Introduction to Social Media Analytics
With the explosion of technological advances and the eruption of web-based applications, social media is changing faces rapidly. User-generated content or consumer-generated content is the defining characteristic of our everyday lives. Having a fundamental Social Media Presence is key to the next-generation business intelligence platform.
Are you the head of your Company’s Social Media Presence or a famous Blogger to name a few? Do you know what Social Media Analytics is all about?
You might want to know precisely what tools to use to make better decisions for your business on a daily basis. Earning Revenue through various choices and investing are crucial assessments.
This is where social media analytics comes into play. Understanding and making informed judgments in where to target and whom to target are key marketing decisions for which social media analytics is a vital gear.
So what exactly is it?
Social Media Analytics refers to developing and evaluating tools and frameworks by gathering and analyzing social media data. Capitalizing on the online information available and consequently measuring content or performance leads to a win-win situation.
Why do we need it?
1.Better Understand Your Audience
Having so much online data on human behavior and trends is perhaps a rich opportunity to understand the society at large or even groups and individuals on a small scale.
This results in you building up their trust and establish a reliable brand that people care about. Try content discovery before writing content for maximum engagement.
This will help you stay updated on trendy content and help you develop an understanding of what your audience is looking for around the globe.
Find Which Accounts Work Best
Social media analytics helps in understanding social media trends, the kind of ROI the business is bringing in which ultimately results in the evaluation of which marketing strategy is working and if not, what diversification is needed.
Tracking social conversations and using the results of the analysis of data is a serious business.
Evaluating likes, comments and retweets is just the basic analysis. Tracking down customer likes and dislikes by evaluating their response times, their preferences using social analysis is a gateway to better business.
Social Media Analytics also helps us to better understand which social networks are working for us. Needless to say the bigger a network e.g Facebook or twitter might not be giving us the best results. On the other hand, smaller platforms like Pinterest might be a better driver of consumer engagement.
Create Better Social Media Content
Through analytics, your business can decipher which messages will succeed and which shall fail. It helps in understanding what the audience is interested in, who are they talking about, and what are the current trends.
This gauging of sentiment results in better social media content. You can market your content about what they care about, what their hobbies are.
Understand Competitors
Some analytics tool helps you compare your business content with your competitors. This not only helps you learn what works for them but you also learn from their mistakes.
Simply checking out their social media feeds can help you get on the straight path and provide insights to improve your business where it might be lagging in a proactive way.
Finding a Better Strategy
Strategies based on these trends and predictions give the foundations on which the businesses social media campaign is based on.
If the social media strategy is failing to build your brand it is time to evaluate how aptly the strategy is delivering the vision for which it was built for and what needs to be done differently.
Analytics not only helps us in find our targeted consumer base but also effectively teaches us time management by making us aware to prioritize our time on those aspects which are giving us the highest sales and eliminating ones that don’t work for us.
Types of Analytics Marketers use:
- Social media data is via simple general routines or programming in a language such as MATLAB, Java or Python.
- Analytics dashboards—these dashboards are helpful in representing raw data by using a non-programming interface.
- Holistic data analysis—gives us information by cross-examining data across multiple social media networks.
- Data visualization—these provide visualization tools whereby information is presented graphically in various different forms e.g. Bar graphs, charts, pie charts, line plots, scatter charts, etc.
How to start using Social Media Analytics
Identify and Track KPIs
Initially, when deciding to use social media analytics the marketing team needs to decide your social media Key performance indicators (KPIs). On a strategic level, these KPIs are drawn down from the business strategy and should be aligned with it. Marketers can then rationalize ROI and leverage relevant data to optimize social media campaigns.
Tracking Consumer Trends
Marketers should constantly be on the pulse of the consumers and track their sentiment by having insights into what brands, advertising, and content is creating hype.
Positioning your brand based on these measurements can enhance the business and you are aware of the actual perception of the customer rather than the perception.
Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, and Google Analytics are a few of the platform-tools available for social media analysis as basics, others one for monitoring your whole social media channels are content studio, Hootsuite, etc
Facebook Insights is a tool that enables business owners to analyze internal KPIs such as engagement, impressions, likes, and reactions.
Twitter Analytics shows the engagement rate, number of followers, and more in a 28-day summary. Google Analytics provides metrics on a variety of social platforms to help brands learn about product sales, leads, visit duration, and more.
Targeting Potential Customers
Social Media Analytics These media analytics not only help a business target their current consumer base but also help in identifying their potential customers as data collection and analysis can help identify various audience profiles. One of the best ways marketers use to retarget the traffic is through LinkedIn retargeting via link shortener
Using analytics marketers can attract and hone their branding message resulting in the Personalization of your own brand which can help you stand in the crowd and get noticed.
This type of result which shows sentiment analysis of the consumer base can help us understand if the effect on them is positive negative or neutral.
How to Track Social Media Analytics
34% say they are not proficient in measuring metrics. The below-mentioned goals are what you could start off with and then gradually redefine as your business grows or your consumer base changes.
- Firstly you need to define the purpose of gathering and analyzing your data.
- This can be obtained by defining goals and objectives. What are the results you are aiming for? To increase your consumer base by increased traffic or through more engagement.
- Having laid out these SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely) goals gives you a clearer picture of what is your business aims for. These help you in achieving your targets. The more clarity you have in what you want to achieve the better you can focus your metrics.
- Does your business need an analytic tool to manage just one media platform or multiples?
- Which metrics have you decided upon?
- Is your plan realistic and in line with your budget?
- Does your tool need integration with previous ones or shall be a standalone one.
1. Traffic:
Social media is a vital traffic driver to blogs and websites for many publishers.
2. Followers:
The more people who choose to follow your account the wider social media presence you have. So in this day and age the vital question you have to ask is how do I increase my list of followers?
Some ideas that can get you started:
- Promote your hashtag on different social media platforms.
- Participate in popular conversations.
- Get descriptive with your captions.
- See what’s going on in your local neighborhood and be more involved in any event or survey.
3. Engagement:
All the data focused on Likes, shares, mentions, and comments are part of this goal which helps you build your community .These can include but are not limited to industry influencers, current or potential customers, or the audience for your content.
Twitter: Compute the percentage your links were clicked, your message was retweeted, or your hashtag was used and then look at how many people were responsible for the action.
Facebook: Determine the number of times the links were clicked on and which messages were liked or commented on. Track wall posts and private messages by linking them to the specific activity.
YouTube: Evaluate how many comments your video had. How many people rated it, how many people shared it, and the number of people who subscribed to it?
Blog: Evaluate your number of comments, the number of subscribers generated, and how many people shared your post and on which social media platform did they share it on. Consequently, you shall be able to measure the resulting referral traffic.
Email: Calculate how many people opened, clicked, and shared your email. Include where the items were shared, similar to the point above. Also, keep track of the number of new subscriptions generated.
4. Reach
The whole point of being on social media is to be heard and seen and followed. This in return gives your brand and campaign more power to influence behaviors and trends. The exposure you gain through your positive reach is what makes you build your brand.
Reach for some social network websites can be calculated as follows:
YouTube: Measure the number of views for videos tied to a promotion or specific periods of time, such as monthly, and the total number of subscribers.
Blog: Measure the number of visitors who viewed the posts tied to the promotion or a specific period of time.
Email: Take a look at how many people are on the distribution list and how many actually received the email.
5. Conversions
When consumers visit your website you want them to carry out whatever your goals are as a business. It could be to complete a purchase or signing up for their newsletter or filling out a form. This is called a conversion. When someone completes any action you desired that is called a conversion. Thus the visitor on your website has taken an action which has resulted in a conversion.
Let’s talk about a purchase as a conversion. Most commonly a purchase is depicted as a funnel.
So how is a conversion depicted as a funnel?
Many visitors visit a website. Which is the first step. After this it becomes sporadic. Some people leave the site, others go on the page to check out some items of interest while the number of visitors keeps dropping down. The last step is when the purchase is completed and your business ultimate goal for conversion has been reached.
Marketing is ultimately about driving sales. Converting organic social media traffic can be tough. However, it is possible to drive conversions from your organic content.
There are four main types of social media analytics you should be concerned with if you want to achieve social media success. These four types are:
- Descriptive analytics
- Diagnostic analytics
- Predictive analytics
- Prescriptive analytics
Further visit: 9 Amazing Tips To Increase Website Traffic in 2020
Descriptive analytics
This type of analysis groups together data together in order to provide a cohesive view. Sentiment Analysis, for example, uses groups of comments and posts and provides helpful results.
Diagnostic analysis
The diagnostic analysis focuses on the numbers: like counts, follower numbers, page views, reviews, shares, what have you. This analysis determines what made the posts and campaigns successful. By comparing the performance of different campaigns, trends and consumer preferences can be discerned.
Predictive analysis
This is a proactive approach to predict trends, events, and shifts based on available data.
Social listening tools are important in the predictive analysis as they help in analyzing large data focused on shifts in consumer behavior and keywords.
Prescriptive analysis
Finally, the prescriptive analysis provides data analysis based on which goal to adopt at any given time. Situations ranging from handling social media crises and incidents to purchase preferences. This kind of analysis requires a lot of data to be analyzed.
