How I Use Analytics to Explode My Social Media Growth

Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another video. Today I want to talk about one of my favorite tools that I use to run my business, and it's called CrowdBooster. And what it basically does is allow me to figure out what times of day I should tweet to be able to have the highest impact with my audience. So this is my tools page, and I'll just go and search for CrowdBooster. There it is. Now this is a free tool, which is always great, and it will analyze your Twitter page as well as your Facebook page if you have a Facebook page that you use. There's a lot of analytics in here. A lot of it again is free. The main thing that I use it for, I'll show you here, is this part here which shows you the schedule that you should use to tweet out. So if I click Y, what it basically does is analyze when people are interacting with tweets that you send out. So you could be sending out tweets all day long, but this will tell you when you can have the maximum impact with your audience at certain times of day. So basically what it does is show you every hour of the day and shows you every day of the week, and it'll show you by the size of the circle when the best times to tweet are. So for me, in general, 2 and 3 o'clock are really good times, and then 8 and 9 are also pretty good in the morning, and then maybe 7 and 11. So what I do is I take this data and put it into Buffer, which is another free tool that I've talked about in a previous video, which allows you to schedule your tweets. So I don't have to go online at 2 and 3 o'clock every day and send something out. It's automatically scheduled in advance through my Buffer. So I can find out what the best times are through CrowdBooster. So I set up my Buffer to go for 7, 8, 9, 2, 3, and 11, based on the data that I've gotten from CrowdBooster. So this is the main reason why I use it, but there's a couple other tools you can use that might be helpful as well. You get a lot of stats. It tells you how many people are following you, how many tweets you sent out, mentions, retweets, etc. It'll show you a graph of your top tweets. It shows you how many replies you get, how many people you've reached on some of your tweets, and you can customize it by the timeline that you want. I don't really look at that too much. I use Buffer sometimes for my analytics. But what I do use sometimes is this section here, recommendations. I used to look at this every day, but now I don't do it as often. So there are two types of recommendations. The first is people who you might want to connect with. So it shows you influential users who have recently followed your account, and basically what it does is give you an opportunity to be able to follow them back and to mention them if you want. Now, how they judge who an influential user is, is by their Klout score. And unfortunately right now at least, Klout seems to be easily manipulated, so I found a lot of people on this list that I don't really want to connect with and they may be spammer accounts. So for that reason, I don't check this every day. If there was a better way to do this, then I might be on here more often. But basically I can look at these two people and see who they are and if I want to engage with them or not. So this person is the a professor and dean at Columbia University, tech evangelist, so maybe somebody who I would want to connect with and thank them for following me. And this person is a nature lover and social worker. I'll have to check maybe a little bit more to see what she's into before I want to interact with her. So you can see, you'll see a list of people who are, I believe it's over 60, maybe over 50 in Klout, so influential people. And gives you an opportunity to connect with them and thank them for following you. So that could be a good way to start connecting with some of your influential followers. The next thing that they show here is they show you tweets of people who've mentioned you who you haven't written back to. Now, I don't really use this at all. I use Hootsuite to manage the people who connect with me. So these are going to be mostly spammers. So somebody's asking me to follow them back, somebody's promoting a Samsung computer, whatever it is. So I don't use this for this, but you can. It's a free tool again, so you can see people who you need to connect with, who've talked about you, mentioned you, and are asking to get back in touch with them. So that's a cool way to, you know, be able to manage your Twitter account. Again, the main reason I use it is to set my schedule, and I take that and put it into my Buffer app. And sometimes I'll use the recommendations here of influential people just to see who's following me and who I should thank for following and maybe getting in touch with them. You can also integrate your Facebook page and Maybe a topic for a different day. I don't use it too much, but again, gives you lots of stats on who's on your Facebook page, who you want to recognize, your top fans, etc. So there's a lot more stats here again— follower growth, influential followers, top retweeters— that you can dive into if you like. You want more detailed analytics on your Twitter account, and again, it's all free, so you might as well go check it out. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, please give it a thumbs up. I'd also love to hear your comments on what you thought about it, what tools you use. The comments that you guys leave really help drive all the future videos that I make, so I really appreciate them when you do leave them, and I try to write back to everybody. So if you did, please leave a comment, give that thumbs up, and we'll see you on the next episode.