Analyze paid social media

What is social media analytics?

Social media analytics is the gathering and analysis of data points from social media networks to help inform your social media strategy and optimize engagement around your organic and paid social media efforts.

Ultimately, social media analytics help you answer the ever-important question: is your strategy working? Some of the many other questions it also helps answer include:

• Do you know the social media trends that are relevant to your space?
• Do you have a way to quantify the kind of ROI you’re bringing in with each campaign or post on different social media channels?
• Do you know what your audience expects and wants from your content and messaging? How is your content perceived in comparison to your competitors? 

Social media analytics software is critical because it can answer every single one of the aforementioned questions. With the right software, a single platform can answer all of these questions for every social channel in an easy-to-understand way – no complex data analysis, just a clear presentation of what’s working, and how you can fix what’s not.

This all heralds back to a truth that all marketers understand: without measuring and analyzing your content and its performance, there’s no sustainable way to improve your results, or even put your results in the proper context needed to understand if they are good or bad. 

Social media marketers need a data-driven roadmap to signpost the path ahead so they know where to go and what to do – this is what every social media analytics solution aims to provide, to varying degrees of success.

Four reasons why social media analytics is essential

Before we dive into the details of the specific metrics you’ll need to analyze, and how to interpret and make decisions based on these metrics, let’s take a look at four critical and universal use-cases for a social media analytics solution.

These use cases demonstrate why social media analytics is so crucial for brands, and every good analytics platform will be built and developed with these use cases in mind.

1. Measure and prove ROI and marketing impact

The bottom line to analytics is that they give you instant feedback about how your company is performing across social media channels and whether the strategy your teams are executing is effective. Overviewing performance KPIs is essential to the success of your social media campaigns.

If strategy isn’t working, then your data analysis will point you in exactly the right direction so you can make effective strategy tweaks before performance dips or becomes a real problem. Catch any downward turns fast and remedy them right away.

Clear overviews also allow CMOs, or anyone across the organization, to quickly and easily see the most important metrics and evaluate marketing performance, so everyone’s working from the latest data.

It’s logical to seek to understand if the resources you’re investing in social media (for example, paid content promotion) are bringing in revenue – directly or indirectly. A full 61% of marketers still struggle to prove ROI from their marketing efforts.

The right tools are as important as the right method of calculation when it comes to ROI on social media. To make things easier:

• Add a Facebook tracking pixel to your site’s key pages, and any page linked to from your social channel. This allows you to accurately attribute conversions and actions to specific content or campaigns, even if the user converts days or weeks after first reading your content. If users don’t convert, the Facebook pixel allows you to conduct remarketing campaigns, targeting users who have already visited specific pages before but failed to take action.
• Add Google Analytics UTM parameters to your social ads’ URL to understand how much traffic and how many conversions your social media marketing activities are driving.
• Emplifi Ads Benchmarks help you measure your social media ROI in context by understanding how the return on Facebook ads (or Instagram ads) evolves across regions and industries over the course of a campaign, or any period of time you choose.
• Emplifi’s Paid Analytics allows you to quickly track all your campaigns and ads in one place so there’s no confusion around advertising campaign performance. Analyze entire campaigns, or individual ads, to save time and optimize budget. There are so many moving parts within paid campaigns but this solution gives you maximum transparency and actionable insights.

2. Make better strategic and business decisions

Strong social media analytics will obviously provide marketing teams with data and insight that help them identify what’s working and what’s not when it comes to social media and content strategy. However, social analytics also provide vital insights that help inform strategic decisions outside of marketing.

This holds more and more true every year, as the amount of data being posted to social media is steadily increasing, as is our ability to extract useful insights from this data as technology improves. Here are some examples of how social media analytics can help improve key decision-making both inside and outside of marketing:

• Social listening – The best social listening tools will help tremendously with competitive and audience analysis. Social listening is the process of analyzing and parsing the vast amounts of data posted to social channels every day, and automatically extracting useful insights relevant to one’s business.

Social listening allows marketers and analysts to understand how audiences feel about their brand, product, or industry. These insights can help inform product decisions (e.g. “lots of people are complaining about this feature”), shed light on the interests and values of your demographic, and uncover trends relevant to your industry as they happen.

• Respond to trends in a timely manner – Access real-time data so that you can rapidly act upon bigger trends and get the jump on competitors.
• Minimize business risk – Data is there to signpost your strategic path and show you the right direction, so let data guide your decisions and help you make the best use of your resources and be led by your performance KPIs.

There is little room for emotion in your decisions – base your strategy on data. This will really save your team from wasting time on efforts that yield no worthwhile business outcome. Save resources and time for where you can make the most impact.

3. Compare your social media performance against competitors

What is the point in celebrating good performance if you have no idea whether it’s better than your competitors’ performance or how it looks set against average industry performances? It’s pure vanity to do so, and metrics that stand alone have no bearing on real success.

Context is so crucial, so to measure real success companies must compare themselves to competitors, and also to industry and regional performance averages.

Benchmarking always provides key insights and allows you to see how you stack up against the competition, or see how your performance looks against your industry or region averages.

4. Track marketing teams’ efficiency

Streamlined workflows are key to running a tight marketing crew, so being able to overview team efficiency and velocity is essential to guide them in the right direction. Keep working velocity high and strictly no bottlenecks. This is especially true in areas like community management and online customer service where a good tool will allow you to measure key community management KPIs like response time and audience sentiment.

Businesses need to understand that the customer journey can be tricky to manage in today’s world and one wrong step can spell disaster. Or at least a social media crisis, which, let’s face it, is a disaster.

Micro-management is a thing of the past, and with a good analytics solution teams can easily report on exactly the metrics their CMO wants to see, and from the other side, the CMOs can easily overview marketing operations, see crucial top-line data (or even granular), and spot trends that need further investigation by the marketing team.

Key areas to use social media analytics

Many social media teams don’t know exactly which areas of their social media marketing can really benefit from analysis, so let’s have a look into exactly where you should be measuring, and why.

Here are the key areas:

• Audience analytics
• Performance analytics
• Competitive analytics
• Paid social media analytics
• Customer service and community management analytics
• Influencer analytics
• Sentiment analysis of your profiles and ad campaigns
• Sentiment analysis for customer service

Key performance metrics to track:

• An overview of interactions across platforms and over time to understand if the content you’re publishing is effectively engaging your audience.
• Look at both the cumulative number of interactions and the number of interactions per 1,000 followers to see how big of a share of your community is responding to your messaging.
• Zoom in on the number of click-throughs on your posts to learn how effectively you’re driving traffic from social to web.
• Monitor your follower growth over time to see if your audience is growing as a result of your teams’ social media efforts. You want to grow your customer base, so it’s important that you consistently gain new followers.