October 4, 2017

Different audiences live on various social media platforms, and their expectations for what you share (and how) can be wildly different. The good news is that you can use the free analytics tools offered by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to unlock the details about your audience and share relevant content.

Analytics can tell you:

  • Audience breakdown by gender 
  • The age of your audience
  • Where your audience is located
  • What else your audience is interest in
  • When your audience visits the site

Using this data, you can:

  • Learn what content does or doesn’t do well
  • Learn what your audience likes, favorites, comments on, watches or shares
  • Track what your audience doesn’t engage with (looking at failures is one way to look at what’s working and what’s not) 
  • Get immediate feedback about what your audience likes and what they don’t 
  • Learn how many people are viewing a post without engaging (likes, shares, etc.) 
  • See how you rank against your competition 

Taken from Tweet This, Not That: How to Write and Edit for Social Media, a webinar replay with Alysha Love at Poynter NewsU. Want to learn more about metrics? Join our one-day workshop on Nov. 10 in Chicago, led by Joy Mayer. 

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Vicki Krueger has worked with The Poynter Institute for more than 20 years in roles from editor to director of interactive learning and her current…
Vicki Krueger

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