Analytics

You’re using your own analytics without even realizing it…

If you’ve made a post on either Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn in the past year, you would have already have had at least one encounter with your own analytics data. Any time you open your social media account to see how many likes your post has generated, you’re most likely looking at some form of analytics data from your account.

There’s a growing number of businesses that are starting to use services like Google Analytics to monitor and track things like the number of visits to a specific web page, and even the kinds of activity that users take on those web pages. The data collected helps these businesses better understand the behavior of their online consumers. With that, businesses can decide to either make changes or apply new strategies to boost their online engagement.

I personally think that we are already interacting with our own analytics through social media. Each time we produce content on social media, the platform usually has a way of showing us how our audiences react to our content. Whether or not it’s through the number of “likes”, “shares”, “re-tweets”, or “views”, knowing how people react to your content and understanding what they like about it is key.

If you look closer into the social media platforms you’re on, you’ll notice that these platforms are starting to give you more specific analytical data from your profiles. These platforms are slowly making your own analytics more accessible and easy to understand for you.

On LinkedIn, not only can I see how many views my post has generated, but from within the number of views, I can look at these numbers based off of which industry, career, and country the viewers are coming from. — That’s Nuts!

With an Instagram business profile, I can find anything from the number or “impressions”, “views”, “reach”, and even the number of people who tapped forward or backwards to skip through my stories.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that although the terminology and definitions that surround web analytics and data can seem intimidating and complicated. Although you might think that tracking your web analytics is something that only businesses need, the reality is that we’ve all been relying on analytics ever since the “like button” was created.

With platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn already showing us more specific analytics data, it’s only a matter of time before all of us are able to read our analytics without much effort.

For those out there struggling to make engaging content on social media or even for those who are thinking of starting out — a way to get a better idea of what works and what doesn’t would be to look at your analytics data to see what it says about you.