Every business knows the importance of social media in promoting and creating brand name awareness. How about social media analytics?
Businesses need to create, publish, and share relevant content on their social media platforms. However, that’s not enough; they also need to determine the success of their social media marketing strategy. If you don’t optimize your content, you will not get the desired results. But how can you know what you need to improve in your social media marketing? This is where social media analytics comes in.
You want to constantly monitor how your social content performs so that you deliver unswerving value to your audience. The thing is; you can’t improve your social content performance unless you track what works and what doesn’t. It’s crucial that you understand and identify the right social media metrics to measure so that you work on them.
So, what is Social Analytics?
In defining social media analytics, you can refer to it as the act of collecting and directly interpreting data related to social media marketing. It is the process of gathering hidden insights and information from social data – whether structured or unstructured – to allow you to make an educated decision in your social marketing strategy.
Social media analytics can help you monitor and analyze your brand’s online reputation. It also helps analyze and optimize the performance of your social media strategy or campaigns. You can use analytics to research trends in social media usage for market research purposes. Again, social media analytics help to identify key touchpoints within the customer journey.
What Social Media Metrics can you Measure
A business owner can use analytics to measure different metrics including mentions, engagement, sentiment, virality, the share of voice, and visual mentions. You can look at how often a particular keyword, phrase, or sentence has been mentioned across different social media channels. Also, you can measure how much engagement your post with a particular keyword is receiving including shares, likes, and comments on Facebook, retweets, and likes on Twitter, and likes, and comments on Instagram.
When it comes to measuring sentiments, you want to see what kind of emotions your target audiences express by looking at the kind of words and phrases they use when talking about your brand. Sentiments can help determine if your audiences and customers are happy about your brand or not and it’s important in helping you restore your brand’s reputation. With a share of voice, it allows you to determine the proportion of discussion about your brand, topics, or a trend compared to your competitors.
Social media analytics not only allows businesses of any size and type to garner the right data but also makes it easier to measure the level of impact of the marketing efforts on their fans and followers.
Various Social Media Analytics tools you can Utilize
Depending on the social channels you are posting your content and engaging your target audiences, there are different social analytics tools you can use.
Facebook / Instagram Insights
If you are doing Facebook campaigns, you can use Facebook Insights to measure your campaigns’ performance. This tool provides data from your audience and your posts’ performance. The data may be taken for a single day, seven days, or 28 days. When you drill further down, you get high-level stats including likes, reach page views, locations from where likes happened, post views, page views, and the demographic data of your audiences.
Insights on Instagram tool gives you information on follower demographics, insights like reach, impressions, and follower activity. Since Instagram is part of the Facebook ecosystem, Facebook and Instagram Insights are bundled together.
LinkedIn Analytics
If you have a LinkedIn business page, you want to find out your level of engagement with followers. LinkedIn Company Page Analytics offers you metrics about your company page. However, only the administrators of the page are able to view the data. The tool provides three kinds of data including updates, followers, and visitors.
You can see updates on how a post was sent to as well as whether it is sponsored or not. You also get information on how many times updates were shown to members and the clicks on content and company logo. On the Followers tab, you find the number of members who are following your page in addition to acquired and organic followers. You also get the followers’ demographics including their job function, industry, seniority, and their company size.
When it comes to visitors, the LinkedIn Analytics tool provides you with page views, unique visitors, visitor demographics, and career page clicks.
Linkedin offers Marketing Solutions for businesses that advertise on this platform. You can create Ads
Twitter Analytics
The 28-day overview of your Twitter campaign performance offers you stats about impressions, engagements, and followers. Twitter Analytics allows you to find out the number of people following your business account, the number of times your tweets get seen to audiences, and the engagements including mentions, retweets, favorites, replicates, and other kinds of interactions.
Within the first level of analytics, you will see activity data over garnered over the last 28 days. This data features the top tweet you have from earned impressions and top mention you have from earned engagements. There is also data on profile visits and total mentions in addition to the top follower and their total number of followers.
Pinterest Analytics
There are many stats you can get from Pinterest Analytics. Some of the data you receive includes the daily average pins from your website, the average number of individuals who pinned from your site, and the number of engagement on your Pins. You also have data on reach and impressions – the people who saw your page pins and the number of times the pins showed up within the board feeds and the main feeds. Other information you can find from the tool includes the most clicked and most repined content as well as the people who visit your site from Pinterest.
YouTube Ads
Separate from YouTube Studio (formally Creator Studio).
YouTube Analytics is often neglected, however, video metrics can provide insight into your campaign’s performance. YouTube Analytics covers everything from Impressions, Views, View Rates, Cost-per-View (CPV), Earned Actions, and much more. If you link your Google Ads account, you can get more in-depth video insights.
How to Make the Most of your Social Analytics
Whenever you post on social media, there is social data generated. The data created by consumers include sentiments, comments, likes, retweets, and shares. If you want to have big wins from your social medial marketing campaigns, you should make sure that you utilize the data to see which areas to improve.
For instance, you need to understand what your audiences want so that you provide exactly that. Also, see where most of your audiences are – are they on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, YouTube, or Pinterest? It is important that you use the social channels that work best for your brand – you don’t have to be everywhere. See where your audiences are and target them on those channels they are spending much of their time. Consider competitive benchmarking to analyze competitors’ data and find what works and what doesn’t work for you. See if you can replicate their success and avoid the mistakes they have made or the pitfalls they had.
Look at the content you post and how it performs so that you know which ones drive results – it will help inspire your future campaigns. Your brand reputation needs to remain steady by looking at the sentiments your customers and fans are giving. Identifying how your brand feels to your audiences across different channels helps you take appropriate actions. Again, ensure you protect your brand assets including image recognition like your company logo.
Wrap-Up
social analytics presents you with reliable data you can use to make insightful and educated decisions about your digital marketing activities. You can identify which channels your target audiences are in and what they say about your brand. You also see how a particular social media campaign or even a post performs across different channels.
