Social media is a vital avenue for amplifying your brand messaging to the public and nurturing long-term customer connections on a daily basis. If your social content isn't resonating with your audiences, you’re missing out on an extremely important part of your content marketing strategy. 

Even if your brand has seen some success on social, what has worked in the past may not work forever. You need to constantly evaluate your content and your engagement data to ensure you’re reaching optimal levels of brand engagement. 

If you’re looking for expert tips on how to analyze and optimize your social content for better engagement, you’ve come to the right place. Here are the big bases to cover when analyzing the success of your social content, adjusting your strategy accordingly, and securing the best results for your social audiences.  

Establish Meaningful and Measurable Goals 

If you have not created goals and KPIs for your social platforms, do not pass go and do not collect $200. Posts need intention behind them, helping you reach your desired outcomes on each platform. 

Examples of goals can look like any or all of the following: 

• Getting audiences to click back to the website 

• Increasing newsletter subscribers 

• Increasing shares to get messaging in front of a wider audience 

• Gain more followers 

Not all social platforms need to have the same goals, and goals should be tailored for each platform you use. For example, your goal on Instagram may be to reach an average number of shares, likes, and comments for each post, while your LinkedIn goals might be to increase your number of job applications by a certain percentage.  

However, every social platform should have a specified goal, and measuring against those goals will help guide your social strategy for each platform. Once those goals are established, always keep them in mind when creating content. When possible, include a call-to-action to engage your audience in the way you want. 

Regularly Evaluating Data is a Must 

Once you have your goals in place, looking at the data regularly will help you understand if your audience is reacting in the way you hope. 

Look at the different types of engagement – video views, reactions, comments, shares, link clicks – and weigh them based on your goals. For example, if you’re looking to earn more clicks to your website, link clicks should carry more weight in your data analysis than other forms of engagement.  

From there, it’s easy to gauge the top-performing and weakest-performing posts, and you'll be able to assess whether there are commonalities that will help you optimize your future content. You may also discover some types of posts that perform well in goal categories for other social platforms, and you can start weaving that type of content into your strategy for other social channels. 

Data will show you the pathways to reaching your goals. Be sure to compare the data to previous months to see if there are larger trends at play that are impacting interactions.  

Is there a day of the week or time of the day that performs better? Are there types of posts always in the top-performing pack? Are there outlier posts (like big announcements) that disrupt your data patterns? All of these factors can help you maximize the performance of your social content. 

Platforms are Different, and Your Content Should Be Too 

When you publish the same content on multiple social channels, you’re likely to see wildly different results from platform to platform. This makes perfect sense, because your audiences use each social platform for a different reason, and their expectations and behaviors will change accordingly. 

LinkedIn is used as a professional networking tool, so any industry insights or company updates you share on LinkedIn may not perform well on Instagram. Instagram may be the ideal place to show off the capabilities of your new products, using enticing visuals.  

To optimize your social strategy across multiple platforms, it’s crucial to create copy and multimedia content tailored specifically to each social channel. Your visual and verbal language and tone should match the voice and expectations of each platform. 

If you’re looking to super-charge your engagement, dive into who is following your brand on each channel. Social platforms allow you to see the demographics of who’s following your pages, giving you an in-depth understanding of the people interacting with your content. 

Be Adaptable, Because Social Platforms are Always Changing 

Even after analyzing all the data from your own content, you’ll still need to keep a watchful eye on developments in the social industry. Social networking platforms frequently change their algorithms and posting parameters, which may change the performance metrics of  certain types of posts.  

For example, in 2020, Instagram introduced Reels to help them compete with the video platform TikTok. Furthermore, in order to get more people to use Reels, Instagram changed its algorithm to reward Reels content and get Reels in front of more people. 

Paying attention to and leaning into these changes can help amplify and popularize your content among intended audiences. This can be a lot to keep up with, so partnering with someone who can keep up with updates can help ease the burden. 

Sometimes, You May Need to Start Over 

If you’re looking to revamp your social content or haven’t put much thought into the direction for your social posts, a social strategy will help you get on track. This puts every piece of the puzzle we’ve described above into a formal plan that will help you reach the goals you’ve set for each social channel. 

Start by looking at the data for your posts and platform demographics, and take note of what has been working and what needs to change. Create KPIs and measurable goals to guide your work, and from there, you’ll discover a path that gets you to your destination.  

Social strategies aren't set in stone, and you should always be fluid to adjust to what's performing well. However, it is important to put a concrete plan down on paper, as it will serve as a guide to revisit, revise, and optimize with new insights as time goes on. 

All these steps can allow you to get creative on social media in a smart and focused way. When you have the tools and the understanding of how your audiences will react to different types of posts, you can create well-thought-out content that will drive successful and targeted engagement over and over again. 

Even though the data will guide your top-performing content, don’t be afraid to try new things! Your audience will appreciate fresh thinking and new types of content, and analyzing the data for new types of posts will help you hone your strategy even further. You never know: A new type of content may resonate better than anything you’ve posted before. 

Need an expert helping hand to guide your social content strategy? Contact us, and let’s talk about how to start engaging with your social audiences in the best possible way.