In the world of marketing, data-backed campaigns are everything. Successful strategies are underpinned by analysis, which provides insights into what consumers want and need, their behavior and purchase patterns, and the overall audience demographic.Â
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Social media analytics is just one aspect of the wider analysis your business should be performing to make informed decisions. In this article, we’ll show you how to use it to your advantage and the data you need to inform tactics that work.Â
What Is Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics is the collection and analysis of data points from social media platforms. Your business can harness this information to create impactful marketing strategies and optimize engagement around your social activities.Â
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In the same way as website visitor tracking monitors the success of your web endeavors, social media analytics informs you of what’s working and not regarding your social strategy. You can also discover:
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- Relevant social media trends that will resonate with your target audience.Â
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- How to quantify the ROI you generate for each social media campaign.Â
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- The most appropriate social channels for your prospects.Â
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- What your audience expects from your brand.
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- How your content is perceived in comparison to your competitors.Â
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Social media monitoring tools can answer all this and more. Without measuring and analyzing the content you publish, there’s no verifiable way to put results into context or improve upon them. Â
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Some social media analytics tools use technologies such as Big Data and data mining to uncover meaningful insights. Social media analysis typically examines the rate of conversions, audience engagement, and outreach, among other things. For example, the number of clicks on a LinkedIn post can indicate conversions, whereas the number of likes on your business Instagram reels defines the level of audience engagement.Â
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Based on these clicks and likes, you can measure your brand’s content performance and alter your strategy as required. You can also analyze your competitor’s social platforms to see which content is getting the most engagement.Â
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Why is this data important?
1. It measures marketing ROI and impacts
Social media data delivers quick feedback to determine the performance of your social strategies. If these aren’t providing a substantial ROI, your data analysis can guide you in making effective changes and getting back on the right track.Â
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Social media management tools provide clear insights and allow marketing professionals to quickly and easily see the most impactful metrics and evaluate marketing performance. This way, you can rapidly assess the impact paid content promotion is having on your social channels before you commit to more investment.Â
2. It measures your marketing strategy efficiency
By using social media analytics, you can measure how efficient your marketing strategies are. Key metrics include response time and audience sentiment. It’s essential your business responds to audience comments on social media activities, and social media analytics will tell you how you’re performing in this area. Â
3. Provides information to help make better business decisions
Analytics provide more than social media insights. Outside of marketing decisions, analyzing social channels can yield crucial information about industry trends as well as your audience and competitors.
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Social listening tools are part of social media analytics. They extract insights from your social media data, which you can use to inform business decisions. For example, you can see whether extending your Instagram video length has had the hoped-for effect on engagement. Having this knowledge empowers you to tailor your marketing strategies and company value propositions accordingly.   Â
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You might want to explore the best business process management software tools on the market to see if they can help with your data collection and handling.Â
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4. Provides information about your social media marketing performance versus competitors
Implementing social media analytics can inform you of what your competitors are up to as well. A solid understanding of how your brand compares in your target audience’s minds is essential.Â
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Discover which topics are discussed online in relation to your rivals. For example, exploring other business VoIP providers in Canada on social media may reveal various instances of poor customer service. Your business can leverage this information to showcase your own excellent service through positive testimonials.  Â
5. Provides information on who your audience is and how to cater to them
The data you extract from social media analytics is like gold dust. Establishing a firm baseline of your target audience, together with their needs, enables you to pivot your marketing campaigns directly toward them.Â
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Analyzing social media platforms delivers general information about your audience, like their location, age, and gender. You can also go one step further and analyze and monitor your and rival brands through social media mentions and online communities. Doing this allows you to build a comprehensive picture of your target audience’s feelings toward your business.
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Exploring social media mentions can reveal valuable information about your customers, like their preferences and motivations and what ticks their boxes and compels them to make purchasing decisions.Â
For example, hosted PBX providers in Canada may want to leverage telephony features that appeal to a specific segment of the market based on information discovered through their social media analytics.
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How to take advantage of social media analytics data
1. Measure your strengths and weaknesses
First up is to measure your business’s strengths and weaknesses. The metric you need here is sentiment.
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Social media analytics tools can use machine learning to understand sentence context and assign sentiment to posts. These posts are then categorized as positive, negative, or neutral. This allows you to constantly monitor audience sentiment and quickly pick up on any attitude shifts.
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The next step is to discover what causes changing perceptions because exploring your audience’s feelings about your brand is essential to improving their experience.
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Aspect-based sentiment analysis works to analyze both the context and tone of posts to provide a broader angle. For instance, even though your website is getting great traction and SEO results, your audience on social media might be complaining about high shipping costs. Knowing this means you can take action to resolve it before it escalates and contributes to a detrimental customer experience. Â
2. Know your audience better—and what they consume
By monitoring the content they consume and using this to understand your audience better, you can deliver more of what they want from your business. Some key metrics to track include:
- Number of click-throughs on your posts. This will allow you to monitor how effective your campaigns are at driving traffic from social media to your website.
- Growth over time to establish if your audience is growing in alignment with your social media campaigns.
Interactions overview to check your digital content is engaging your audience and encouraging them to take action.
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3. Research your competitors
Some social media analytics tools provide data insights on different topics online in relation to your competitors. Uncovering demographics, most-used social media channels, and influential mentions data is invaluable and will help you beat the competition.Â
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Say you’re marketing a VoIP business phone in Canada, and you discover through social media analytics that your competitors’ subscription plans are more expensive than yours and also offer fewer features.Â
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You can leverage this high-quality data to market your VoIP solution at a price point more comfortable for your target audience and highlight the features your competitors fail to provide too. Â
4. Track your marketing campaign performance
Analyzing and tracking your marketing campaigns is another way to harness social media analytics.Â
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Simultaneously running multiple marketing campaigns can be difficult, so use social media analytics tools to keep a handle on the effectiveness of each of them. To achieve this, you can create bespoke dashboards for different campaigns. This is especially helpful if these are managed by separate teams or staff members.Â
5. Come up with new marketing campaign ideas that better cater to your audienceÂ
If you have a highly engaged audience on Instagram, visual listening is your friend in terms of social media analytics tools. It tracks visual mentions by capturing logos. Even if your consumers aren’t tagging companies in their Instagram posts, it can pick up on brands and deliver meaningful insights.Â
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As probably the most visual social media platform, Instagram’s images provide significant customer insights. Via this medium, consumers share their habits and, consciously or not, give away a lot of information about their lives.Â
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Many social media analytics tools feature AI-powered technology that works to identify scenes, people, objects, activities, and more. Gaining access to images that feature brands enables your business to explore common use cases in addition to potential opportunities.Â
Conclusion
Analytics are essential to social media marketing. If you can’t measure whether your campaigns are working or not, all you’re doing is shooting in the dark. As demonstrated in this article, harnessing their power provides you with advantages over your competitors.
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Intuitive analysis enables you to constantly improve performance, optimize your budget, prove your impact, and form audience relationships that will guide them through your funnel to the point of purchase.
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After all, learning exactly who your digital audience is, where they reside online, and what they care most about allows you to align your marketing with them and is what good business is all about.
