6 Reasons Why Influencers Should Be Using Audience Insights Data

Whether you’re an influencer, brand, or general social media user, the analytics behind the content you post is equally, if not more, important as the caption you wrote. Social media analytics are so much more than the likes, comments and engagements you receive. What you do with that data and the insights you can gather from it are how you learn and grow your audience. Influencers should care about this data because brands today care about it more than anything. Brands want to work with those influencers that value and understand it as well.

Snips Social Insights gathers real-time analytics and audience demographics from your social media when you share content through Snips. This is all presented in an intuitive dashboard that you can access right in your account and download as a PDF. Snips translates information from different platforms into one language and shows the big picture on one page.

This data is extremely valuable to any influencer and the brands they work with, no matter the category or follower count. With these insights you can better understand your audience and optimize engagement across your social media channels. Let’s dive deep into exactly why you should be using audience insights data to build your brand as an influencer.

1. All of your data is in one place

Snips Social Insights makes it clear which networks are generating the most traffic, keeping track of your follower count and engagements across all platforms in easy-to-read graphs. Many analytics programs only deliver the a few metrics from one or two networks. It is also important to understand the difference between who is following you versus who is engaging, which are two very different metrics. Snips Social Insights gives you a clear picture of who your most active audience members are, whether they follow you or not. We fill in the gap of what other social media networks don’t give you to provide a big picture of your entire social landscape.

Apart from your Social Insights dashboard you can also view the statistics on each individual link you snip. This will conversely help you see which campaigns and kinds of content your followers respond to. Tracking visits, impressions, shares, revenue and peak times will help you streamline your content calendar for maximum engagement. You’ll also be able to give your brands an accurate picture of conversions for sales-focused campaigns.

2. The importance of real-time analytics

To achieve the level of detail that Social Insights provides, other analytics software requires users to create custom reports and then wait for results. With Snips, it’s already working the moment you make your first post. Facebook Insights are one day behind and only measure activity up to the last 28 days, whereas our Social Insights tracks engagement on links over the last 12 months. Our platform is constantly gathering data even when you’re not active on social media but those engaging in your content are. From your report you can discover overall trends in audience traffic as well as a breakdown of daily traffic. This can help you determine what days of the week are best for different types of content.

3. Get to know your audience

Audience insights helps you get to know your audience at a higher level of detail so you can build lasting relationships with your followers. In addition to basic demographic information like age, gender and ethnicity, Snips gauges what interests, markets, content categories and lifestyles your followers share. One very important metric is “affinity,” which helps you identify other categories to engage because of the commonalities among your followers. This information is extremely useful for remarketing and identifying secondary interests to pair with your main content. You may discover that many of your fans enjoy cooking, spend lots of time at the beach, are currently house-hunting or share other interests that may be a great source of content.

Snips gathers data from not only your followers, but anyone engaging with your content. The people who engage with your content can have different interests and demographics compared to those that "follow you" but don't engage. Other social media sites lump these audience insights together, when they are two very different audiences.

Using this data, influencers can optimize their content strategy and offerings to fit their audience interests and increase engagement. Marketers also recognize that the more you know about your social followers, the easier it is to create and share content they will find valuable.

4. Keep yourself accountable

Not all data is created equal; different software measures traffic in different ways. Social networks are becoming more secretive, even changing their algorithms on a regular basis to keep an edge on hackers trying to cheat the system. As Michael K. Spencer explains in an article on Medium: “LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram likely use [view counts] to mask their actual real numbers of engagement. If you cannot trust an algorithm, you certainly cannot trust the metrics these networks provide us with.” Independent analytics providers are not immune to skewed information; sophisticated bots and fake profiles stay one step ahead of many analytics providers. This makes it difficult to measure your own success if you can’t trust the numbers coming from these sites. Monitoring your own Social Insights keeps you aware of your performance and prevents any misleading analytics.

5. Prove your authenticity to brands

We're in a data driven world now, and measuring ROI has become the biggest challenge to brands. Brands are becoming increasingly wary of influencers who work with a pod of other influencers or use bots to drum up their engagement numbers. According to Digiday, an average of only 36 sponsored posts out of 2,000 made per day contained no Instagram pod activity, fake comments, fake likes or uneven ratios of bot followers to engagements. When looking for potential influencers, brands want to know that their campaigns will receive quality engagements from a real audience. It has become more and more difficult to prove your authenticity as an influencer. Snips eliminates numbers from bots and fake followers so you can see the true numbers.

With Social Insights, your report can be exported to a PDF file in one click to show brands the size and makeup of your following. This helps prove your authenticity in a professional way to impress brands. Any influencer that can provide accurate data for brands to measure the ROI on their campaign will definitely stand out from the rest.

6. Don’t waste your money

Social media management and analytics sites come with a hefty price. Most social media sites have a monthly fee starting at $9 for analytics for just one platform, and more sophisticated programs run up to $500/month for data on multiple platforms. On top of the price, these social media sites provide little or no audience demographic information for influencers to build their brand. There’s no reason to waste the money you earn from your sponsored posts on software when you can get all that information and more with Snips Social Insights. We offer our Social Insights platform FREE for all of our influencers with a Snips account. You can access all the key audience metrics and social media stats that matter most to you and potential brands.

Get on board with audience insights!

Understanding the insights of those that engage with your content is crucial to building your brand and creating meaningful relationships with your fans. Not only is this data important to you as an influencer, but it gives the brands that you work with intelligent data and a proper way to measure ROI. Through sharing Snips Campaigns, Trending News, Collections and any snipped link, this resource accurately captures audience data and conversions to create successful case studies of your influencer marketing partnerships.

If you’re a Snips influencer, get your Social Insights data:

1. Link all your social media accounts
2. Share campaigns on social media through Snips
3. Data is gathered from those that view and engage with your shared content. View these real-time engagements of your Snipped links
4. That’s it! Now view your completed Social Insights profile

Need more help? Watch our tutorial on “How to Build Your Audience Profile with Social Insights”