127 Time-Saving Keyboard Shortcuts for Social Media Marketers

I used to think the few seconds I save by using keyboard shortcuts are not useful. I mean, what can I do with those few seconds?

A lot, it seems…

A few seconds here and there can add up. And according to Brainscape, you can save up to eight workdays per year! Just by using shortcuts—enough time for a long vacation.

Being a social media marketer, you spend a lot of time on the various social media platforms and your favorite social media tools. Often repeating the same actions: Like, reply, and more.

Let’s help you save your eight precious days every year with these social media keyboard shortcuts.

Top Social Media Keyboard Shortcuts to Save You Time

Here’re all the social media platforms and tools we’ll cover in this blog post. Click on the respective bullet point to jump to the platform or tool you’re interested in:

Social media platforms

• Facebook
• Messenger
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Instagram (mobile app shortcuts)
• Pinterest (mobile app shortcuts)
• Google+
• YouTube
• Medium
• Tumblr

Tools

• Buffer
• Respond
• Feedly
• Pocket
• Canva
• Trello

One Keyboard Shortcut to Rule Them All

I struggle to remember all the keyboard shortcuts since different platforms and tools tend to have different keyboard shortcuts (even for similar actions such as Liking a post).

Fortunately, many platforms and tools have a keyboard shortcut to show all the keyboard shortcuts! If there’s one to remember, this is it.

“?” or Shift + /

Facebook Keyboard Shortcuts

Facebook keyboard shortcuts differ by computer operating system and by browser:

• Chrome for PC: Alt + #
• Firefox for PC: Shift + Alt + #
• Internet Explorer for PC: Alt + #, then Enter
• Chrome, Safari, and Firefox for Mac: Ctrl + Opt + #

Replace # with the following numbers to access the respective features or pages on Facebook. For example, Alt + 1 will bring you to your Facebook home page on Chrome on a PC.

0 – Help

1 – Home

2 – Timeline

3 – Friends

4 – Inbox

5 – Notifications

6 – Settings

7 – Activity Log

8 – About

9 – Terms

Here’re a few more keyboard shortcuts for actions you might regularly take:

j or k – Scroll down or up between News Feed stories

Enter – See more of the selected story

p – Post a new status

l – Like or unlike the selected story

c – Comment on the selected story

s – Share the selected story

o – Open the link or expand the photo from the selected story

/ – Search

To see the full list of keyboard shortcuts, type “?” on any Facebook page.

[Back to navigation]

Messenger Keyboard Shortcuts

Increasingly, more businesses are using Messenger to provide social customer support. Being able to speed up your workflow allows you to reply your customers faster. The only keyboard shortcut for Messenger seems to this:

Opt + Up arrow or Down arrow / Alt + Up arrow or Down arrow – Jump to the conversation above or below

If you want to enhance your Messenger workflow, Allen Guo has developed a Chrome extension and a Firefox add-on, which adds several useful keyboard shortcuts to the Messenger web app (i.e. messenger.com).

Here’re two handy ones to know:

Opt + Shift + (number) / Alt + Shift + (number) – Jump to the X-th conversation from the top (e.g. Opt + Shift + 3 brings you to the third conversation from the top)

Opt + Shift + q / Alt + Shift + q – Search

[Back to navigation]

Twitter Keyboard Shortcuts

Hop to different Twitter pages with these keyboard shortcuts:

g + h – Home

g + n – Notifications

g + r – Mentions

g + p – Profile

g + l – Likes

g + i – Lists

g + m – Messages

g + s – Settings

g + u – Go to user…

Here’re a few more keyboard shortcuts for actions you might regularly take:

n – New tweets

Cmd + Enter / Ctrl + Enter – Send tweets

j or k – Next or previous tweet

l – Like

r – Reply

t – Retweet

m – Direct message

Enter – Open tweet details

o – Expand photo

/ – Search

To see the full list of keyboard shortcuts, type “?” on any Twitter page.

[Back to navigation]

LinkedIn Keyboard Shortcuts

It seems that LinkedIn does not have keyboard shortcuts for navigation and actions. But here’re two browser shortcuts you can use when commenting on a post:

Tab + Enter – Add an image

Tab + Tab + Enter – Post your comment

Do you know of any other handy LinkedIn keyboard shortcuts? Share them in the comments.

[Back to navigation]

Instagram App Shortcuts

While Instagram doesn’t have any keyboard shortcuts, it has some shortcuts for its mobile app.

Tap and hold a post in grid view in Search & Explore or on a profile – Expand the post (then swipe up to like the post, view the profile, or send the post as a message)

Tap and hold a profile or hashtag on your feed – Get a preview of the recent posts (then swipe up to view the profile, turn post notifications on, or send the profile or hashtag as a message)

Give the app icon a firm press – Get shortcuts to create a new post, view activities or direct messages, search, and more (only for iPhone 6s or later)

[Back to navigation]

Pinterest App Shortcuts

Pinterest also doesn’t have any keyboard shortcuts but if you use Pinterest on your mobile phone (iPhone 6s or later, Android 7.1 or higher), give the app icon a firm press and you’ll see four Pinterest shortcuts.

Lens – Find pins related to anything you snap (only available to users with the Lens feature)

Explore – See the trending ideas for the day

Saved – Jump right to the ideas you saved

Search – Search for ideas on Pinterest

For Android users, you can even move the shortcuts onto your home screen by tapping and dragging the shortcut over.

[Back to navigation]

Google+ Keyboard Shortcuts

Google+ uses a few different keyboard shortcuts from most social media platforms for common actions such as comment and +1 (or Like). Just type “?” on most Google+ pages when you want to see the keyboard shortcuts.

j or k – Next or previous post

/ – Search

c – Create a new post

r – Comment on selected post

s – Share selected post

v – View attachment on selected post

+ – Add or remove a +1 on the selected post

Here’s a little bonus: Google+ might be the only major social media platform where you can style your text with markdown.

– (dash before and after the text) – Strikethrough

* (asterisks before and after the text) – Bold

_ (underscore before and after the text) – Italics

[Back to navigation]

YouTube Keyboard Shortcuts

YouTube has over 30 keyboard shortcuts. Here’re the few you might use most often:

k or Spacebar – Play or pause video

Left arrow or j – Go back 5 or 10 seconds

Right arrow or l – Go forward 5 or 10 seconds

1 to 9 – Skip to X0 percent of the video (e.g. 5 skips to 50 percent of the video)

0 – Restart video

> or < – Speed up or slow down the video

Shift + n or p – Next or previous video in the playlist

c – Turn captions on or off

If you would like to learn all the keyboard shortcuts, Hong Kiat has compiled a great list on its site.

[Back to navigation]

Medium Keyboard Shortcuts

Medium does not have keyboard shortcuts for navigation but its keyboard shortcuts for editing and formatting can save you quite some time!

Here’re a few notable ones:

Cmd + k / Ctrl + k – Add a link (works for images, too)

Cmd + Alt + 5 / Ctrl + Alt + 5 – Block quote (press again for a pull quote)

Cmd + Enter / Ctrl + Enter – Add a separator

t + k – Leave a TK reminder

Cmd + Alt + 8 / Ctrl + Alt + 8 / Shift + f – Set image as featured image

Opt + Click / Alt + Click – Set focal point on featured image (which will be taken into account when the image is cropped on the feed)

` + ` + ` – Add a code block

To see the keyboard shortcuts while you are writing your Medium post, hit Cmd + ? or Ctrl + ?.

[Back to navigation]

Tumblr Keyboard Shortcuts

Tumblr has keyboard shortcuts for navigation, posting, and composing (such as inserting a GIF ). Type “?” on your Tumblr dashboard to pull out the list of keyboard shortcuts.

Here’re a few you might use more frequently:

j or k – Next or previous post

l – Like a post

s – Share a post

n – View a post’s notes

Enter – Open a post’s blog

/ – Search

Opt + c / Alt + c – Compose a new post

Opt + r / Alt + r – Reblog a post

Opt + e / Alt + e – Add a post to your queue

Oh, and of course,

Cmd + Shift + g / Ctrl + Shift + g – Insert GIF

Tumblr keyboard shortcuts also work on its mobile app if you have a Bluetooth keyboard connected to your mobile device.

[Back to navigation]

Buffer Keyboard Shortcuts

We also have some nifty keyboard shortcuts for the Buffer app and browser extension to help you speed up your social media sharing and management.

Opt + (number) / Alt + (number) – Switch between your connected profiles in the Buffer dashboard

Opt + b / Alt + b – Open the Buffer browser extension if you have it installed

Cmd + Enter / Ctrl + Enter – Add updates to your Buffer queue

You can customize the keyboard shortcut for opening the browser extension in your browser extension settings. For example, for Chrome, go to Settings > Extensions > Options (under Buffer).

[Back to navigation]

Respond Keyboard Shortcuts

We built Respond to help you engage with your social media fans more effectively. Naturally, we included many keyboard shortcuts to help you zoom through your social media conversations. (This is the secret to our fast responses during #bufferchat!)

Here’re the few shortcuts that I use regularly:

g + o – Go to team inbox

g + m – Go to mine (conversations assigned to you)

f – Like a tweet or Facebook comment

w – Follow user

e – Archive conversation

Enter – Focus on the composer

Cmd + Enter / Ctrl + Enter – Send reply, archive conversation, and move to the next conversation

Cmd + Shift + Enter / Ctrl + Shift + Enter – Send reply and stay in the conversation

: – Insert emoji (e.g. :smile:)

You can see the full list of keyboard shortcuts here or from the app (Help > Keyboard Shortcuts).

[Back to navigation]

Feedly Keyboard Shortcuts

Feedly is my go-to tool for staying up to date with industry news. Learning its keyboard shortcuts allowed me to quickly navigate around my Feedly dashboard and catch up on the blogs I’m following.

Here’re the few I found very useful:

g + g – Search and navigate to a particular feed or source

g + f – Go to Favourites feed

g + l – Go to Read later feed

n or p – Next or previous story

o – Open or close currently selected story

v – Open original in a new tab

x – Mark as read and hide

[Back to navigation]

Pocket Keyboard Shortcuts

Pocket is one of our favorite content curation tools, and I found out that it also has several keyboard shortcuts to help me navigate and find the articles and videos I want quickly.

Here’re the ones I like:

g + l or f or a – Switch to My List, Favorites, or Archive

g + r or v or i – Filter by articles, videos, or images

g + s – Search

j or k – Next or previous item

a – Archive the selected item

f – Favorite the selected item

o – Open the original of selected item in a new tab

[Back to navigation]

Canva Keyboard Shortcuts

We use and recommend Canva regularly because it’s easy and quick for creating social media graphics. With its keyboard shortcuts, you can reduce the time you take to create graphics even further.

Here’re a few handy ones to know:

t – Add a text

Opt + Shift + b / Alt + Shift + b – Add border around your text box

Cmd + Shift + k / Ctrl + Shift + k – Transform your text to uppercase

Cmd + Shift + l or r or c / Ctrl + Shift + l or r or c – Left or right or center align your text

Cmd + g / Ctrl + g – Group elements (Add Shift to ungroup)

Cmd + Click / Ctrl + Click – Select elements behind other elements

Cmd + Up arrow or Down arrow / Ctrl + Up arrow or Down arrow – Move an element in front of or behind other elements

Cmd + ; / Ctrl + ; – Turn grid lines on or off

Canva provides tutorials where you can learn and practice the most useful keyboard shortcuts.

[Back to navigation]

Trello Keyboard Shortcuts

Trello is a great tool for managing your social media schedule (and a tool we heavily rely on in the marketing team). While Trello is already easy to use, knowing the keyboard shortcuts can help you quickly create, change, and archive your cards.

Hover over a card to use the respective shortcuts on the card.

e – Open quick edit mode (for changing the title, labels, members, and more)

l – Open labels option

c – Archive the card

d – Set or change due date

f – Open card filter menu

, or . – Move the card to the bottom of the list on the left or right

< or > – Move the card to the top of the list on the left or right

[Back to navigation]

What are your favorite keyboard shortcuts?

With so many keyboard shortcuts available on all the social media platforms and tools, I’m sure you have found several that you love and use regularly.

Which are the ones that you use most often or the ones that save you the most time?

—

Image credit: Unsplash, Tumblr, MacRumors, and Hong Kiat

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/social-media-keyboard-shortcuts

On Entrepreneurship, Creativity, Social Media and Becoming a Better Marketer – Paul Jarvis [SSM047]

For all of history creativity has, in a sense, been taken advantage of by business.

Look at any musician’s record deal. Or any painter who has found someone to represent them and put their work in galleries. Or the author whose book you see atop the NY Times Bestseller list.

It’s a perfect symbiotic relationship. Well, that is, until recently.

Over the last decade, there has been a sharp rise in creatives as business people. But how can you, as a business person or marketer, learn to hone your inner creativity to thrive in today’s market?

Paul Jarvis, one-time touring musician, veterinary assistant, and paperboy turned full-time entrepreneur shares his insights into how many brands and marketers may be looking at social media all wrong. He also shares how creativity and human connection on social media might be easier than you think.

A huge thank you to Paul for packing episode #47 of The Science of Social Media full of inspiration and actionable takeaways for marketers looking to hone their inner creativity and drive real, human connections on social media. (Part of our brand new podcast series!)

How to listen: iTunes | Google Play | SoundCloud | Stitcher | RSS

This episode is available on:

• iTunes
• Google Play
• Stitcher
• Sound Cloud

In this episode, here’s what you’ll learn:

Paul Jarvis shares his journey from one-time touring musician to full-time entrepreneur. We dive into the intricacies creativity and the important role that it plays in social media and marketing success as well as how you can hone your inner creativity. We also get into some other great things like:

• How the best career moves can happen by accident (and often do)
• Why the “clutch” factor has been key in Paul’s career success
• How passion often follows expertise, not the other way around
• The importance of following market demand for your brand
• Why human connection is the most important factor for social media success
• The essence of creativity and how we’re all capable of being extraordinary

Why being human is one of the most important things your brand can do to connect

In Paul’s words…

“There are a lot of things that are dehumanizing in the marketing and corporate world today. There’s chatbots, and AI, and corporate jargon everywhere you look – even landing pages of most major companies! People create “humanity” in everything that they do, but that’s silly. We’re all surrounded by humans. People simply crave real connection with other people.”

A Great Moment

“Social media is the hook. People aren’t going to see your Twitter account and instantly buy something. But it’s a great place to give people a micro taste of your brand.”

– Paul Jarvis

Awesome People and Stuff Mentioned in the Show

• Paul Jarvis Home
• Paul Jarvis: Sunday Dispatches [Podcast]
• CNBC: Inside the Wendy’s Nuggs Guy and 18 Million Retweets [Article]
• Nuggs and Sass: Inside Wendy’s Social Media Secret Sauce [Forbes]
• Cal Newport – “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” [Book]

Favorite Quotes

• Being an entrepreneur and in my business specifically, I see social media as the hook. People aren’t going to see my Twitter account and then buy something from me, but they are getting micro tastes of my brand (of who I am).
• Most entrepreneurs super powers come from their ability to not be afraid to look silly or stupid and just try things.
• Content marketing is built around trust because sales and audience growth can’t happen without trust. You can’t fake it and you can’t build it immediately, it happens over time.
• Things start to go well when brands truly begin question how they can connect with their audience as real human beings. If you’re engaging, human, real, and interesting then that’s a massive benefit to your audience.
• I don’t build software companies, make courses, or write books because I feel like it. I would rather sit and watch Netflix. But when I start to notice that more people want something specific from me, that’s what I let drive me. In other words, I let market demand dictate what I do next.
• There gets to a point, in the path of many careers, where you realize that you’re not doing what you want to do. And it took me a long time to understand that passion follows mastery. In looking at people who are happy with their jobs, they tend to have mastered them.

How to Say Hello to Paul (and us)

Pau Jarvis is one of my personal favorites to follow along with online and on Twitter. And he would love to say hello to you! You can find Paul on Twitter here. And if you’re interested in checking out more of Paul’s incredible work or podcast (or anything else), head on over to www.pjrvs.com.

Thanks for listening! We’d love to connect with you at @buffer on Twitter or with the hashtag #bufferpodcast.

Enjoy the show? It’d mean the world to us if you’d be up for giving us a rating and review on iTunes!

—

About the Show

The Science of Social Media is your weekly sandbox for social media stories, insights, experimentation, and inspiration. Every Monday (and sometimes more) we share the most cutting-edge social media marketing strategies from brands and influencers in every industry. If you’re a social media team of one, business owner, marketer, or someone simply interested in social media marketing, you’re sure to find something useful in each and every episode.  It’s our hope that you’ll join our 10,000+ weekly iTunes listeners and rock your social media channels as a result!

The Science of Social Media is proudly made by the Buffer team. Feel free to get in touch with us for any thoughts, ideas, or feedback.

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/paul-jarvis-show-notes

7 Social Media Analytics and Reporting Tips for Becoming a Data-Savvy Marketer

How do you know what’s working with your social media? And what’s not working?

The social networks provide us with a ton of data about our posts but it can be hard to distinguish the signals from the noise.

Imagine having a framework to pull out the signals from the noise — a framework that points you to the key information about your social media performance. With this framework, you can easily identify successful posts and understand why they did well.

The key is social media analytics and reporting! 

In this post, you’ll learn how to analyze, evaluate, and use your social media data to boost and report your social media marketing results — from exporting your data to creating benchmarks, to finding your best times to post.

7 Tips for Getting Better Social Media Results by Using Data

To give you a quick overview of what we’ll go through in this post, here are the seven tips:

1. 1. Create quick reports with spreadsheets
   2. Set benchmarks for your performance
   3. Measure total engagement
   4. Add context to the data you pull
   5. Find out your best time to post
   6. Reuse your top posts
   7. Engage influencers who shared your content

Most of the tips use data from Buffer, which can be exported with a Buffer for Business plan. We’d love for you to give it a try for free if you haven’t tried it before. You can also get most of the data and graphs for free directly from Twitter Analytics and Facebook Insights.

1. Create quick reports with spreadsheets

The most powerful tool in your toolbox: The data export

For the longest time, I was scared of a data export. What’s a .csv? What do I do with it once I have it? Exports gave me more questions than answers. I was frozen.

/cue ”Let it go” soundtrack!

Fortunately, my Buffer friends came to the rescue! I picked up some awesome tips from the community on the power of data exports.

I’d love to share the highlights!

First, export your data.
You can get an export of your data from any screen in the analytics section of your Buffer dashboard. Bonus: You can grab data from any date range imaginable; the defaults are 7 days, 30 days, and 90 days, with an option to set a custom date range, too.

(The Export option is part of our Buffer for Business plan. You can also grab free data exports from Facebook and Twitter themselves.)

Next, import the data into a Google Sheet, or open the data in Excel.

Next, calculate total engagement.
We’ll make an extra column in the spreadsheet to track total engagement: the sum of clicks, reshares, comments, and Likes.

Next, set a baseline.
Once your stats are out of Buffer, Facebook, or Twitter and into a spreadsheet, the first thing we tend to do is remove any outliers from the dataset.

For instance, in Buffer’s case, we have a lot of #bufferchat tweets on Twitter, and these aren’t necessarily part of the social media marketing posts that we’d love to analyze. We throw out the viral hits, too — yay for them, they just kind of throw off the rest of our averages.

Then we run the averages and the medians to find our baseline.

(The median finds the middle value in a set of numbers, which can be helpful if the data still has any outliers.)

Next, find the rates.
There are a couple of rates that are key for us at Buffer: social media stats per impression and per follower.

For instance, is a post a success if it gets 100 clicks? Maybe. Depends on how many people saw it, right! This is where stats per impression comes into play.

We can do the same with stats per followers, which ends up being a useful measure for comparing different networks like Twitter to Instagram. If we have 100 engagements on an average Instagram post and we have 5,000 Instagram followers, that might be an amazing area for us to double-down — especially if we know our Twitter average is 100 engagements per tweet with 400,000 Twitter followers!

Here’s one way that we’ve heard it explained to us:

• Crawling: Stats per day, e.g. total clicks
• Walking: Stats per post, e.g. average clicks
• Running: Stats per impression/follower, e.g. click rate

Act now:

Here’re some templates to get you started with analyzing all the stats mentioned here: baselines, engagement, rates, and more.

• Basic baseline template: Likes, reshares, mentions, clicks, and impressions
• Template for total engagement: All the above plus engagement
• Template for rates: All the above plus rates (stats per impression and per follower)

If you prefer following a video, here’s a quick 7-minute walk-through on how to build a simple social media report with your data.

2. Set benchmarks for your performance

Benchmarks can be aspirational, earned, traditional, and competitive

One thing we’ll often ask ourselves – just today even – when looking through our social media stats is this:

So … is that good?

We’re always on the hunt for answers here, and one of our latest tactics has made analyzing our social media updates a million times faster and smarter — not to mention saved us an hour a day on our social media processes.

Here’s the key: Setting benchmarks for what makes a good post.

And here’s how we’ve gone about it:

Once you have your social media data in your spreadsheet (steps 1 to 3 of Tip 1), run this formula on each of the stat columns that matter to you; Likes, clicks, comments, etc.:

=AVERAGE(your data).

Awesome, now that you’ve got your average, we like to bump ours up slightly so that the benchmark is a bit aspirational. To the moon!

=(average)*1.5

And just like that, you’ve set yourself a benchmark!

Now, when you’re scrolling through your Buffer history, you can see at-a-glance which posts have gone above and beyond your benchmark. You can recognize your best posts in a second or less!

How frequently should you re-examine your benchmarks?

Great question! I tend to rethink my benchmarks anytime I’m noticing that I’m reaching the benchmark more often than I’m not. It’s a rather soft science! I’m sure you’ll have a great intuition on when it feels best to bump the benchmark up.

Act now:

This all just scratches the surface of what benchmarks can mean for you and your organization. We’ve written a full 2,000 words on the topic in case you’re at all interested in more. Here’s a link to the full article:

So…Is That Good? The Complete Beginner’s Guide to Benchmarking on Social Media

3. Evaluate your social media performance

Total engagement and other fun social media stats

We all might have our favorite actors, favorite foods, and favorite places. I have a sense the same is true for favorite social media stats!

(For me, it’s Jennifer Lawrence, pizza, the ski slopes, and total engagement.)

Certain stats are more important to some people than they are to others.

For instance, do you care deeply for traffic? Do you feel strongly for building awareness? Is tracking revenue a major key to your success?

I’d love to share a couple ideas here, including the one stat that everyone loves and the one stat that everyone wishes came easier.

The stat everyone loves: Total engagement

Total engagement is the sum of all interactions on your post: clicks, reshares, comments, and Likes. It is the social media analyst’s peanut butter sandwich. Almost everyone loves it.

Finding total engagement is as simple as adding up the interactions on a post. In your data spreadsheet, make an extra column in the spreadsheet to sum the number of clicks, reshares, comments, and Likes of each post.

There are several social media analytics tools that automatically calculate total engagement for you, which can save you some time. We’re working hard to show you your total engagement right within your Buffer dashboard. Stay tuned!

The stat everyone longs for: Revenue from social

It’s our white whale!

How do you even go about tracking revenue from social? It’s not as straightforward as some of the other stats like engagement or clicks. Still, it’s possible! Here’re the tools and steps we’ve found to work:

• Buffer to set your UTMs
• Google Analytics to crunch the revenue numbers

Here’s a quick run-through of the steps:

Step 1: Set your UTMs the way you want them in Buffer under Settings > Link Shortening.

Step 2: Head into Google Analytics and set up Ecommerce or Goals.

Step 3: After a day or two, head back to Google Analytics and get a traffic report by going to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Social.

Step 4: Add the conversion goals to your data table, and voila, you’ll see the revenue!

(Our report is showing $0 as we have been using another tool, Looker, instead of Google Analytics, to track revenue from social.)

The Google Analytics stuff can sometimes be a bit tricky for me! Haha, okay – most of the time it’s tricky for me! I’ll often head for help at YouTube. There are some really great tutorials there!

Act now:

And of course, these two ways — total engagement and revenue — just scratch the surface of all that’s possible with evaluating your social media content. We’ve written an article that covers a bit more of the iceberg. We’d love for you to take a peek!

5 Unique Ways to Measure and Evaluate a Social Media Campaign

4. Add context to the data you pull

How do you even do that?

Social media be confusing sometimes, especially when you’re down in the day-to-day of it and struggling to see the bigger picture.

Looking at the larger trends of your social performance is hugely helpful for seeing how strategies are playing out.

In particular, there’s this post written by the Intercom team that I just adore when it comes to trends. Here’s a key graphic from the post:

The tl;dr – Data is great, especially data with context!

To start with, it’s useful to have the trends data in front of you.

We’re hoping to make this as easy as pie for you and your team with the Analysis Report. To find your Analysis Report, head to the Analytics tab in your Buffer dashboard and click on “Analysis”.

In this report, you’ll see the trend of your key social media metrics such as clicks, Likes, reshares, and followers.

Act now:

And then once you’re seeing the trends, there’re a few questions that might be great to ask:

• What caused any spikes or valleys?
• When will we reach the next milestone?
• Where will we be in the next (x) days or months?
• What factors are we not accounting for?

For example, for the graphs above, the spike in Likes was caused by a tweet that took off while the spikes in clicks were due to the launch of our new online social media strategy class.

Quick tip: You can click on any point on the graphs to zoom in on that date and see the posts published on that date. This is great for finding out which post(s) caused the spike.

I’m just now realizing that it might be a bit hard to answer “What factors are we not accounting for?” Kind of like asking you to know what you don’t know! If it’s helpful, here’re some of the factors I’m often overlooking on accident:

• Weekends
• Holidays
• Seasonality
• Most popular times to share on social (9 AM to 5 PM New York time)
• Big announcements or campaigns

5. Find your best time to post

There’s no one ideal time to post in 2017. It’s all unique to your brand.

We used to think there’s a universal best time to post.

Not anymore.

Instead, we believe every brand has its own set of best times to post. Here’re some tips on how to find time:

How to find the best times to post on Facebook

In your Facebook Page Insights, Facebook shows you when your Facebook fans are online.

With the algorithmic News Feed, the timing of your Facebook post might be less important but I feel there’s still utility in finding the best posting times to generate initial engagement — early signs of a quality content which might cause Facebook’s algorithm to show your post to more people.

There are generally two schools of thought about best Facebook posting times. The first is to post when your fans are most active on Facebook so that there’s a higher chance of them seeing and interacting with your posts. The second is to post when your fans are least active as there is less competition for the limited space on users’ News Feed.

I’d recommend experimenting with both ideas to see which works better for your brand. For example, we have been seeing some success with posting during off-peak hours.

To get this data, head to your Facebook Page > Insights > Posts > When Fans Are Online.

How to find the best times to post on Twitter

Since Twitter still uses a reverse-chronological timeline, finding the optimal posting times is still very relevant.

While Twitter Analytics does not provide similar followers’ activity data, Twitter tools like Followerwonk and Tweriod can tell you when your followers are most active.

It’s generally believed that if you tweet when your followers are most active, there’s a higher chance that they’d see your tweets. Having said that, I’d still recommend experimenting with different times using the data you have.

There’s also a way to find out the best times to post based on how your tweets have performed in the past. It would require you to dig into your Twitter Analytics using spreadsheets. If you’re keen, here’s a guide on how to do that.

Act now:

With these data, you could experiment with different posting times to see if you can achieve better results. An experimental Twitter schedule, with five posting times, could look something like this:

• Three posting times in the three most active hours
• Two posting times in the two least active hours

6. Reuse your top posts

Repeat your successes by republishing them after a few weeks

So, one of your tweets is taking off. Likes, retweets, and replies are rolling in. What should you do?

(First, celebrate, of course!)

To maximize the value of that tweet, you can consider republishing it — ideally with a different copy several days or weeks later. If you repeat this flow for a while, you can build up a nice repository of social media posts — that have proven to be great — to fall back on whenever you are having a social media manager’s block.

It’s good to remember that all networks are different. Generally, you can publish the same content more frequently on Twitter than on Facebook and more frequently on Facebook than on Instagram. For example, you could republish a piece of content a few days later on Twitter but you might want to give it a few weeks on Facebook and a few months on Instagram before republishing.

We’re hoping that one of the fastest ways to find your top-performing posts (across the networks) is in the Posts Report of your Buffer Analytics. At a glance, you can see the various types of engagement generated by each post. You can also sort them by a particular type of engagement such as retweets.

You can also get similar data from Twitter Analytics (Tweets > Top Tweets) and Facebook Insights (Posts > All Post Published > Sort by Reach or Engagement).

When you are lacking inspirations for new tweets, you can head to your Posts Report and grab a top post from several weeks or months back. For example, here’s what we did:

Step 1: Set the timeframe as 90 Days or set a custom timeframe if you want to go even further back.

Step 2: Sort your posts by a form of engagement such as retweets, Likes, or clicks. Here, I chose retweets.

Step 3: Pick a post from a few weeks back and hit “Re-Buffer”.

Here’s the post we republished (originally published last December). The original tweet received 133 Likes, 135 retweets, and one reply while the republished tweet received 134 Likes, 134 retweets, and 3 replies!

Act now:

We wrote a full blog post, a while back, on the power of republishing the same content and the ways we reframed our republished content in case you’re interested in more. Here’s the link to the full article:

Why You Should Share Your Blog Post More Than Once on Social Media: The Case for Reposting Content

7. Engage influencers who shared your content

The tools to find influencers

Here’s a fun thought: At this very moment, an influencer — someone with a significant social media following — might be sharing your content.

Wow, that’d be a powerful bit of information to celebrate with a boss or client or team!

Not to mention a virtual high-five for all your hard work.

You can find out this information in a handful of ways:

• Referral report in Google Analytics (bonus: sometimes folks will even mention themselves in a UTM)
• Alert tools like Mention and Warble
• Twitter advanced search for your URL

We’re hoping that one of the easiest methods might be the one waiting for you in your Buffer dashboard. We’ve added a new Influencer Report for your Twitter profiles, where you can see who has shared any of your URLs on social, ranked by the number of followers each person has.

Act now:

So if you published a blog post yesterday and wanted to thank the folks who had shared it since, just plug it into the tool and see the results. You can click on “View tweet” to pull up the tweet and reply the influencer.

(There’s another layer to this, too. If you click the retweets in your Buffer stats, you’ll get a list of everyone who has retweeted you — and you can follow back and click through to their profile right from the Buffer dashboard.)

What is your favorite analytics trick?

There are so many things you can do with your social media data, and I’m sure I barely scratched the surface with these seven tips. I’d love to learn from you and hear about your favorite analytics tip or trick!

How do you use your social media data? How has that helped you with your social media performance?

—

Image credit: Unsplash

source https://blog.bufferapp.com/learn-social-media-analytics