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Nowadays, you can get reliable data from anywhere. With the number of data visualization tools, choosing the right visualization tool may be tricky for a newbie. But the truth remains — the human brain is more receptive to visual information than texts. By merely taking advantage of this, you can pretty much adapt how you translate raw data to your audience.

The advent of social media platforms and other technological advancements gave rise to information overload — yes, information overload is real, and humans are more exposed to a large volume of information than they did thirty years ago.

The thing is, information overload could be a blessing or a curse, depending on how it is handled. You can easily translate raw social media data into a digestible format with data visualization. If properly done, it will help you improve your social media campaign.

Speaking of social media data, you probably think you know what it is, and how you can use it to reach more people. Here is what you need to know about social media data for clarity.

If you're like most people, you probably think that social media data includes shares and likes. Well, that's a piece of the puzzle, but there's much more to it. Social media data helps you gain a better understanding of your target audience, and how they interact with your brand.

A good grasp of social media data helps you gain a better insight into the success of your campaign, post, and network. Social media analytics helps you gain a better understanding of which platform generates more conversion and the most leads for your campaign. Aside from shares, impressions, and likes, here are other metrics that can be measured using social media analytics.

Lead generation: Social media analytics helps you to create a good lead generation model around your audience activity
Content engagement: Analytics helps you to identify where you need to publish more content, and where you need less engagement
Audience segmentation: Analytics helps you to segment your audience based on parameters like demography
Sales outreach: Data from social media analytics can help during approaches and personalized conversations.

Moving on, here is the data visualization of social networks.

Here's how to use the built-in analytics of major social media platforms to gain insight into the user.

Facebook Insights

Facebook insight shows the visualization for stats like engagement, audience, and posts. There is also a Pages to Watch feature that helps you gain insight into the performance of other Facebook pages.

Here are some metrics that are measured in Facebook insight.

Post Reach: Post reach connects posts to various graph trends. If there's a significant increase in your page activity, you can use this section to identify the post that generates that much engagement. This way, you get to create similar content that resonates with your audience.
Page Likes: Page likes help you to track your followers. It also helps you to pinpoint where your likes are coming from — are they coming from paid or organic traffic? All in all, it helps you to grasp the effect of a post or campaign on your page.
Page Views: It helps you identify the number of eyeballs that hit your Facebook page, and where all these eyeballs are coming from. Page views are made of two categories — external referrers and page and tab visits. External referrers are the number of eyeballs from other platforms that land on your Facebook page, while page or tab visits are the total number of eyeballs that land on your tabs or pages.
Videos: It shows the number of views you get on your videos. It could be top videos or the total number of video views on your page.
Posts: Posts have some metrics that help you identify the content that resonates most with your audience. It also helps you to identify the best time to publish content on your social media account.
People: People tag helps you to categorize your audience. You would easily pinpoint your fans, people reached, and people engaged metrics.

LinkedIn Analytics

LinkedIn analytics pretty much helps you to track and visualize engagement on your LinkedIn page. Here are three dashboards that offer insights into how your page is performing.

Visitors: It shows you an overview of the page visitors. You get to see the percentage of how much the metrics have increased or decreased over a month.
Traffic: This section showcases the traffic statistics over some time. It shows you metrics like Pageviews and Unique visitors over a defined period.
Visitor Demographics: It offers insight into the people that view your company page. There is an option to filter your visitors using metrics like job function, seniority, company size, industry, and location.

Instagram Insights

You can access Instagram Insights using your Instagram Business Profile. This section showcases everything you need to know about your Instagram account. Here are some metrics you will discover in the Instagram Insight section.

Gender and age range: It shows you the gender and age range of your target. If you notice that your audience is an older generation, then posting things that thrill the older generation will be your best move.
Top locations: It shows you the location of your audience. Knowing the location will pretty much help you to schedule your content accordingly.
Reach: It shows you the number of views on your Instagram account.
Stories analytics: It shows you metrics like exists and replies. Exists is a measure of the times users swipe of (or skip) your story, while replies are the measure of direct engagement (or interaction) from users on your story.
Video engagement: It shows you how many times your IGTV content has been viewed, commented on, or liked. For emphasis, you should pay attention to your audience retention time. Audience retention time is a metric that shows you how long you retained the attention of the people who viewed your IGTV.

Twitter Analytics

Twitter analytics shows a 28-day overview of your Twitter profile. Here are some metrics that are shown on the analytics dashboard.

Audiences: You get to find your user's interest here. It also shows users who engaged with your tweets.
Demographics: The report shows you an overview of your target audience's location, gender, net worth, and more.
Impressions: It helps you identify the impressions on your tweet. This way, you can trace the patterns like if your best tweets have call-to-action (CTA), or the time of day that's likely to generate more reaction.

Pinterest Analytics

Pinterest analytics showcase metrics like the audience, impressions, and web interactions. Here are seven metrics you'll likely see on the Pinterest analytics dashboard.

Audience affinities: It offers an overview of the kind of content your audience interacts with.
Impressions: It shows you the number of times your post appears on the user's feed. It also helps you to identify the keywords and categories that generate the most impressions.
Clicks: It helps you identify if your pin will drive traffic to your website.
Saves: Saves pretty much shows that a user loves and endorses your content.
All-time Stats: It could be your pins that performed well during searches, your most repined pins, or merely the most interactive pins.
Repins: It shows the number of saves your pins generate. It's somewhat similar to Twitter's retweets.
Top Pins: Top pins help you to identify your top-performing content (or pins).

Wrap Up

Whether you're using Sankey Charts or other visualization tools, you can improve your social media campaign by merely taking a close look at the data. The good news is, all major social media platforms have a built-in analytics dashboard where you can see valuable metrics on the go.

Data visualization should be a vital piece of your marketing puzzle. It always brings precision and context to your social media marketing. You also get to make more informed decisions.

Furthermore, data visualization helps you to properly analyze your audience. This will, in turn, help you choose the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for your campaign.

As a general rule of thumb, you've got to understand the nitty-gritty of data visualization, and how to draw meaningful marketing insights from such visuals.

Now you understand the importance of data visualization on social media campaigns, what metrics will you look out for in your next campaign?

How to Improve Social Media Campaign Using Data Visualization