Every business owner knows you need to build your brand using social media channels and social media analytics tools.
Analytics plays a massive part in successfully creating a digital marketing strategy and online presence that produces positive results.
Social media analytics allow you to:
- Connect with your audience
- Build relationships
- View consumer reactions
- Learn more about your competitors
It also helps you run a successful marketing campaign that drives consumers towards your business and helps them remain loyal to your brand.
👉🏼 However, it often feels overwhelming without knowing where to begin.
The following information will guide you through the process and make it easier to understand social media analytics.
Important disclosure: we're proud affiliates of some tools mentioned in this guide. If you click an affiliate link and subsequently make a purchase, we will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you (you pay nothing extra).
What Are Analytics? 💁🏼♀️
Analytics provide you with insights into your marketing strategies.
With this data, you can boost the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts by looking for opportunities for improvement.
Luckily, there are a variety of social media tools that can help you get insight into this data. These online tools are a critical component for:
- Product research
- Competitive research
- Audience analysis
Generally, analytics aims to gather data and use the results to determine your business marketing decisions.
Measure ROI And Marketing Impact 👩🏼💻
The core of social media analytics is receiving immediate feedback on your company’s performance on all social platforms.
This information allows you to adjust and control your social media strategy for optimal results.
The results and social media metrics also reveal when your strategy is not working. This is essential information even if you work with a mentor or a marketing agency.
This is the moment when data analysis becomes highly valuable, guiding you in the right direction.
According to Hootsuite, 85% of organizations expect to accurately prove the return on investment (ROI) when integrating social media data into innovative tools that produce analytics.
Improve Business And Strategic Decisions 🧐
Data provides you and your marketing team insight into the constant fluctuation of social media trends and content.
Sometimes one marketing strategy will work great for a few months while others need to change every few weeks or more.
The following information highlights the ways analytics from your social media accounts help improve your decisions on your marketing strategy.
1. Respond To Trends Immediately:
Analytics allows you to access data in real time. The results will enable you to act directly on trends and stay one step or a few steps ahead of your competitors.
Look at influencer campaigns and the social media efforts involved across different social channels to gain an idea of what content strategy you need to take.
There are vast amounts of campaigns out there, you need to make sure yours stands out in some way and creates social conversations between your readers and viewers.
This way you can find unseen business opportunities too, and develop a marketing strategy that can really help your business lift off and develop innovation strategies.
2. Social Listening:
This process involves analyzing data that is posted on social media channels daily, in real-time.
You also learn more about the trends and interest your target audience holds within your industry.
This can create an opportunity to have social conversations too and reach out to your audience to better understand the innovation process and what your audience wants to see.
3. Minimize Risk:
You gain control over the direction of your marketing strategy by using analytics.
The data guides you toward the right decisions along the way, which helps minimize business risk.
Stand Strong Against Competitors 🦸🏼♂️
There’s competition in every industry, and chances are you already have key competitors that make things quite tricky for your business.
Analytics allows you to precisely strategize to be a leader in your industry and stand firm against your competitors by improving your performance.
👉🏼 You can use analytics for your social media accounts to check your performance against your competitors and the industry.
The data can also be broken down to regional averages to help you remain a strong brand in your industry.
Track Efficiency 🕵🏼♂️
You can use social media analytics to drive your marketing team in the right direction.
Exact metrics include crucial data that helps you understand your customer's journey and makes it easy to spot trends that improve their experience.
Tracking the efficiency of your marketing efforts and guiding your marketing team to investigate specific areas further helps make your plan fluid and flow easily at every turn.
7 Specific Areas To Use Analytics 📊
You might be wondering which areas fall under the analytics umbrella.
The following list includes key areas that benefit from analysis.
- Performance
- Audience
- Influencer
- Competitive
- Profile And Ad Campaign Analysis
- Paid Social Media
- Customer Service Analysis
1. Performance:
This includes interactions across your social media platforms, the number of click-throughs, and monitoring of the number of followers that grow over a particular span of time.
2. Audience:
This includes information that allows you to create an audience-first strategy for your marketing campaign.
Analytics will immediately reveal your ideal customer so you can create a marketing strategy built around your follower's behaviors, interests, and characteristics.
3. Influencer:
These analytics help you to identify the best influencers in your industry and monitor their work.
The data reveals if the influencer is working effectively with influencer marketing tactics to generate engagement, grow your audience, actively post for your brand, and more.
4. Competitive:
Your competitors might be the nicest in the industry but it’s your job to view them in a competitive light.
Analytics compares your social media platforms against the performance of your competitors.
5. Profile And Ad Campaign Analysis:
Analytics allows you to monitor downturns and upturns in your online campaigns consistently.
AI-powered, driven analytic tools spot negative sentiment quickly and guide you towards maintaining positive engagement, growth, and interactions with your followers, all assisting your social media marketing efforts.
6. Paid Social Media:
Most social media platforms offer paid advertising.
Analytics allows you to see the effectiveness of each paid ad you create and gives you insight into areas that need to be improved or changed within the ad to optimize its use.
7. Customer Service Analysis:
The way you treat your customers is essential to the well-being of your business.
Social media platforms build bonds with consumers and your customer service needs to go beyond your customer's expectations.
This detailed information is best used to improve your customer service in a variety of ways when needed.
Best Analytics Tools 🔧
Now that you know why social media marketing is so important for your business and how to use analytics to optimize the use of your profiles.
It’s time to use some of the best social media tools for analytics in the industry.
Here is a list of top analytic tools for social media:
AgoraPulse
This tool is known as one of the best that helps you identify the needs of your specific audience. You can conduct all your social media tasks with this one tool.
Google Analytics
This free web tool analyzes the traffic to your website. It tracks individual visits to your website, pages visited, video views, button clicks, and other related actions performed by users.
Hootsuite Analytics
This tool allows you to schedule and publish your posts to your social media accounts. It tracks which posts perform the best and helps you make good decisions regarding your marketing strategy.
Keyhole
This tool helps you identify the key influencers in your industry to guide you towards the ones with the highest engagement rates.
Brandwatch
This tool monitors your brand and produces insight into your targeted audience's wants and needs.
Meltwater
This go-to tool focuses on your brand engagement driven by influencers.
TweetReach
This twitter analytic tool reports your hashtags, keywords, and overall engagement.
You need to choose the right social media tools for your analytics.
The first thing you need to do is determine the type of information you want to be revealed by the tool, then choose the one that suits your needs the most.
Every social media tool offers a different service, but the ones listed above are the best available and most effective.
What Social Media Platforms Are Ideal For Businesses? 📱
Social media is here, and it’s going to stay for years to come.
Social media marketing will continue to grow and change, which makes it essential that you stay on top of it.
Analytic tools provide you with the best information for creating and maintaining your social media marketing strategy.
The information revealed by the tools is not always positive, and that’s meant to drive you in a different direction and try a new strategy.
👉🏼 Some businesses choose to access all social media platforms, and some choose just a few.
Whether you are starting a recruiting business or have had a brick-and-mortar store for years, it’s up to you to determine which one will work best for your company and the direction you plan to drive your business.
Twitter #️⃣
Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms chosen by business owners because it allows you to create a voice and reputation for business and communicate with your audience.
Consumers are interested in hearing the thoughts of business owners or brands they follow. Building a strong bond with your audience takes time and needs to be maintained regularly.
Twitter allows you to inform a wide audience, promote to them strategically, and interact in real-time when needed.
Pinterest 😍
Pinterest is a social media gem that many businesses overlook but should truly consider.
This epic platform helps show your products in their best light, attract new customers, and quickly build an audience.
Facebook 🗣
Facebook has been around for many years and is the best-known social media platform worldwide.
The younger crowd doesn’t frequently visit Facebook, but you can gain a wide audience if your products or services are geared toward a specific age group.
Facebook comes with a broad audience, and marketers now use it to generate leads and nurture them by connecting Facebook with Mailchimp or other tools.
Other Platforms
Other beneficial social media platforms for businesses include YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram.
Using a variety of platforms is recommended as long as they cater to your target audience's age demographic.
For example, if your products or services are geared towards a younger crowd such as teens and people in their 20’s, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat are excellent social media platforms to consider.
They allow you to reach out to a younger audience and captivate their attention in numerous ways with various social media activities.
Social media influencers are abundant on these platforms, giving you plenty of options when hiring a specific influencer for your brand.
Leveraging Social Media Marketing And Social Analytics 😎
It might seem overwhelming if you’re yet to get started on social media for your business, but it’s easier than you think.
Once you determine the platforms you want to use, just sign up for free and create a profile for your business.
And if you’re already using social media, it’s always good to evaluate your current platforms and strategy and follow these best practices in your accounts.
It’s essential to fill out the profile section of your social media account because it creates a sense of trust that your business is valid.
Consumers are careful of which businesses they deal with and trust. Representing yourself and your business as a trusted leader in your specific industry is important.
An excellent way to become trusted is to keep an eye on your analytic tools and your competitors in order to gain valuable insights.
Create social media posts that are entertaining as well as informative about your products or services. Answer questions on your social media outlets and address issues previous customers have experienced.
This will help in keeping customer experience at a high and show that you care about each customer.
It’s one thing for a customer to complain online, but it’s a special business that addresses their issues and immediately takes care of the error.
Other consumers following your social media account will see the comment and know you take your business seriously. You'll appreciate audience insights as they can help develop targeted content.
Feedback can help achieve new goals for future campaigns too and help you make better social media platform business decisions.
Thanks to your analytic tools, your quick action will show consumers if they have an issue, you will solve it quickly and to their satisfaction.
👉🏼 Dealing with unhappy customers is a part of doing business, and negative online comments can damage your reputation quickly.
Sometimes negative comments can destroy your business and cause you to work even harder to rebuild your place in your industry.
Final Thoughts On Social Media Analytics 💭
Tracking your social media analytics and data allow you to create successful marketing campaigns that are fluid to the changing demographic on social media.
Thanks to analytics, your business won’t suffer a downfall if you act on the recommendations of the results.
This means when the analytics reveal a problem, it’s essential to find an immediate solution to prevent heading in the wrong direction for an extended period of time.
Analytics can provide you with the complete picture of your marketing efforts and help you ensure each post provides meaningful insights and is successful amongst your social channels.
👉🏼 When you stay current with the analytics, you will maintain an outstanding balance of success across your social media platforms.
Since analytics provides essential insights, you can choose to handle your marketing needs independently, depending on the size of your business.
However, some businesses prefer to have an in-house marketing team that uses analytics for guidance.
The way you use analytics is up to you, but it’s a beneficial tool that allows you to create the best marketing campaigns and strategies across your chosen platforms to monitor social media performance in the best way possible.