Social Media is exploding right now. You’re missing out on a wide spectrum of audiences if it’s not a part of your marketing checklist.
Knowing that, however, is not enough.
You need to have in-depth knowledge of how to utilize social media. And analytics is where you must start. Social Media Analytics help you track the results of your strategies so you can continuously improve and evolve.
Let analytics be your shining armor to make important business and marketing decisions.
In this article, we’ll discuss how analytics tools work and how you can put them to best use.
Social Media Analytics Process
- Start with defining the problem you’re looking to solve. Clearly, state what are the pain points you’re going to cater to? What are the questions you’re going to answer? Focus on: ‘Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?’
- Locate the appropriate sources of data to work on for analysis. Identify ‘what’ content is of interest, ‘who’ created it, ‘where’ and ‘when’ did it appear, and is it something that will interest your audience.
- Have specific keywords in mind. With the help of those keywords search the data.
- Now it’s time to create a data model. A data model assembles elements of data and standardizes how they relate to each other. For instance, a data model puts in perspective that the data element representing a smartphone can include other elements that represent the color and size of the smartphone and define its owner.
- The analytics are then run utilizing several tools. Interpretation of results takes place. And finally, meaningful insights are developed and derived from the process.
How Social Media Analytics Can Help You Attain Your Marketing Objectives
Help to engage better with the audience
Social media analytics tools come in handy when determining the engagement on your content. They clearly define the likes, shares, comments, etc you receive. For instance, Roxy Theater, a music theater in California utilized TweetReach to get insights on how many people their Tweets reached.
However, to put analytics to best use, you must incorporate social media listening and monitoring strategies.
The most common strategy is to focus on your own social media brand. And while it is helpful, you need to take the next step to leap ahead of the curve.
Listen to social media. By listening to it widely, you’ll come across many issues and topics (related to your industry) that your audience is discussing. Now, this can be in the form of repeated Quora questions or trending posts on Instagram.
Your next step must be to answer these concerns and queries. This will not only help you gain some new followers but also establish your brand as an authority. People will start looking up to you as their solution provider in the pool of exhausting questions.
There’s no better way than this to engage your target audience.
McDonald’s reintroduced the limited edition Szechuan sauce after listening from its customers on Social Media.
Keep an Eye on the Competition
Another great advantage that social media analytics put forth is that it helps you monitor your competition. When you enter the social media game, studying your competitors must be one of your foremost strategies.
This will help you in identifying: what kind of content works, who engages with your competitor’s posts, what your target audience prefers, what they do not engage with, which marketing campaigns outperform others, and which ones fail.
All this will give you sufficient data on how you must approach your own social media. This strategy works well for all strata of businesses but is especially useful for small businesses looking to start out their social media journey. Small businesses can model and learn from big businesses on how to leverage social media to the fullest. That being said, you don’t have to mimic your competitors. All in all, monitoring competitors is a must for every brand on the platform.
Moneygram, a money transfer company took notice of the conversations about their industry, products and competitors and created a new campaign, giving them a leap.
Bolster Best Content
When you start creating content on social media, you’ll observe not all posts perform the same. Some posts will not garner much attention while others will break all records. Social media analytics help in identifying which are these posts that outperform all others.
You then need to boost your best content, even more, to garner traction, gain new followers, and increase engagement.
Make the best use of your high performing content.
Influencer Mapping
The influencer marketing industry is booming like never before. So, you obviously cannot miss out on finding the right influencers for your brand who drive the desired actions.
However, to find the influencer that fits right, speaks to ‘your’ audience, and whom your audience really ‘listens’ to is a real task.
Social media analytics can help you do that. It will help you pluck the right influencers and will also equip you with the content they should be sharing.
Also, as the influencer marketing industry continues to be at an all-time high, now is the right time to adopt a dedicated approach towards it. An influencer marketing application is the best place to start. It will not only serve you with the right influencers for your brand but also help you zero-in on the best as per your campaign requirements.
Samsung, initially had no social media and customer support. They eventually created benchmarks for content volume around keywords and sentiment level, identified influencers for community involvement and within 2 months had 325,000+ product conversations.
Categorize Your target Audience
2020 has witnessed 3.8 billion active users on social media. And while you aim to expand the reach of your business through social media, you cannot target them all. The best way to bring in loyal customers through social media platforms is to fine-tune your targeting.
Social media analytics categorize your target audience into sections of age, gender, profession, geographical location, interests, etc. Now when you have this refined list, you can promote your products/services accordingly.
Find out which of your products/services will serve which category of your audience. You can then promote accordingly and enhance conversion rates.
Conclusion
Marketing isn’t about blind aiming. You need to be highly targeted and defined in your approach to garner the right attention and drive results. Analytics help you attain your marketing goals by doing exactly that.
If social media is a goldmine, social media analytics is the key to it. Now you know, before venturing into the social media game, it is imperative to know the ways of using the key (analytics) to unlock the platform’s full potential.
About the Author
Sourodip Biswas works at Space-O Canada, a company having expertise in software and iOS app development. He believes knowledge is a treasure that follows its owner everywhere. His writings have been published on many distinguished websites across the web.
