Audience Research Tools

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Tools of the trade

Let’s look at the free social media analytics tools that are out there on platforms like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Twitter Analytics

Twitter has some of the most fascinating and robust analytics around. Your analytics home opens in a new tab or window. There, you will see a 28-day summary and highlights of your most popular tweets, mentions, number of new followers, profile views, etc. The tab at the top of the page called Audiences defaults to an overview and provides a lot of excellent data about your audience and their interests.

YouTube Analytics

YouTube’s analytics are pretty extensive. To access them, go to your Creator Studio by, once again, clicking on your profile image in the top right corner and choosing Creator Studio. Then click on Analytics in the left-hand column to expand the options and then demographics.

Demographics aren’t really very useful. However, you can take note of the fact that your audience seems to follow similar patterns to your Twitter followers. So you can probably assume that many of your Twitter followers are also subscribed to you on YouTube, and that the audience crosses over quite a bit.

Facebook Analytics

When you’re on your page, click on the Insights tab at the top of the page, below the search bar. Then click on the People menu along the left-hand side to open up your demographics insights. Much like YouTube, there isn’t much more here other than the demographics, information like age, country, and gender.

LinkedIn Analytics

Different analytics are provided depending on the type of page you have, whether it is a personal profile, a company page, or a group. If you are personally connected to a lot of people on LinkedIn, you should get a lot of interesting data from just your personal profile. You can actually start to scroll down this page and see the individuals who’ve looked at your profile. Or you can look at the statistics in the overview at the top, which will show you the titles and industries of the people that have looked at your profile.

If you have a business page, just click on the Analytics tab below the company name and logo bar. If you scroll down, you’ll be able to get similar demographics for your page followers. Understanding the industry that your audience is in, their seniority and job title, can give you a great jumping off point for digging deeper.

Google Analytics

If your website gets a lot of traffic, Google Analytics will offer up some data on the interests of your audience. You can click into those categories as well to find out deeper behaviors like how much time they spend on your site and - if you have your Google Analytics set up right - whether or not they convert. This may help you understand who those valuable customers are and what they want.