Social media data analytics and measurement tools help you measure varying stages of social media campaigns, including social media marketing goals and the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns. Here we’ll cover the different types of social media analytics tools and their features, benefits and limitations.
What can Social Media Analytics tools help you measure when assessing campaign results? Keeping track of your social media efforts isn’t always easy, especially if you’re dealing with multiple networks and demographics. If you’re finding it hard to measure the success of your social media campaigns, then Social Media Analytics tools are what you need. These tools will give you a better idea of how well your social media strategies are working by allowing you to set goals, monitor activity, and even improve your reach. Let’s talk about some of the ways these analytics tools can help.
Social media analytics tools can help you measure when assessing the eturn on investment for your social media efforts. It is necessary to develop benchmarks and metrics to use when analyzing data from social media. In order to make sense of the data, it is important that you investigate the time spent on social media, the content type and medium used, who or what was seen or heard and where, including location. Social media managers may choose to use different tools depending on the platform they are focused on measuring.
Managing social media profiles can take up a lot of time, and it’s hard to know if you’re getting value from your efforts. If you use social media to drive traffic to your website, easily find out with Google Analytics how many visitors came from social, what they did when they got there, and even their demographics. Learn more about using Analytics.
An overview of social media analytics
Practitioners and analysts alike know social media by its many websites and channels: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and many others.
Social media analytics is the ability to gather and find meaning in data gathered from social channels to support business decisions — and measure the performance of actions based on those decisions through social media.
Social media analytics is broader than metrics such as likes, follows, retweets, previews, clicks, and impressions gathered from individual channels. It also differs from reporting offered by services that support marketing campaigns such as LinkedIn or Google Analytics.
Social media analytics uses specifically designed software platforms that work similarly to web search tools. Data about keywords or topics is retrieved through search queries or web ‘crawlers’ that span channels. Fragments of text are returned, loaded into a database, categorized and analyzed to derive meaningful insights.
Social media analytics includes the concept of social listening. Listening is monitoring social channels for problems and opportunities. Social media analytics tools typically incorporate listening into more comprehensive reporting that involves listening and performance analysis.
Why is social media analytics important?
IBM points out that with the prevalence of social media: “News of a great product can spread like wildfire. And news about a bad product — or a bad experience with a customer service rep — can spread just as quickly. Consumers are now holding organizations to account for their brand promises and sharing their experiences with friends, co-workers and the public at large.”
Social media analytics helps companies address these experiences and use them to:
- Spot trends related to offerings and brands
- Understand conversations — what is being said and how it is being received
- Derive customer sentiment towards products and services
- Gauge response to social media and other communications
- Identify high-value features for a product or service
- Uncover what competitors are saying and its effectiveness
- Map how third-party partners and channels may affect performance
These insights can be used to not only make tactical adjustments, like addressing an angry tweet, they can help drive strategic decisions. In fact, IBM finds social media analytics is now “being brought into the core discussions about how businesses develop their strategies.”
These strategies affect a range of business activity:
- Product development – Analyzing an aggregate of Facebook posts, tweets and Amazon product reviews can deliver a clearer picture of customer pain points, shifting needs and desired features. Trends can be identified and tracked to shape the management of existing product lines as well as guide new product development.
- Customer experience – An IBM study discovered “organizations are evolving from product-led to experience-led businesses.” Behavioral analysis can be applied across social channels to capitalize on micro-moments to delight customers and increase loyalty and lifetime value.
Branding – Social media may be the world’s largest focus group. Natural language processing and sentiment analysis can continually monitor positive or negative expectations to maintain brand health, refine positioning and develop new brand attributes. - Competitive Analysis – Understanding what competitors are doing and how customers are responding is always critical. For example, a competitor may indicate that they are foregoing a niche market, creating an opportunity. Or a spike in positive mentions for a new product can alert organizations to market disruptors.
- Operational efficiency – Deep analysis of social media can help organizations improve how they gauge demand. Retailers and others can use that information to manage inventory and suppliers, reduce costs and optimize resources.
What are the benefits of social media analytics?
By enabling companies to identify meaningful patterns and trends in social data, it helps companies make informed decisions in areas ranging from product development to public relations. Social media data analysis can help companies better understand the needs and expectations of their customers, improve the efficiency of customer service and market research carried out on social channels, invest smarter in product development and marketing, increase their competitive intelligence, and demonstrate their social media ROI.
How to Track and Understand Social Media Analytics
Step 1: Access Social Media Analytics
We use Facebook as an example of how to view the data that each social media platform offers.
Facebook Insights is a detailed program that helps you learn about your audience’s behavior. It’s simple to understand and includes interactive visual graphics – making it easy to use, even for beginners.
To navigate to the Insights panel, start at your business’s Facebook page and choose “Insights” from the white menu at the top of the page.
You’ll be presented with a number of choices, including:
- Actions on Page
- Page Views
- Page Likes
- Reach
- Post Engagements
- Page Followers
Step 2: Discover Information About Your Followers
Choose “Page Followers” to see information about your Facebook followers.
The graphs are interactive, and you can scroll over them to view specific information or click on them to pull more details.
To view information about how many followers you have, look at the first graph, “Total Followers.” Scrolling over it shows your total page followers on any specific date.
The next graph is called “Net Followers.” It calculates the number of page likes minus the number of unlikes to show overall audience growth.
Scroll over the graph to discover when people liked or unliked your pages. This is useful when you’re ready to measure the success of your shared content. You can look at the date you published a post and find out if you added followers – or lost them – on that day.
The third graph shows where your new followers were when they liked your page.
In the left-hand column of your Insights dashboard, there’s a menu for viewing different data.
Click on the Posts menu option to find information about when your audience is online.
Have you ever wondered when are the best times to post on social media? Here’s the data that gives you the answers.
By scrolling through the graph, called When Your Audience is Online, you can find the days and times your fans socialize on Facebook.
The graph above is a small sampling of the data that’s quickly available through the Facebook Insights manager.
You can see how simple it is to find information that will help grow your community and improve your ROI by better understanding your audience.
The other social media channels have unique analytic or insights programs, except Instagram, which uses the same platform as Facebook.
Step 3: Set Goals to Know What Social Media Metrics to Measure
It’s fascinating to watch your audiences unfold in such detail on different social media analytics programs. But before you get carried away, decide which numbers are important for achieving your goals. What data will you track and measure to improve results?
A recent study of 344 social media marketers revealed that the most important metrics for tracking the success of social media are engagement (36%) and conversion rates (35%).
Planning a social media campaign is a great way to get started because you choose a specific goal for a defined period of time. Your campaign will require you to track and measure the specific data needed to reach your goal(s).
The metrics you track and follow will depend on the goals you set in your social media strategy. Be sure they’re “S.M.A.R.T.” goals:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
For example, if your purpose is to improve brand awareness, you might set a goal of 500 likes or 100 shares. To reach that goal, you’ll track metrics such as likes, shares, net followers, and engagement.
If your purpose is to improve leads and sales, you might set a goal of a 3% click-through rate (CTR) and 2% conversion rate. In this case, you track the CTR from social media posts, ads, and calls to action, plus changes to your site traffic and conversions.
Step 4: Use Tools to Help Analyze and Measure Your Social Data
There are software programs and apps that allow you to manage all your social media accounts in one place to improve the effectiveness and results of your social media efforts.
For example, Sprout Social and Hootsuite are two apps that allow you to schedule posts ahead of time and track results across a number of social media platforms.
Google Analytics is another option for tracking social media results. You can learn more about using Google for social media data from MonsterInsights guide on how to analyze social media traffic using Google Analytics.
Step 5: Advance Your Knowledge With Outside Resources
When you’re ready to get serious about improving your profits and ROI, you might want to take a course or class. These courses come in many different forms.
Best social media analytics tools for marketers
1. Sprout Social
The need for cross-channel social media analytics makes Sprout Social an easy choice for No. 1 on our list.
Whether you want to dive deep into your performance on a single network, or quickly compare results across multiple networks at once, Sprout has you covered.
Track Facebook Page impressions, tally up Twitter link clicks, measure Instagram follower growth, evaluate LinkedIn engagement, asses content performance on Pinterest and much more, all from the same location.
Then quickly organize and share your data with easy-to-understand, presentation-ready reports. Or take it a step further with Premium Analytics and create your own custom report, tailored to your organization’s KPIs.
Sprout comes complete with both templated and customizable reporting options, meaning you have multiple ways to not only gather essential social metrics, but truly understand what they mean and present them to others including only the metrics you care about most and reducing the noise.
From tags to trends and everything in between, Sprout puts powerful analytics at your fingertips. You can even access data related to internal team performance and competitor activity to help you improve customer care or benchmark your brand against others in your industry.
But that’s only scratching the surface.
Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool arms you with valuable data related to audience demographics, industry influencers, campaign performance, share of voice and consumer sentiment.
No matter your social media analysis and reporting needs, Sprout has been built from the ground up to give you a fast, user-friendly way to discover and display social insights.
2. HubSpot
With HubSpot’s analytics tools you can tie social media performance to business and revenue growth. Whether publishing directly through HubSpot, or publishing using other tools or while on the go, you’ll be able to report on the success of your social strategy across every channel. You can also compare the performance of multiple social channels to measure campaign performance.
HubSpot’s social analytics tools offer expansive graphs and visuals that break down the numbers by specific platform features, like audience, session lengths, and impressions.
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What’s important to highlight is that HubSpot’s social analytics tools is part of HubSpot’s Marking Hub, their all-in-one inbound marketing software. This means that using the platform you’ll have insight into the entire customer journey, not only social media-specific metrics. You’ll be able to see which marketing tactics are working best for your business, how are they impacting your bottom line, and learn about your social media campaigns ROI.
That makes HubSpot an excellent choice for businesses whose marketing teams want to keep all campaign functions in one place.
3. TapInfluence
The boom of influencer marketing has created a need for social media tools specifically tailored for influencer campaigns.
Enter TapInfluence, an analytics platform which removes many of the “what-ifs” related to influencer marketing. This includes metrics such as reach, engagement rate and the potential price tag behind any given influencer.
In short, TapInfluence highlights relevant influencer metrics in black and white so brands can better understand whether or not a potential relationship makes sense prior to outreach.
Influencer campaigns shouldn’t be a black hole of ROI. In addition to individual influencer metrics, the platform also measures the performance of overall campaigns against industry benchmarks.
Conclusion
Social media analytics tools have become an indicator of the popularity of a social network. They are useful for reporting purposes, analysis, and brand awareness. These tools can help to measure the success of a campaign and determine if there is a correlation between social media and other platforms such as search engine optimization or pay per click.
Social media analytics tools can help you measure when assessing which of the following products best suit your needs and budget, track the success of your social media campaigns, and interact with other users. Using these tools, you have access to all of your teams’ data in real-time, which allows you to make informed decisions about the future growth of your business.