What is Social Media Analytics?

Social Media Analytics has become indispensable for digital marketing. Whether you’re looking to increase sales or raise brand awareness online, social media is more important than ever. Social Media Analytics refers to metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) used to track user activity. This activity can be anywhere from websites, blogs, review sites, or social media accounts. 

Consumers everywhere are spending an increasing amount of their time on social media. A business that leverages analytics can improve customer outreach, brand recognition, and profits.       

The Importance of Social Media Analytics

Social media analysis can help you understand how social media users interact with your website and social accounts. It allows you to track website performance and reactions to social media posts, and also make campaign adjustments. This process allows you to gauge consumer sentiment around your product. You can also keep tabs on competitor activities and the impact they have on users online. 

Common use cases for social media analytics include: 

• Audience profiling
• Competitive benchmarking
• Content optimization
• Building brand awareness

Key metrics include conversions, demographics, impressions, click-through, engagement rate, comments, shares, or retweets. 

With as many as two-thirds of consumers doing their shopping on social media, companies are now using their social media to make direct sales.  

What can Social Media Analytics do for You?

Social media analytics can provide a simple and inexpensive way to help you improve your business outcomes online. Common social media analytics features include:

• Campaign performance tracking
• Dashboards
• Data analytics
• Graphs
• Image recognition
• Influencer performance analysis
• Multichannel content tracking (including impressions, hashtags, likes, and mentions)
• Sentiment analysis
• Share of voice
• Web analytics integrations (i.e. Google Analytics)

Here are some other key elements of social media analytics to consider:  

Social Media Content

Attractive content is the key to increasing engagement and generating demand for your products or services. Social media networks allow you to deliver any type of content to a wide audience through your social media channels. Social media analytics tools can then provide you with data points to reinforce the decision-making process. Optimizing your social media campaigns becomes that much easier. 

Now you might be asking, what makes great social media content? In the end, the goal of web content is to drive more traffic to your website. To have your websites and blog posts rank highly on search engines, your content will have to be accurate, appealing, and original. For example, Google periodically updates its search algorithms to seek out relevant content. As AI and machine learning become more sophisticated, the focus on quality will only increase. Visual elements like charts, graphs, videos, or infographics will tend to take on greater importance. 

That said, subject matter expertise and an engaging delivery will always be rewarded when it comes to search engine rankings. The more you know about your target audience, the easier it will be to build a connection through social media. Knowing who your social posts are meant for will help you avoid talking down to your customers, or putting out content that they may not relate to. Analytics can help you stay in touch with the latest social media trends by giving you a snapshot of content performance over time. 

Depending on your needs, it may be beneficial to invest in Social Media Management Tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social. These tools provide suite solutions that include analytics and campaign management features. 

Competitor Analysis

Real-time social media metrics and data analytics show you what’s trending in your industry. This allows you to keep an eye on your competition’s actions and how their audience is responding. Share of Voice features can show you your market share in relation to competitors. They do this by measuring web traffic, ad clicks, or social media mentions. 

Social media analytics tools usually offer competitor analysis and benchmarking tools. Businesses interested in more advanced feature capabilities should consider Social Media Monitoring Tools. As the name suggests, this software monitors social media for posts that are relevant to your business.    

Analytics tools also provide social listening. This feature identifies brand mentions across social platforms. Tracking these mentions helps zero in on customer preferences and pain points within your target market. 

Innovations in analytics have come a long way. It’s now possible for image recognition to identify specific brands. With this technology, brand or product mentions can be tracked even if users don’t make any textual reference to them.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis provides insights into how consumers feel about a product on social media. With NER, sentiment analysis tools retrieve social media data from LinkedIn, Facebook posts, message boards, or even review sites. 

A social post might be trending, but sentiment analysis can make it clear whether these trends are positive or harmful to your brand. The age-old quote about “all press is good press” does not extend to social media. This information can let you know if it’s best to stay on the same track or if it’s time to switch gears.     

Influencer Marketing

Another way to boost your social media engagement is through influencer marketing. Social media personalities in your niche market can be a fast track to engaging with potential customers. This is functionally similar to celebrity endorsements, which even the Romans were using. 

 Influencer Marketing Software helps marketing teams and businesses identify the most relevant influencers. If you want to work with influencers, look for tools that include influencer performance analysis features.

Product Development 

Keeping an eye on how customers react to your product across social media can bring you many benefits when it comes to product development. Review sites and forums can provide a treasure trove of information with unbiased feedback from real users of your product. 

By analyzing consumer pros and cons, you can identify any common issues with your products and use that information to enhance them. Direct engagement with customers can be a fantastic tool here as well. Responding in comments and on threads makes customers feel heard, and shows you take problems seriously. Where possible, engage with your users, even when they are having issues.      

Promoting Brand Loyalty

Awareness of market trends and consumer sentiment will help you improve customer care before and after a sale. This also makes it easier to divide your current and potential customers into segments. This technique can help personalize the customer experience and increase brand loyalty. 

Social Media Analytics as a Driver of Marketing Strategy

If engaging content is the foundation of social media marketing, analytics are the driving force behind social media strategy. They provide the information to determine what is and isn’t working. Actionable insights on user interactions with your brand enable more informed business decisions. 

Knowing more about your target audience and their motivations will also make it that much easier to convert leads into customers. For this reason, analytics insights are becoming more prevalent in marketing plans by the day.  

Leveraging Social Media Analytics to Grow your Business

The modern business should engage with customers across many sales channels. Social media analytics provide you with critical insights into how online users view and interact with your products. This will help you fend off competitors, improve social media ROI, and increase your bottom line.

TrustRadius can help you identify the best Social Media Analytics tools to meet your business needs. Reading concise, unbiased reviews from verified users can help you make the best decision. If you’ve already used any of these tools, we would love to hear your thoughts! By writing a review, you can make your voice heard while helping other software buyers to make informed decisions.