SMM analytics

Importance of social media marketing analytics

So, why is it important to perform a social media analysis, anyway? Won’t you know by the number of likes and retweets if your social profile is healthy? The answer is no.
It takes a lot more than just looking at how your followers interact with your posts — you’ll have to dive deeper to see if your social platforms are truly driving results for your company. That’s where your social media marketing analysis comes in to help. When you analyze your social media accounts, you can see metrics like:

• New followers
• Unfollows
• Post engagements
• Reach
• Mentions
• And more

This kind of information can help you understand how your audience interacts with your social platforms — and if you’re not satisfied, you can make necessary tweaks and changes. Over time, you’ll be able to make small changes to post frequency, post content, and more — depending on which metrics you want to improve. It’s typically the most beneficial to perform a social media analysis monthly so that you can tell which tweaks are working in your favor and which ones had no effect.
After a few months of creating social media analysis reports for your company’s social presence, you’ll have a great idea of what your audience interacts with, who your followers are, and more. So, what is the importance of social media analytics? Wrapped up, a social media analysis informs you on:

• What kinds of content your audience engages with
• Demographics of your target audience
• What social platforms your target audience uses
• And more
  Overall, this information is invaluable to your social media marketing campaign.

What are the use cases of social media analytics?

Social media analysis platforms can track and analyze a range of data and interactions used in a variety of social media marketing use cases.

Measure the ROI of social media marketing efforts

The main goal for any social media post, like, retweet or share is ROI.
To determine social media ROI, marketers must first determine an initial benchmark and then have a way to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) against that benchmark over time. When efforts aren’t working well, analysis of those metrics will reveal tweaks marketers can make to improve the performance of the campaign and overall ROI.
In fact, a recent study from Hootsuite, a vendor offering a social media management platform, found that 85% of organizations that began measuring social media data within their analytics tools were able to accurately show ROI for those efforts.
To begin tracking social media campaign performance, a tracking pixel or Google Analytics UTM parameter can be added to any links used in social media posts or ads. That will show any conversions that came from social media marketing and can help with planning retargeting campaigns for visitors who didn’t convert.

Improve strategic decision-making

Social media analytics can improve a marketing team’s ability to understand what social media strategies are working and which ones aren’t as effective.
However, the analytical results can also provide insight that can be useful for making business decisions about other important aspects of the business not necessarily directly related to the marketing campaigns.
For example, with social listening tools, audience and competition can be analyzed by extracting useful insight from social media data being posted on various social media networks like LinkedIn and Facebook. It can also provide demographic information about the audience that will enable enhanced marketing efforts targeting that sector and more effectively create brand awareness.
By using real-time data, emerging trends may be detected that can give a business a jump on the competition by posting social media content sooner.

Track the efficiency of marketing teams

Most organizations strive to streamline workflows and enable team members to be more productive. A lesser known, but still important, feature of social media analytics is its ability to improve efficiency with your marketing team.
In addition to the KPIs for your social media content, you can also measure aspects like response time and customer sentiment.
Showing the chief marketing officer areas where workflows can be automated and resources can be redirected to strategic activities that directly impact revenue are key to obtaining marketing budget and approvals for future campaigns.

What metrics should be tracked with social media analytics?

There are six general types of social media metrics that should be tracked.

Who can benefit the most from using the analytics tools for social media?

You. The chances are big that you can immensely benefit from navigating through analytics.
In all seriousness, anyone who uses social media to grow their online presence, or as a part of the sales funnel, should tackle the mysteries of analytics.
Starting from marketers, to solopreneurs, social media influencers, small business owners, media and PR agencies, up to large companies and firms. If you belong in any of these (or similar) professional profiles, know that the wisest way to elevate a social media strategy is to dive into its data.
The truth is: many of your competitors, regardless of the industry, will still ride a bike blindfolded or prepare dishes without reading the labels, meaning – manage their social media channels while ignoring the numbers behind them!

To dodge a bullet of ignorance, read throughout our free guide and learn how to use social analytics to your advantage.
In an era of social media permeating our lives, there’s nothing more important for marketers than tracking the performance of their posts. It’s a free-for-all world – which means there’s a lot of competition for our customers’ attention spans. Knowing what works and what doesn’t is the key to successful social media marketing.
As such, there is nothing more important than analytics. 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

All four seek to answer different questions and provide different insights. How do you tell which one is which? What situations are they useful in? Worry not, dear reader – we’re here to demystify the four types of social media analytics.

Descriptive analytics
Descriptive analytics answer the question “what is happening”? “What happened”? These types of analytics cluster similar types of data together in order to produce a cohesive view. Comments and posts can be grouped together, for instance, for the purpose of sentiment analysis (as offered, for instance, by our very own SentiOne platform). Any time you gather a lot of similar data points in order to analyse them looking for patterns, sentiments, and/or trends, you’re dealing with descriptive analytics.

Diagnostic analysis
Diagnostic analysis focuses on the numbers: like counts, follower numbers, pageviews, reviews, shares, what have you. This type of analytics focuses on the performance of posts and campaigns and attempts to discern what made them successful. By comparing the performance of different campaigns, trends and consumer preferences can be discerned. Both diagnostic and descriptive analytics are reactive – that is, they are concerned with events that have already happened.

Predictive analysis

In contrast, both predictive and prescriptive analytics are proactive – as in, they attempt to predict trends, events, and shifts based on existing data. It can range from simple things, like predicting possible visits to a location based upon posts expressing that intention, to forecasting entire trends and phenomena based upon mentions. Social listening tools can help identify upcoming trends and shifts in consumer behaviour by analysing large volumes of social media data and indicating the shifting popularity of keywords.

Prescriptive analysis

Finally, prescriptive analysis is the analysis of data with the intention of providing the best way to proceed at any given moment. This can be applied to situations ranging from handling social media crises and incidents (“how well does this type of apology track with our target audience?”) to purchase preferences (“we’ve identified this group of customers – how do we optimise our sales process to their habits?”). Although it’s an incredibly useful form of analysis, it requires a lot of data in order to truly show its potential.

Closing words

All manner of social media activity requires good analytics. Knowing how to understand and use your data can take you very far – provided, of course, you know what you’re looking for.
If you’re interested in doing a little bit of analysis yourself, social media reporting tools with excellent reporting capabilities – such as our own SentiOne (#humblebrag) – can get you off the ground in no time.