4 Analytics Lessons Learned in 2015

2015 was a great year for data! Our analytics team put our heads together to find some highlights for the year and a little sprinkle of speculation for what is to come in 2016.

Facebook Organic Reach

Oh Facebook organic reach, where hast thou gone. This year we took a look to find out and discovered that organic Facebook posts are currently reaching around 1% of fans.

Bring out yer dead!

It might not be dead yet, but it sure is smellin’ funny.

Video Killed the Social Media Star

Whoo! There hasn’t been this much of a video explosion since the last Michael Bay film. Facebook led the non-YouTube pack in really pushing the prominence of video content. They even rolled out an entirely new section in Insights . Twitter also readjusted how they approach video and video reporting as they try to keep up with Facebook. And the circle completes itself. YouTube did a complete refresh of their analytics interface which put a significant emphasis on video watch time.

Snapchat Measurement

This year we hosted the first ever Snapinar, and in doing so attempted to find the best way to measure Snapchat. As it turns out, it’s not so easy! Hopefully we will see the channel introduce a native analytics platform, especially if they hope to continue encouraging brands to market and buy ads on the platform. This also brings me to the final and more speculative learning of 2015:

Standardization

The smallest change might have been one of the biggest indicators of social media analytics standardization. Twitter recently changed the “favorite” into a “like.” While a move to make using the channel more intuitive and increase frequency of use, this is also a sign that social media could see standardization in the future. Currently, there are differences in how social platforms measure and report data. However, and maybe this is more of a hope than a prediction but, this could be a sign of things to come.

And with that, Happy New Year from the Analytics team at Ignite Social Media. We hope 2016… measures up… to your expectations.



Ignite Social Media