How to Analyze Social Media Analytics Data: Benefits & Use Cases
Written By
Arushi Monga
Social media is an easy source of a large audience for your brand communication. Brands can communicate with their consumers on social media, as long as they remember one thing: social media may be your brand’s first and last impression, so make it a good one.
Social media analytics and campaign measurement tools are crucial sources of strategic marketing data, especially now that social media marketing is such an important part of total marketing success.
The gathering and analysis of marketing and audience data to drive business decisions are the basis of social media analytics. It’s the only surefire approach to get the information you can utilize to improve your marketing and product strategy. We will cover the following topics in this piece for you to get the most out of your social media analytics data.
What is social media analytics, and how do you use it?
The ability to collect and make sense of data gathered from social channels to support business choices — and monitor the performance of actions based on those decisions through social media — is known as social media analytics.
Likes, followers, retweets, views, clicks, and impressions from particular channels are not the only metrics included in social media analytics. It also differs from reporting provided by marketing campaign support services like LinkedIn or Google Analytics.
Social media analytics employs custom software platforms that function similarly to web search engines. Data on keywords or concepts are obtained via cross-channel search queries or site crawlers. To draw useful insights, text fragments are returned, loaded into a database, categorized, and evaluated.
The concept of performance analysis is included in social media analytics.
What are the benefits of social media analytics?
The prominence of social media can be gauged from the fact that news of a good product may spread like wildfire, but a word of a terrible product — or a negative customer service experience — may spread just as quickly. Consumers are now holding businesses accountable for their brand promises and sharing their stories with their friends, coworkers, and the general public.
Companies can utilize social media analytics to address these issues and:
- Look for trends in offerings and branding.
- Understand what is being said and how it is being received in talks.
- Uncover how customers feel about products and services.
- Determine how people react to social media and other forms of communication.
- Assess which elements of a product or service are most valuable.
- Discover what your competitors are saying
- Identify how it might boost the success of your marketing efforts.
- Measure the effects of third-party partners and channels on performance.
These insights can be used to make strategic decisions as well as tactical modifications, such as responding to an angry tweet. Social media analytics is now being pushed into the core conversations about how firms establish their strategies.
Social media analytics requires the right tool
True social media analytics tools are still overlooked despite playing a critical role in performance and success. Many companies continue to underestimate these platforms, relying instead on native tools that provide limited performance analytics for each of their channels separately. In addition to all of the data points and insights obtained from contextualizing social media data across channels and industries, these firms are missing out on a slew of more in-depth analytics.
“A good social media analytics tool is intuitive, easy-to-use, improves transparency, processes, and structure so marketing activities and strategy can become sustainable and scalable.”
Without a solution that can both collect and distribute data and insights from various, different social networks, providing concise and clear social media analytics reports can be a real pain.
It’s time to get serious about analytics or risk being cast aside by the competition. Social media analytics are critical to any company’s content marketing success.
Cross-platform analytics that is unified combine the entire consumer experience into one solution.
A strong analytics solution provides an overview of your social media performance, so you can identify where strategic opportunities exist and where dangers need to be mitigated with plan tweaks, in addition to daily tracking, monitoring, and analysis of metrics and data trends.
Key areas to use social media analytics
Many social media teams are unsure of which aspects of their marketing strategy might benefit from analysis, so let’s take a look at what you should be monitoring and why.
Audience analytics
It all starts with your audience. It’s critical to understand what your company’s target market is. It assists you in developing an effective audience-first marketing approach that guides your communities through the conversion funnel.
It all starts with your audience. Knowing who your core audience is crucial. It assists you in developing an effective, audience-first marketing strategy that allows you to nurture your communities along the funnel and provide excellent customer service.
You must understand what your clients want and how they react to your efforts to draw them to your product or service.
Understanding your target market is critical to your company’s success.
When it comes to completing a purchase, online customers consider strong social media communication to be “extremely significant.” This demonstrates the importance of social media audience statistics in providing excellent communication.
In the past, marketing executives lacked a deep understanding of their digital audiences. Because audience data was distributed throughout several social media platforms and on the internet, this was the case. To put it all together, map out personas, and report on them, an expert analyst was needed.
Furthermore, each audience on each channel is unique, with distinct viewers, and there was no simple way to combine all of that data and segment audiences effectively and sustainably.
Certain tools now allow marketers to instantly determine who their digital audiences, or ideal customers, are and ensure that their overall marketing plan is in line with the personas’ features, interests, and habits. They can also use the information to reach out to new consumers and expand their commercial chances.
You’ll be able to maintain your content and strategy current and effective if you keep track of your important KPI’s. Indeed, adopting the appropriate plan has a direct benefit: it saves money on advertising.
The lower your cost-per-click and the more frequently your ad is shown, the better targeted and tailored your advertising is. Knowing your audience is crucial to lowering cost-per-click and increasing ad frequency.
These strategies are all beneficial, if not necessary, but the bottom line is results. A marketer must question oneself what constitutes strong social media performance and whether their own performance is improving or deteriorating over time.
The second question is if you can track your performance levels as they change. Yes, you may and must do so.
Analysis of social media performance
Measuring your own performance is essential for determining where your approach is succeeding and generating a positive return on investment, as well as where it needs improvement.
According to eMarketer, global digital ad spending will reach $571 billion in 2022 and nearly $800 billion by 2025.
If you’ve boosted your social media marketing budget, you’d expect to see a higher return on investment, but you’ll have to show it. You don’t need to know how many people liked or shared your most recent Facebook post if you’re just starting out. You require a higher-level overview of larger trends.
Key performance indicators to monitor include:
- An overview of interactions across platforms and across time to see if the material you’re putting out is engaging your audience effectively.
- To evaluate how much of your community is responding to your messaging, look at both the total number of interactions and the number of interactions per 1,000 followers.
- To find out how well you’re moving traffic from social to the web, look at the number of click-throughs on your posts.
- Keep track of your followers to see if your audience is expanding as a result of your team’s social media efforts. You need to continually obtain new followers if you want to expand your customer base.
Again, tracking all of these data over time is critical for spotting larger trends, understanding the results of your organization’s social media strategy, and determining the return on your investment.
Competitive Analysis
Your company may have had its best year ever, but if all of your competitors had even better years, there’s not much to rejoice about.
Competitive analysis and benchmarking can help you gain a better understanding of your performance measures by placing them in a competitive perspective.
Almost every business wants to increase its performance in two crucial areas: effectiveness (getting the intended outcome) and efficiency (cutting waste), but they often don’t know where to start.
Benchmarking is one technique to evaluate your company’s performance and determine what improvements you need to make.
The greatest approach to evaluate the efficacy of your team’s effort and the plan is to compare your company’s social media performance to that of competitors.
It also allows you to determine whether your performance and return on investment are competitive.
You might compare your performance to that of a specific business if you wish to move ahead of them. You can, however, compare yourself to a number of competitors to see how you compare.
It’s vital to conduct competitive studies on a frequent basis to stay on top of what your competitors are up to and to advise your teams on what strategic initiatives they can take to maintain your company ahead of the pack.
You can utilise a benchmarking solution with modern social media analytics to see your competitors’ performance across each major social network platform.
You can see their plan and easily outsmart them.
It’s easy for companies to overlook this aspect of analytics, but they should keep in mind that even if they aren’t performing competitive analysis, their competitors most likely are.
Paid social media analytics
According to a HubSpot survey, 79% of businesses buy paid social ads, indicating that it is a viable type of advertising. The trick is that for this strategy to work, paid social analytics must be thoroughly understood.
Businesses must understand the success of their social media ad advertising because a lot of money is being spent. You must be able to make wise investments and ensure that each dollar spent on social media is well spent.
If you don’t know what paid content your audience will react positively to, it’s all too simple to squander time and resources marketing material that doesn’t perform well.
Some companies utilise predictive technologies to properly anticipate which content to invest in for the best returns, and early adopters are finding amazing benefits.
With so many variables involved, paid social media advertising might appear confusing, and reporting on ad expenditure can be difficult with so many channels, accounts, and profiles. To keep track of your spending, gather all of your channels into one spot before you begin measuring.
The following are some key performance indicators (KPIs) to monitor:
- Number of ads
- Total spend
- Clicks
- Click-through rate
- Cost per click
- Cost per engagement
- Cost per action
- Cost per purchase
- Campaign ROI
These KPIs will show you where your money is going, how much you’re paying for various components of your advertising campaigns, and how effective your efforts are.
You should compare your advertising spend to that of your competitors as well as the industry average to get a more full view.
You’ll be able to determine whether your advertising budget is adequate to stay competitive, as well as where your ad approach needs to be tweaked to improve its efficiency and reportable impact. However, the data must be recent; only monthly reports are insufficient.
Analyzing your paid social media metrics – both self and competitive – on a frequent basis is the most productive and efficient.
How to quickly and simply track your important performance insights
It’s crucial to have the correct perspectives on your data. On second thought, it’s critical, to be sure.
Intuitively designed dashboards allow you to see only the stats that are relevant to you at any given time. Dashboards connect the dots for you and provide the strategic information you need.
Consider this scenario: You take data from Facebook, Instagram, and other sources and analyze it separately, working around data gaps and trying to piece together the jigsaw puzzle to find out what’s going on. Then you strive to make a report that clearly depicts the essential data insights that will have an impact on strategy. Tough times.
Now consider this alternative scenario: all of your data is consolidated on your dashboard. The data’s story is cleanly translated and given in shareable, presentation-ready reports, and the dots are joined for you. Good times.
Dashboards allow you to see all of your metrics in one place. You get real-time access to all of the information. Instead of fretting about sloppy or incomplete data, marketing teams may put up automatic, visual reports to communicate with upper management so everyone is on the same page.
The takeaway
Social media analytics is now an integral part of social media marketing. It’s pointless to market if you can’t tell if you’re doing well or not.
Measurement and analysis allow you to demonstrate your influence, continuously improve performance, optimize budget, develop strategy, and construct meaningful relationships with your audience that nurture them through every touchpoint on the path to purchase.
If you’re a social media manager, the message is clear: track, measure, and evaluate everything you do, and make sure you have the tools to do so.
