Knowing Your Audience with Analytics

What you need to know to know the people who know you

One of the most important things a content creator can do, that fundamentally affects every other one of their efforts, is to understand analytics. When considering content creation, and social media specifically, knowing the what, how, and why of every post, ad, and campaign can mean the difference between success and failure.

But before we get into the details of how that works and the best ways to apply it, what exactly ARE analytics anyway?

Basically, the term analytics refers to the collection and analysis of various points of data regarding content creation and reception. In simpler terms, it's the numbers behind why popular posts work and why the rest are consigned to irrelevance. Though the difference may look like random chance and a fickle internet at first, the real strength of understanding analytics is in the ability to see what truly drives your audience through a series of seemingly unrelated metrics.

What Can We Learn?

The overall idea of analytics is a broad one. In order to make the most of it, content creators need to know what to look for, and why each piece of information is actually relevant to them on a practical level. Luckily, we've compiled a list of some of of the most important types of analytics to keep a close eye on:

• Audience analytics - In pretty much every form of entertainment, the most important element the entertainer can consider is the age-old wisdom "know your audience" and content creation is no exception. Understanding as much as you can about exactly who your content is most popular with can be crucial, including their age, geographic location, other potential interests, etc. The better you understand who your audience is actually composed of, the better you can tailor your content to appeal best to them.

• Competitive analytics - Another important element to content creation is standing out and drawing attention. Looking at other creators in your niche and understanding why they're successful, especially when directly comparing their efforts to your own, can be a great way to learn more about what works and what doesn't.

• Trendspotting - In addition to more specific data points like followers and competitors, the ability to monitor relevant topics, discussions, and mentions of your niche can be crucial to staying on top of popular trends and even getting ahead of the curve once this art is perfected.

And plenty more besides. Paid advertising analytics, for instance, doesn't just aid understanding of what gets seen and where, but also the details of how much money each ad costs versus how much return on that investment is generated. Sentiment analysis doesn't just address the data of how many people are engaging with your content, but also why and what brought them there. The list could go on and on, but you get the idea. The better question now isn't about more what but is about how all this is done.

A Goal Oriented Approach

Before anything else, the most important step in undertaking any new project is to determine what your desired outcome is. Since the term "success" can be somewhat nebulous and looks different to different people and in different contexts, it's hard to always know which analytics are helpful to what you're trying to do and which are less applicable. The process of setting specific and measurable goals for what success actually looks like to you is one of the best ways to determine which analytics matter most to achieving it. 

For instance, if your primary goal is to increase community engagement, the most important data points will probably be things like likes, comments, reposts, and sharing rather than things like reach or impressions. Those analytics in particular will highlight your current progress and inform you what needs improving when trying to reach that objective. Conversely, if your primary goal is to build awareness, reach and impressions are exactly what will matter most, accompanied by stats like follower growth and mentions/tags. In putting together the data from those analytics, you're effectively monitoring how much awareness you're building in real time.

Putting The Pieces Together

Once you've narrowed down the data to specific goals and metrics that measure them, you'll need the tools to access that data in a convenient and understandable way. Luckily, Wallafan offers full integration with Google Analytics to allow for easy access to pretty much every piece of important information you could ask for, all wrapped up in a neat little package. All you have to do is navigate to the dropdown menu in the top right corner of the site, click "My Account" (or make an account if you haven't already), then click "statistics" and enable Google Analytics.

After that, all that's left to do is make sense of all that information. Of course, the internet is rarely kind enough to provide a single, universal answer to any question, especially one rooted so thoroughly in preference like popularity. But through monitoring and understanding analytics, content creators can get a little closer to solving the mysteries of popularity one post at a time.