Do you have the tools and skills to fully reap the benefits of social media analytics?
The amount of data generated by maintaining a social media presence in today’s digital landscape can overwhelm even the most skilled marketing professionals. It is crucial to be able to parse and analyze this data in order to stay competitive in almost every market. But how do small business owners keep up with the flow of data and information?
In order to make up the shortfall and keep the pace, many organizations rely on social media analytics tools.
Read on to learn more about:
- The importance of social media analytics
- When to use a social media analytics tool
- Tracking marketing performance using social media analytics
What is social media analytics and why is it important?
Marketers rely on social media analytics to gather data about the performance of their content marketing and advertising efforts across social media platforms. That data provides insight into which strategies are working and which should be reevaluated. This allows business leaders to be more intentional with their social media strategy in order to drive business, increase conversions, and maximize the customer experience.
What are the benefits of leveraging social media analytics?
Using social media analytics strategies to inform your brand’s marketing efforts provides solutions to a number of challenges faced by businesses:
- Access social listening data to determine the perceived value of your brand across social channels to ensure you meet consumer expectations.
- Measure brand sentiment and satisfaction to determine if there are opportunities for improving a product or service.
- Use machine-learning enhanced analytics tools to help your brand take advantage of opportunities and trends before they catch the eye of other brands.
- Strategically pivot and establish more realistic social media objectives by determining what strategies are working well and where your efforts are falling short.
Why you need a social media analytics tool
Humans generate a staggering amount of data—upwards of 328.77 million terabytes daily, according to 2023 estimates. Video content dominates global traffic, accounting for over half of all internet traffic. Social media alone, as many platforms are dominated by video content, is thought to account for almost 13% of total global traffic [1].
At a glance, social media data can seem like a flood of chaotic data points. With the right social media analytics tool in hand, your marketing team can gain access to insights that can provide valuable guidance on how your marketing team should adjust campaigns and strategies.
Gain insight into your social media efforts
Social media analytics track and provide insights into how consumers are engaging with your content, allowing you to see user behaviors across the entirety of the inbound funnel that starts with a post. You can gauge the success of your efforts by tracking how impressions, likes, and shares generate additional views and clicks, leading to more traffic and sales on your website. This information can be used to calculate the ROI of your social media marketing efforts.
Discover trends and analyze the competition
Trends and consumer preferences across the vast, ever-evolving landscape of social media platforms can shift faster than you can read this sentence. What might have been a trending and popular service model or product line last week can be supplanted by the next big thing tomorrow.
Increasingly driven by artificial intelligence (AI), analytics tools can be set to dial into trending topics and track how competitors are handling those trends. These tools can also be used to dig into the marketing and advertising habits of competitors, allowing your marketing team to more strategically target relevant keywords and longtail keyword phrases.
Gather audience insight and improve engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty
Gone are the days where a majority of your customers will call your service line for a customer service issue. Over half of users who engage with brands on social media do so to get help with a customer care concern, and 65% of all users expect some form of response [2]. Social analytics reveals how often customers are engaging with your platform and how satisfied they are with the experience.
Additional data points allow marketing teams to track how often a brand’s community turns to social commerce to make a purchase of products or services or to engage with content, an easy way to gauge brand loyalty in the brand’s social media communities.
What your social media analytics tool should include
The social media analytics market, valued in 2023 at $10.99 billion, is expected to more than quadruple by 2030 [3]. It stands to follow that there are thousands of digital tools and software on the market that can be used to support your social media analytics needs.
While there are tools that focus on several specific functions related to analyzing social media data, many are general use tools that come with all of the necessary functionality to fully support your social media analytics needs.
A full, comprehensive tool should include, at minimum, the following functions and features:
- The ability to track data across multiple social media platforms.
- Powerful machine learning that allows you to compare social media data against internal operational data in order to attribute effort to ROI.
- Dashboards, data visualization, and reporting tools in order to communicate insights to leadership in meaningful ways.
- Integrated AI-driven social listening tools for tracking brand mentions and assessing audience sentiment.
- The ability to segment data into key demographics or by social platform in order to best assess where your content marketing and social media advertising efforts should be focused and where strategies need to be adjusted
- Competitive benchmarking tools that allow you to track keyword and advertising behaviors of your competitors, and in conjunction with social listening tools provide insight into marketplace opportunities and gaps you can pivot into for competitive advantage.
How to track social media performance with social media analytics tools
A study on marketing behaviors of small businesses from 2023 revealed that only 32% of SMBs have a clear social media strategy in place, with 94% who are using social media for marketing relying solely on organic, non-paid traffic [4]. This approach isn’t ideal, but can work as long as your team is using social media analytics tools to guide your non-paid activities across social platforms.
How do social media analytics tools help your team understand what is and isn’t working? What should your workflow look like in order to get the data into a form that leadership can make an informed strategic decision?
Gather and analyze data about your efforts
Use your social media analytics tool to start gathering data from your social platforms about visitor traffic and behaviors. The better you understand which content is driving consumer traffic back to your website and which of those users are converting into paying customers. This will give your team an idea up front of the baseline effectiveness of your social media efforts in their current state.
Gather data about competitors and use it as a source of benchmarking
Take advantage of the fact that social media platforms and social media analytics tools provide transparency about the marketing and advertising efforts of your competitors. Find out what they are doing well, what customers are saying about their experiences with their services and products, and how well their ads are performing versus targeted keywords. With a clear understanding of the competition, you can pivot and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
Pivot in real time with actionable data insights
Enhanced by powerful machine learning algorithms, properly configured social media analytics tools can quickly correlate causality between data sources. With the right reporting parameters, your tool can provide actionable insights as to how you should deploy your social media content and advertising efforts to take advantage of trending consumer behaviors before the competition even realizes there’s been a shift.
Make informed decisions with historical insight
The ability to track historical trends and understand patterns of traffic and behavior is just as important as being able to respond to real-time shifts in consumer behavior. This can allow your marketing team to respond to seasonal shifts by allowing them to identify opportunities for long-term planning when trends become patterns over time.
Data visualization that leadership can understand
Data in its raw form is technical and hard to explain to someone without a background in data analysis. While business owners and leaders might have those skills in their wheelhouse, they are also often operating at a high level in order to keep the business running, and don’t have the bandwidth to get bogged down with details.
Well-designed social media analytics platforms will provide marketing professionals with powerful reporting tools that correlate the complex data streams according to customized parameters. Leadership should be able to quickly understand the data being presented and understand the insights being presented, so they can rapidly make informed decisions about shifts in strategy.
Take an iterative approach to constant improvement of your marketing strategy using social media analytics tools
The most important takeaway in this process is that social media marketing isn’t a “set it and forget it” business process. Your strategies and tactics must constantly be assessed and tracked to ensure your content and advertising strategies are aligned with consumer behaviors.
In order to iterate and improve your social media marketing strategies over time, provide leadership with the back up it needs in the form of a partner with experience in professional social media marketing and using social media analytics tools. These individuals and agencies have the skill and experience with these software platforms necessary to elevate your social media marketing strategies beyond the competition and position your brand for long-term success.
Sources
- Amount of Data Created Daily (2024), Exploding Topics
- Social media customer service: Importance and stats for 2023, Khoros
- Social Media Analytics Market Share | Revenue Analysis [2030], Fortune Business Insights
- Small Business Social Media Statistics [Fresh Research], Gitnux