Social Media Analytics & You
We all use social media. It’s an endless source of entertainment and vehicle for communication but it’s also a vast database of every interaction and digital movement that anyone and everyone can utilize through analytics.
By now, there’s a general awareness that big corporations like the Metaverse and Google track this information and use it to their own advantage. These companies take user data and tailor our online experiences to hyper-specific categories to sell advertisements and recommend media that will increase our usage of their platforms. Businesses use social media analytics for a multitude of reasons– they can see what content performs best on their page, interact with customers or potential customers in real-time, and build brand awareness to name a few. This is something that an everyday user might see as daunting. However, users can also take that knowledge and use it to understand their own online experience.
Social media platforms take in information about your friends, the content you like (and don’t like), where you travel, and how you engage with all of those aspects of life. For example, you might see an article from a publication and click it, comment on it, or share it. Those actions funnel similar content your way. Everyday social media users can use this to their advantage by just being aware of how platforms operate. If you want more of a certain type of content, simply engage. If not, then don’t, but also there are always options to tell your social media platform “I don’t like this,” by clicking the post’s options or even blocking the source of the post.
People can also utilize their own social media page’s analytics. For example, by switching to a Professional or Creator account on Instagram, users can access the Insights feature to see how others interact with their own posts. There are a few areas to look at while observing your own analytics. The first is your reach, which shows how many followers and non-followers are seeing your posts, where they are from, and what posts that get the most attention. You can also look at engagement, which gives more insight into what people are interacting with most. There are features to check your follower count as well as when your followers are most active.
Learning about your own audiences can serve as a useful tool if you’re a user that enjoys curating content or if you are interested in becoming a content creator yourself.
Whether you’re looking to understand how social media platforms see you or you’re looking into content creation, yourself, social media analytics serve us all as a powerful tool to navigate our social footprint.