Social media data is a rich source of information and can be used by many people and areas of your company. The data helps you to make better and faster decisions on what to post, helps you get more fans and followers, track the success of your social marketing campaigns as well as predict the future and measure the ROI.
How to Find Social Media Analytics
So, you might wonder, “even if you have all of this social data from various social media platforms, what use does it offer? This is where the fun begins.
Having access to raw data provides you with the opportunity to understand your customers better, and develop an effective content strategy. When you obtain data, you can know the interests of your audience and tailor the content you create for real people.
Here are five marketing goals that social media data collection can be used for:
Content optimization
The Content Marketing Institute reports that 57% of marketing professionals agree that creating on-page content is the best SEO strategy. At this time, every business is aware of how important SEO is to reaching customers through internet marketing.
It should come as no surprise that maximizing audience engagement is one of the key goals of many traditional and internet businesses.
Content optimization has shown to be the most effective strategy for creating high levels of engagement with both current audiences and potential consumers. Utilizing modern technology, it’s easy to optimize your content for both customers and enterprises.
Collecting data from social media makes sure you have enough information to meet your audience’s needs based on their preferences. It is simpler to determine which social media sites are most popular with your audience by gathering data.
Social media data collecting also makes sure that you are fully aware of the content types that your audience like, the best times of day to post, and the best ways to increase reach. Use Popsters, a social media content analytics tool, to make such jobs easier.
Social media strategy development
The nicest thing about developing a social media strategy is that it effectively insures your business for future advancements. You can be sure that your company has a backup plan in place for unforeseen changes to social media platforms by putting a media strategy in place.
You can find out what your customers discuss and post about by gathering social media data. This means that since you are already aware of their issues, you can quickly find solutions. For companies who want to know what their customers think of them, Twitter is a crucial medium.
Utilizing a social media strategy guarantees that your material stays genuine while addressing your audience’s needs. An estimated 80% of consumers believe that “authenticity of content” has a significant impact on their decision to continue with a company.
Better SEO strategies
The total picture of social media marketing includes SEO significantly. Although it is tempting to believe that merely creating more content would result in greater interaction, this is not necessarily the case.
Social media data makes it possible for you to create the correct strategies needed to keep your current clients and attract new ones. In this approach, you may obtain the necessary information to produce the content required for every given situation thanks to the data that has been gathered.
On the majority of social networks, engagement, hashtags, and keywords are some of the fundamental concepts.
Social networking networks are utilized in conjunction with search engines like Google and Bing while conducting searches.
According to estimates, Facebook alone processed more than one billion search requests in 2012.
Brand image management
Did you realize that poor customer service costs American brands $41 billion annually? Social media platforms are a great resource for learning what people are saying about your business. You may find out what people are saying, whether positively or negatively, about your brand using data gathered from various social media sites.
This guarantees that you can come up with practical solutions for keeping your clients happy and addressing their problems. With the help of Facebook messaging, some businesses have been able to attract new clients by learning more about their target market’s wants and preferences.
Easily spot effective social media influencers
Of course, word-of-mouth and popularity are good ways to find social media influencers. Finding an influencer who exactly matches the requirements of your business, though, could be trickier. Social media data collection comes into play here.
Through their social media posts, social media influencers have the ability to affect their followers’ purchasing decisions. When used properly, brand influencers can play a significant role in your marketing plan.
According to research, even if two brands are stating the same thing, 92 percent of consumers will trust a personal recommendation. It is not surprising that a lot of businesses lately switched their advertising operations to social media.
Influencers, for instance, can assist in educating your clients about your items.
In essence, you may choose the ideal influencer using social media data to better represent your business and expand your clientele. Influencers can help you by helping you to develop pertinent postings, offering market insights, igniting a dialogue about your brand, identifying trends, and granting suitable access to your company.
In order to get and analyze social media data from their clients, marketing organizations must overcome a special set of obstacles.
First, you need a clever method for tracking data. Compared to manually combing through each social media channel’s native metrics, it must be quicker and more trustworthy.
Second, make sure your calculations are correct. The substantial amounts of data you gather from
Thirdly, you must align yourself with your clients. Working together to find the social media metrics and KPIs that meet their demands is crucial because each of them has different objectives.
And finally, you need to summarize all the information you’ve gathered into a report that even your clients with the least data literacy can understand.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of your efforts and translate data insights into actionable takeaways and next steps, you must complete all of the above.
It seems like a large-scale endeavor. But you can accomplish all of these objectives with the appropriate social media data collection technology.
In this tutorial for marketing firms, we’ll explain why and how to gather, examine, and display social media data.
You’ll learn some of the most important metrics to track, how to create a social media report, and how to choose the right social media analytics tool.
Why should you collect and analyze social media data?
Social media data is the information that is collected from a company’s profiles across different social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Snapchat.
It helps you understand how people consume and engage with content through likes, shares, comments, reactions, clicks, and more.
Collecting and analyzing social media data can help you improve your marketing efforts, stay on top of emerging trends, and offer your clients proof of your results.
And, it can help you continuously refine and improve your strategy. When you are guided by data, you waste less time on guesswork and minimize your risk of making mistakes.
You can learn so much from social media data, so let’s talk about some of the key insights you’ll be able to offer your clients.
The most effective channels
Most brands have numerous profiles on a wide variety of social media sites. However, not all are equally effective.
For example, your client might have lots of followers and high engagement rates on Instagram, but their Facebook page brings little value.
This information will shape your strategy, but you’ll need to know more before you decide whether to double down on Instagram or bring your Facebook campaign up to scratch.
What Are Social Analytics Tools
Social analytics tools help you understand how your content is performing on social media.
They allow you to see which types of posts are popular, which types of users are engaging with your posts, and what other content is trending at the moment.
Social analytics tools can be used to help manage your social media accounts, measure the impact of campaigns, and build better strategies for engagement.
Social analytics tools are the best way to make sense of your social media presence. They help you understand what kind of content works well on different platforms, which audiences are engaging with your brand, and what kind of content they want to see more of. You can use these insights to create better content in the future, as well as to tailor your marketing strategy and make sure you’re always reaching the right people.
In other words, social analytics tools tell you how well your content is doing on social media platforms—what’s working and what isn’t. This information is crucial for any business that wants to grow its audience and get more people involved in their brand.
Social analytics tools are a way to track social media campaigns and see how they’re performing. They can help you figure out what is working, so you can keep doing it, and what isn’t working, so you can stop doing that.
You’ll want to use social analytics tools if you have a business or organization that relies on social media for publicity.
If you’re using social media for marketing purposes, then knowing what works and what doesn’t will help you reach your goals more effectively. Social analytics tools can also help determine whether or not your content is being shared as much as expected; if it isn’t, then maybe it’s time to change things up!
If you’re trying to build an engaged audience, then you need to know what kind of content they like and when they like it—and that’s where social media analytics comes in. Social media analytics tells you exactly how many people interacted with each post on your page, which ones got the most engagement, and what time of day is best for posting.
Analytics can be used to track your own engagement with followers, as well as the engagement of others. It can also help you understand how people are finding your posts and whether or not their content is driving sales for you. It’s important to track your social media metrics in order to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, identify areas for improvement, and see how much engagement each post gets.
Social Analytics Tools
1. Keyhole
Keyhole is the first item on our list of the top social media analytics tools. The platform provides a stunning, thorough, and simple dashboard that tracks all of your social media activity.
Keyhole’s user-friendly technology genuinely helps you understand the thoughts of future clients and engagements. To help you decide what and where is most effective, you will now have access to comprehensive reporting that has been streamlined.
This platform offers a huge number of functions. The quantity of impressions, reach, posts, and engagements that particular accounts or hashtags are receiving will be visible to you.
Keyhole can help you there as well if you need to figure out which key influencers have the most followers and the highest interaction rates. In conclusion, you
2. Sprout Social
Sprout Social’s expertise in tracking and reporting on cross-channel social media analytics is what really elevated it on this list. With the help of this platform, you can compare all of the outcomes from various networks at once or get in-depth into the reports and analytics of a single network.
You can track anything from Facebook impressions to Twitter link clicks with the help of Sprout Social’s numerous features and tools. Having said that, tracking data for sites like LinkedIn and Pinterest are also integrated because, as we all know, social media platforms are rapidly developing.
The platform provides both pre-built and bespoke reporting possibilities. This means that you will have a variety of options.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another of the top social media analytics tools available right now. This platform has a strong reputation in this industry and has long offered reliable social interaction services.
You can fully manage postings, collaborations, scheduling, and analytics with the aid of Hootsuite. Your social media management team will be able to automate posts with the tools it offers, schedule posts appropriately, access a ton of analytics and insights, and calculate key performance indicators from all the marketing content.
Hootsuite’s ability to swiftly and simply interface with all social media networks, such as Facebook and Instagram, is yet another noteworthy feature. This implies that viewing analytics doesn’t require switching between different platforms. rather, you can.
4. Zoho Social
We are all aware that Zoho has a ton of fantastic products, including one of the greatest CRM systems. With the inclusion of Zoho Social, they also bring a solid platform for managing and reaching on social media.
Through its user-friendly publication calendar function, the platform enables you to effortlessly plan out and produce posts. Additionally, you can quickly keep track of every campaign and make tailor-made reports that are simple to read and understand.
From the convenience of the Zoho Social dashboard, interact in real-time with your social media audience and actively engage your followers. Check out Zoho, particularly if you currently use their platform for other tasks.
5. Buffer Analyze
Buffer is a different name that you might be somewhat familiar with. Additionally, they feature strong yet incredibly easy-to-use social media analytics tools with their Buffer Analyze software. It has all the functions and resources you could possibly need for managing and monitoring your social media feeds.
You can easily schedule post timings and manage numerous social media accounts at once, just like with many other programs on this list. All of this enables you to focus on client involvement to the nth degree.
Buffer Analyze is undoubtedly a platform you should think about using because of the integrated social media analytics capabilities that enable you to increase reach, engagement, and sales.
Importance of Social Media Analytics
They help you understand your audience
Taking steps to understand your audience using social data can help you in so many ways. For example, analyzing your past posts can help you find your unique best time to share.
Timing is an important part of social media marketing. If you post when your fans are online and at their highest level of alertness your posts will drive more engagement, traffic and sales.
Therefore, you should dissect your social data and find your unique best time to post on social media.
Some social networks let you do this easily through their built-in analytics.
On Facebook, you can find it by going to the ‘Post’ section in your insights.
You’ll then see two graphs at the top of the screen.
They will show you the days and times at which most of the page’s fans are online.
If you post content at these times, reach will be high.
They show you what your best social networks are
Not all social networks will work perfectly for you. Just because Facebook has over 2 billion users and Instagram has over 800 million users doesn’t mean they will drive the best results.
There might be smaller networks like Pinterest or Flickr that can help execute your strategy better.
The only way to confirm which social networks work best is through experimentation and using your analytics to measure how much engagement, traffic and sales you are getting.
This data can be utilized to focus more on social networks that are working for you and eliminating ones that aren’t.
You can also use the data to prioritize the amount of time you spend managing each social network. More time can be spent on the top performing networks and lesser on ones that bring in smaller results.
To figure out which social networks are driving the highest engagement, you should use a social media dashboard tool like Cyfe. It connects to several social networks and you can place data from all of them in one single dashboard to compare performance.
Here’s a screenshot of one of my dashboards containing data from different social networks.
Cyfe also has a feature known as mashups which can be used to mash data from different social networks to create one graph that compares performance.
Social data can help you create better content
When you track your social networks, you will understand what content drives the best results.
On networks like Facebook and Twitter you will be able to see whether images, links or videos do better. While on visual-centric networks like Pinterest and Instagram you can check what type of images perform best.
To figure out what content is performing best you can use your social media page’s analytics. Some social networks like Facebook have built-in analytics that shows what types of media perform best. You can view it in the ‘Posts’ section of your analytics on Facebook.
As you can see in the screenshot below, links are performing best on this page.
You can also use analytics to check how your blog performs. You can see which content is shared more, the number of visits each social network sends, how much time they spent and how many of those people converted to subscriptions and sales.
To check your content’s performance on social media, you can use a tool like Buzzsumo.
And to check the amount of traffic a social network is driving you can use Google Analytics. This tool will also display other metrics like the amount of time these people spent on your site, the number of pages they visited, the bounce rate, etc.
Help you Understand competitors
Your competitors are also creating content and running social media strategies. This will result in their own unique data.
If you analyze this data, you will be able to figure out what is working and what isn’t. It will help you avoid the mistakes they are making and only focus on techniques that bring results.
To figure out which social networks are working best for your competitors you can use Similar Web.
Just add the URL to any website and it will show you the percentage of the traffic your site receives from social media and the social networks driving it.
Then you can spy on your competitors’ top performing social media and content using Cyfe and Buzzsumo.
For example, on Cyfe you can create an Instagram widget and choose to track a competitors account instead of your own. You just add their username and select the metric.
Here I chose top posts by ‘Likes’ and I am able to view them.
I can click on each post and it will take me to the post on Instagram so that I can take a closer look.
Conclusion
Social media is a game of numbers, and a core part of succeeding in this arena is knowing how to get your hands on this data. Whether you’re looking for customer insights or trying to better understand the behavior of your target audience, social media analysis can really give you the edge. Try these methods out for yourself and see just how much social media data can do for you.