going to report on that and in future episodes also I will link up to the show notes so there’ll be links to Agorapulse and there said do go check that out as well. And like I said there are lots of other systems that do offer some reporting or other.
So you know I’m a big fan of buffer. I’ll hook this up into the show notes. We use that to schedule for some clients and myself and depending on what plan you on you can have some reporting in that also Hoot Suite I think does a bit reporting Social Baker does reporting so there are loads of them out there it’s just trying to find one that you’re happy with the price point you’re happy with. But I wanted to show you in the platform themselves what you should be looking out for in terms of what you should track going forward if you didn’t want to use a third party system. So I really hope that’s made sense. I know there’s been quite a lot that I’ve shoved into here and talked fairly fast as I always do. But I just wanted to give you an overview and I do get asked a lot in terms of what’s good what’s not good. And like I said there really is no straight answer to that. All you’re trying to do is compete with yourself. Ignore everyone else and the other interesting thing you know what everyone else is they don’t have to prove what they say now it’s really interesting with the podcast. One thing that I have been asked I think just once actually someone asked me to send them my downloads to let them know how many downloads my podcast had because obviously what they wanted to do was they wanted to make sure that if they were going to come on that mine was a big podcast that loads of people listening.
Now what’s really interesting is I could have said anything literally anything because there is no way that they can see how many downloads I’m getting because it’s not public information. So sometimes some people are sort of saying to you I get there so I get these many visits I get this much interaction. It’s not always the case so try not to worry too much about it. Like I said put your head down and work in your own lane work on your own stuff and just aim at getting better getting more engagement and improving those numbers over time. Anyway I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode. I hope I haven’t bought you too much for the analytic side but I have to say I love the numbers. I think I’ve talked about this before numbers really are my thing and that’s one of the reasons I love the digital space because when I started in marketing 15 years ago. Well one what I did in my degree is nothing like I do today. And two we couldn’t prove or track or system wise things whereas now we can. And I love it. So anyway I will leave it to a heck of a great week and I will see you soon.
