One of the biggest questions in marketing today is the value of social media analytics. Often marketers look at their analytics and see what’s working, how much traffic is going to their websites from social media, but sometimes it can get messy. So we’ve decided to put together a guide for understanding social media analytics and how you can create value from them.
How Does Social Media Analytics Create Value
Social media analytics is one of the most popular forms of data collection and analysis. It’s also one of the most important for your company.
Here are some ways social media analytics create value for businesses:
Social media analytics helps you understand how customers feel about your brand or product. You can use this information to improve your products or services, and make them more appealing to customers.
Social media analytics lets you identify potential customers who may be interested in your product or service offerings before they become actual customers. This means you can reach out to these people with promotional offers or incentives that might otherwise have gone unnoticed by other methods like traditional advertising channels such as print ads or television commercials.
Social media analytics enables companies like yours to better understand their competition through data collection and analysis methods such as competitive analysis reports which provide insight into competitor activity on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter so that companies can determine if any new trends are emerging within their industry sector which can be leveraged against competitors in order to gain market share and increase revenues overall
Social media analytics creates value by providing the insights you need to make better decisions about your social media strategy.
You know that social media is important for your brand, but how do you know what works? And how do you know what doesn’t work?
The answer is simple: social media analytics. Social media analytics helps you measure the impact of different strategies and tactics on your business, so that you can see which ones are working and which ones aren’t—and then adjust accordingly.
Social media analytics gives you the data that shows if something worked or not. For example, let’s say that a particular post got 5 times more engagement than another post with similar content—that means it was probably a good idea! But if a post received no engagement at all, then maybe it wasn’t so great.
Social media analytics is a tool that helps you understand your audience, and what they like. It can also help you better understand how to reach out to them.
There are many ways to use social media analytics to your advantage. For example, if you have a blog or a website, it’s important for you to know if people are reading it. You can use social media analytics tools to find out if people are actually reading the blog posts on your website. This will help you decide whether or not it’s worth continuing writing content for that particular topic or not.
It also helps you understand what kind of content gets shared most often on social media: pictures, videos or text-based posts? This will help you create more engaging content that will get more shares on Facebook and Twitter as well as other platforms where your audience lives online.
Social media analytics is a way to track the performance of your social media marketing campaigns, so you can make sure they’re working.
It can also help you figure out what’s working and what isn’t, so you can improve your campaigns.
It’s important to understand that social media analytics isn’t just a way to measure your success—it’s also a way to learn how people are engaging with your content. That information can help you make sure that when you’re creating content for social media, it’s engaging and interesting enough for people to share with their friends.
Social media analytics is a way to measure the impact of your social media strategy. It provides insight into your audience, their behaviors, and how they respond to your content.
This information can be used in many ways. For example, if you’re trying to understand how people are interacting with your brand on Instagram, it can help you understand what kind of content gets them excited and engaged. If you notice that people are engaging with your product photos more than anything else, then you may want to focus on posting more photos of your products rather than videos or articles about them.
Social media analytics also allows marketers to track their progress over time and see whether or not the changes they make actually have an impact on their overall business goals. For example, if you have a goal of increasing sales by 10% this month, then social media analytics will show you whether or not those sales increased at all (and if so, by how much). This data can help inform decisions down the line about whether or not certain strategies were effective at meeting those goals and which ones weren’t worth pursuing again next year!
Social media analytics is important because it helps you understand how your audience is engaging with your content and what they’re responding to. You can use this information to improve future content or make changes to your social media strategy.
In short, social media analytics helps you grow by giving you insight into how people interact with your brand.
How to measure the value of social media Analytics
Return On Investment
Do double-tapping posts and responding to tweets genuinely save you time? Your return on investment (ROI) was created to address this and other queries. ROI can be evaluated at the social media platform level for each campaign or at the level of social media marketing as a whole.
The formula for social media ROI is:
(Earnings – Costs) x 100 / Costs
Consider a campaign as an illustration. Earnings are the sum you put the campaign’s expenses on. Your earnings from a single email campaign are the click-through sales. Costs represent the time and money invested by all parties participating in the campaign, including your advertising budget. One of the finest indicators for measuring the value of social media is ROI. It gives monetary value to the time and resources invested in your social media marketing campaigns. As marketers, you frequently need to be able to provide these figures in order to justify actions such as buying new marketing software. Different firms use different inputs when calculating ROI. With our guide to social media ROI, you can learn more about how to put up your company’s plan.
Website traffic
Consumers take a number of actions after following a business on social media, according to the Sprout Social IndexTM, Edition XVII: Accelerate. Consumers will visit the brand’s online 91% of the time, make 90% of their purchases there, and go to the physical store 86% of the time. With these figures, you should surely be keeping an eye on the value social media adds to the traffic to your website.
E-commerce websites receive a large amount of referral traffic from social media. Referral traffic is tracked whenever someone visits your website from one of your social media posts. With a traffic share of almost 50%, Facebook has the highest rate of traffic referrals to e-commerce websites, followed by YouTube (24.46%) and Twitter (10%).
Connect your Google Analytics account or check the native data on your website to track website traffic. Utilize UTM trackers to go one step further and determine the sources of the clicks. In this approach, you’ll be able to identify which of your Facebook posts is responsible for a sudden increase in website traffic. The factors affecting website traffic data depend on how your business is run. Your website traffic data, for instance, will show if you have a substantial quantity of purchases in the fourth quarter. Or, if you write a blog article that gets picked up by news sources, that information is also taken into account. It’s crucial to monitor this measure because some traffic may be predicted while other traffic cannot.
Brand awareness
Brands gain from having a social media presence. Brand awareness should be a goal for you if you want to increase the number of people who are aware of your company through social media. In fact, 80% of consumers claim that brand recognition increases their propensity to make social media purchases. This makes your audience reach a crucial measure to monitor in order to gauge the value social media is providing for your business.
It takes time to build brand awareness, which takes many different forms. Brand awareness is measured by things like reviews, targeted video ads, and post reshares. Purchases have been shown to be influenced by online evaluations and suggestions from reliable sources. On social media, 92% of Millennials and 82% of Gen Z users read reviews left by other customers. By resharing these reviews, you can increase the social authority of your company. Alternately, make fresh content like Burt’s Bees. This is advantageous since you can then follow the relevant analytics for your post.
Engagement
Clicks, likes, reposts, following, views, and incoming messages are all examples of social media involvement. Being receptive to client service is also important for the brand. With the aid of engagement, brands can use their online presence to develop customer service and audience connection inside their selected social platform. According to data from Sprout, 47% of consumers think that providing excellent customer service elevates a brand to the top of its category on social media. In addition, 46% of them think that a company communicating with its audience is as crucial.
Customers engage with brands on social media in a variety of ways when they follow them. 73% of consumers will interact with the brand, and 76% will ask for assistance. 85% of customers will make more frequent purchases from you if you take the effort to develop your community.
Sales and lead generating
A frequent social media objective is to connect with clients while they are still in the consideration phase of their purchasing journey. Customers typically won’t visit one store exclusively when looking for furnishings. Instead, they will weigh their options before making a decision.
As was previously noted, being active and present on social media can influence consumer decisions and brand loyalty. Making ensuring that trackers are set up is the next step.
Make it simple for customers to buy your goods or services and build distinctive tracking links to set up analytics for your lead generation activities. Social commerce is expanding as a result of how simple it is to make a purchase inside of apps like Instagram. Take advantage of this by opening a store and, whenever possible, labeling your products.
Customer retention
While bringing in new clients is important, don’t ignore your existing clientele. According to a poll, 86% of people are more inclined to stick with a business that makes onboarding content investments. Furthermore, according to 63% of respondents, considerations for the purchase choice include post-purchase support.
Create informative content and offer post-purchase customer service support to increase retention rates. Employ customer retention strategies like rewards programs and email surveys. You’ll find that clients will stay longer. It can cost up to seven times more to acquire a new client than to retain an existing one. Returning customers are also 50% more likely to look into new products and 31% more likely to increase their spending. Using social media customer care is one of the finest strategies to raise customer retention rates.
Value of Social Media Marketing
1. Build Brand Awareness
Companies may convey their story across a variety of platforms, explain why they offer the services they do, and keep audiences informed with stories about their clients and employees.
B2B executives can further expand the reach of their brands if they can harness the opinions of their staff. Each employee has their own network, which could contain hundreds of contacts. Each of those contacts is then linked to hundreds of more persons.
2. Generate Leads
By posting videos, news, data, and intriguing trends, they may generate meaningful dialogue and interaction inside their target industry. These techniques not only help you establish credibility with potential clients, but they can also help you generate leads.
3. Nurture Leads
Salespeople can establish relationships with leads thanks to social selling. Potential customers can address problems by using their thought leadership articles, social proofing, and other information. Your sales team might develop credibility and trust as a result of this.
4. Implement Social Listening
Pay attention to what clients and other customers have to say about the business. This gives you the ability to hear direct opinions about how other people see your brand. It provides a glimpse into enhancing your company’s weaker parts while highlighting its positive qualities.
5. Connect Social Posts to Opportunities
With the right enterprise solution, leaders can drive customer posts to their CRM to understand customers more fully.*
6. Measure Marketing Efforts
You can monitor important performance indicators using social media platforms and management solutions (KPIs). Even the worth of organic social media engagement in dollars may be determined. Earned media value (EMV) provides an estimate of the price invested in ads for organic social engagement and reach.
7. Build Brand Authenticity
Brands have the chance to develop trust with potential customers, partners, and talent/employees by engaging on social media. This is especially true if other people are spreading the word about your company’s name, products, or services. Family and friend suggestions and advice are roughly three times more likely to be trusted by consumers than official brand channels.
8. Drive Thought Leadership
Social networking is a fantastic resource for discovering people’s interests and issues. By addressing issues, brands have the chance to promote thought leadership by using social media. Create tutorials, seminars, and other helpful content so that customers will trust your brand as a reliable source of information.
9. Grow Your Audience
4.48 billion individuals using social media in 2021. Social media not only provides you with access to the greatest online addressable market, but it also reveals what real people are interested in or talk about. You can develop an audience that believes in your brand, products, and services if you discover how to use thought leadership material to address the issues facing this market.
10. Build a Community
You can create a vibrant social media community for your brand with some preparation and interaction. To quickly produce Likes and Shares for your material so that it reaches new audiences, you can use both employees and consumers.
Social Media Values
ROI
To find out how many people, page views, conversions, and order values your social media platforms have generated, use your analytics platform. This makes it simple to compare sources like paid search or third-party referrals to, say, Facebook (organic or paid). It’s simple to figure out your return on investment through social media marketing. But what about social media’s natural traffic?
Some businesses factor labor costs into their organic ROI calculations. Employees do, after all, spend time posting content and interacting with clients and prospects. Additionally, it is simple to estimate the cost of a specialist social media marketer.
However, often it is difficult to show a clear connection between social media engagement and income. A product might have originally caught a consumer’s eye on an influencer’s channel. The customer might have then performed a Google search for it, located the retailer’s website, and finished the transaction. The consumer wouldn’t have known about the product if the influencer hadn’t posted about it on social media.
Website Traffic
Merchants ought to be able to link the increase in site traffic brought on by social media posts. A retailer might, for instance, gauge traffic from a post on Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. to only one from last week. To compare traffic across a number of days and posts, however, is the most effective way when seasonality and outside factors are taken into account.
The percentage of overall conversions can be assigned to the source by averaging the lift over time in order to correlate sales from each social channel. By ceasing all social media participation for a week or two, a retailer may assess the effect by monitoring overall sales and traffic.
Awareness
Social media can raise brand recognition, which eventually should result in sales. The idea is comparable to content marketing, which may increase organic search traffic but does not always result in immediate purchases.
The measurement in this case is to monitor all social media mentions of your company using programs like Google Alerts (free) or Sprout Social (not free). The impact of greater exposure might then be assessed by comparing the brand mentions on each social media platform to overall traffic, regardless of channel. The worth of each social media site can also be determined by analyzing the lift from brand mentions.
Compare quarterly or annual sales to the rise or fall in brand mentions to determine the relationship between brand awareness and conversions.
Engagement
A company’s reputation can be made or broken by how it addresses complaints and inquiries in the media.
On social media, there are numerous techniques to gauge participation. Keep tabs on how many people interact with your business on a weekly or monthly basis, as well as the nature of their inquiries. The amount of general market satisfaction with your goods and services might then be well quantified.
Participation on social media can also provide details about your business’s shipping rules, promotions, and problem-solving procedures. By filtering and analyzing discourse and measuring it in various ways, social media listening platforms like Sprout Social and Sysomos can assist with quantifying engagement.
The amount of followers, likes, interactions, website clicks, and conversions are the fundamental social media metrics for each platform. By keeping track of these, you can determine whether you’re interacting with your followers, which posts perform best, and when to post. All are essential for social media channel optimization.
Conclusion
The value of social media analytics is directly correlated to the value that you can provide with your social media presence. It’s not just about numbers and data, but it’s also about what you do with the data that you have. If you don’t have a strategy in place or have an idea of where you’re going, you’ll struggle to see any value in social media analytics. Use these insights to increase your social media efforts’ potential and add more value to your business.