Social media analytics is a great way to understand your audience and get an idea of what they want. There are many ways to do this, but the most common is using Excel. You can use Excel to pull data from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can then use this data to create graphs and tables about your audience’s demographics and interests. This information will help you understand who your customers are so you can better target them with ads or other marketing initiatives.
How to Track Social Media Analytics on Excel
Social media analytics is one of the most vital elements of your social media strategy. You can’t just post on your Facebook page and hope that people will come. There’s a lot more to it than that, and if you want to grow your audience and get people engaged with your brand, then you need to use analytics to understand how well you’re doing.
With Excel, you can analyze all kinds of data related to your social media accounts. You can see which posts have been getting the most engagement, how many people are following your pages, what kind of engagement each post has received, and much more.
Social media analytics are an essential component of any company’s marketing strategy. By monitoring social media channels, companies can get a glimpse into the perception of their brand and make adjustments as needed.
One way to use social media analytics is to look at how many times a brand is mentioned on each platform and what kind of content is being shared. Another method is to see how many impressions a specific post receives and how many people liked it or shared it. These insights can be used to improve performance or troubleshoot issues with campaigns and products.
In order to perform these kinds of analyses, you need access to data from multiple platforms, which can be challenging without a robust tool like Excel available. The good news is that there are several ways you can use Excel for this purpose:
How to Set Up Your Social Media Analytics Excel Spreadsheets
You can create your social media analytics spreadsheet in one of two ways. The first option is to utilize a pre-made template from Factivate, enter the login information for your social media accounts, and create a dynamic spreadsheet that will show data in real time.
The second option is to use Excel’s manual process. Keep in mind that to keep your data current, you must constantly update your spreadsheet.
Why do I need a Social Media Analytics Spreadsheet?
Regardless of the size of your company, we should always measure two things (to start with) when it comes to social media analytics: engagement and community.
You must regularly monitor, test, and gauge the responses to your own postings if you want to make sure that you’re providing your followers with relevant, engaging content. This spreadsheet assists you in accomplishing that.
Step 1: Build Your Spreadsheet
To begin, open Excel and create 14 columns that will contain the following categories:
- Date
- Network
- Categories
- Subcategories
- Target
- Calls to Action
- Meta-tags
- Posts
- Impressions
- Comments (replies)
- Likes (favorites)
- Shares (retweets)
- Clicks
- Total Engagement
The engagement statistics for your content should be kept in the final four columns. In order to improve your total Engagement figures based on what you have learnt, keep in mind that you may also set weights to assess content depending on importance (for example, I only want my clicks to weigh roughly 30% of a Comment).
You should either measure that user’s activity or repost with the author’s name included because there are three basic engagement behaviors on every network: like, remark, and share.
Step 2: Identify Categories and Subcategories
Based on the main subjects of your posts and your overall content strategy, create categories. Once you have that list, you can utilize it to determine the key trends in the performance of the content on the various networks and channels. We included a few of the categories that Factivate has previously used in our example, but normal categories should also include:
- Product: Posts about major product categories
- Holidays/Seasonal: Posts with seasonal themes. These are really helpful if your business has any sort of ecommerce component.
- Third-party content: Posts with content or references from other websites such as blog posts, white papers, presentations, news, and articles.
You can create as many categories as necessary but be sure to keep them general.
Make subcategories out of the categories after you have a list of them. You’ll be able to do this to discover microtrends and the kind of content that perform the best inside your specific segments. Examples based on the aforementioned categories include:
- Specific product names or features
- Specific holiday names or seasonal campaign names
- Specific website names (i.e. HuffingtonPost) or topics for articles such as “analytics”, “humor”, etc…
Step 3: Outline your Target Demographics and Calls To Action
A thorough understanding of your target market and the overarching objectives of your marketing initiatives is necessary for these two columns. If you haven’t taken the time to think about these two columns, be sure you sit down with your complete team.
Target Demographic
Your targeted audience for your material should fit your target demographic. Generally speaking, the more particular you can be with your material, the greater influence it will have. For the sake of this example, we have used the target demographics of job functions within marketing businesses. If you haven’t already, be sure to spend some time with your team thinking about the various personas that make up your audience and create material or context that is tailored to each persona that you hope will read your content.
Calls to Action (CTA)
CTAs can take a variety of shapes, depending on the specific objectives of each article in each category. Keep in mind that not all posts require CTAs, and not all CTAs should be product-related, as audiences today tend to avoid the continual advertising that is thrust upon them.
Examples of CTAs include:
- Download
- Visit website
- Subscribe
- Buy Now
- Share
Meta-tags
These would be our meta-tags if subcategories had subclasses. You should utilize meta-tags to define the various components of the content in order to perform a far more thorough analysis of your content type. These may consist of keywords, picture descriptions, or even copy’s tone descriptors (such as humorous or excited).
With the use of meta tags, you may identify trends in your creative material and create a more dynamic context for your postings.
Step 4: Collecting your data
This is where you will begin adding data to the spreadsheet from various sources. Be careful to execute this appropriately because errors related to these importing and manual processes can be found in roughly 88% of spreadsheets. Make sure to register for Factivate if you want this step to be completed for you automatically. Once you sign up with Factivate, this procedure will be carried out for you in real time.
We’ve imported data from Linkedin, Facebook Insights, and Twitter Analytics into the sample below. To prepare the imports and ensure there have been no human errors, set aside at least 2 hours each time you want to import data from various sources into Excel.
You will need to export regularly to make sure your data is up to date.
Using tools like HootSuite, Buffer App, Pardot, or Marketo to measure which specific posts receive the most clicks will help you achieve this if you frequently post the same link in different places. You may measure posts across several networks using some of these tools, some of which are free.
Step 5: Formatting, and Sorting your Data
Sort the Total Engagement column in descending order to find your best-performing content across all of your marketing platforms. The top of the column will display the posts with the highest performance once your data has been sorted. To be really effective, you should regularly measure this data (we do it every three days), then focus your content improvement efforts on the top-performing post categories, subcategories, and meta information.
If you wish to find the best performing posts for specific social networks, like Twitter or Facebook, you can also filter by Network and then by total engagement.
Step 6: Analyze Categories
The following step is to manually filter for the groups and subgroups you’re interested in studying and start looking at patterns. When you have that data, try to compare it to the trends in your historical data to see if anything stands out to you.
Make sure to include more than one category or subcategory allocated to content when manually filtering in Excel. Instead of selecting the check boxes that show when you begin the filter process, you must use the “contains” field in the Excel filter feature.
It’s time to assess the top content for each channel and category so that you can determine your post-ROI. See if you can see any upward or declining patterns by comparing it to earlier data. What can you do to assist your content be optimized for each strategy?
What does the analysis reveal about the data below? One conclusion might be that one of the image categories performed incredibly well, and we should base future iterations on that data to boost Twitter user engagement. Our historical data support this conclusion, which is appropriate.
To create your first social media analytics portal, you don’t need to be a data scientist. You can determine which material performs best with a little work and a rudimentary comprehension. To keep your material relevant and fresh, keep trying new things and iterating often. Use your spreadsheet to reveal crucial information about your post-engagement, and make sure to keep it updated to ensure that your data is as current as possible. Additionally, you can use Factivate to keep your data current so that you can choose the best course of action for your content strategy.
Your social media influence can be measured using a variety of factors. Hopefully, this article will give you a head start in learning what they are.
Marketing Analytics Using Excel
Data storage and organization began to be done using Excel. Later, it started to be used as a simple data computation application. Thanks to a number of updates, it is currently regarded as an entrance into the analytics industry. In this post, let’s investigate the area of marketing analytics with Excel and recognize the tool’s strengths.
Excel’s greatest asset is that we have all used it to create those straightforward charts and perform minor data processing. We are all aware of how easy Excel is to use. However, we haven’t yet used data analytics, which is this tool’s most important application.
Why Marketing Analytics Using Excel
The reason for preference of Excel for marketing analytics industry wide is threefold:
Easy to Use: Excel does not use strict coding procedures. It features straightforward, user-friendly commands that lead you through the procedure. For someone wishing to enter the field of analytics, it is the first step.
Range of Application: One tool that can save, organize, arrange, compute, analyze, and then show data in the clearest possible way is Excel. Because of its utility, it has spanned numerous fields and divisions.
For any professional or academic career in data analytics, learning Excel is essential. Because it is visual, clear, and keeps things straightforward, it has a wide range of applications.
The amount of data that marketers manage includes information about sales, product price, customer reviews, and other customer insights. All businesses are using data-driven marketing to maximize their efforts to reach the educated consumer. The secret to turning this data into information is analytics.
Excel’s extensive analytics functionality makes it simple to perform marketing analytics using Excel. Let’s discuss those topics in more detail so that you can fairly comprehend how to conduct marketing analytics using Excel.
Excel to Summarize Marketing Data
Imagine that you are the area sales manager for a company that sells shoes. Observe and evaluate the following:
- Investigate the sales volume and % Sales for every month and for different products.
- Analyze the impact of weekends and festive seasons on your sales volume.
- Study the impact of a marketing promotion on sales.
Do you think these situations are applicable? They ought to, since once we start working, the majority of us will be conducting analyses of this nature.
The information is presented as rows and columns of random numbers and text. To acquire insights, it’s crucial to analyze this data in several ways.
Pivot Tables are useful for compressing insights from vast, comprehensive data sets. Additionally, slicers make it simple to traverse through data by performing rapid filters. Additionally, pivot tables aid in data visualization, which makes it simple to examine and display data.
Best Free Social Media Analytics Templates
Social media report template
With this free report template, you can measure your consolidated social media KPIs by consolidating the data into one interface. The template is made for easy KPI tracking so you can see your target progress and goal completion.
You can share the template with your team so they’re more informed about the success of their marketing efforts.
The template also helps you gain valuable insights into trends while tracking changes in metrics like followers, reach, impressions, and engagement on your social media channels.
You can also know where your audience is from, what they like, their professions, gender, and more so you can make better decisions on creative content.
Once you sign up for a trial with Whatagraph, you can download and use the social media report template for free.
2. Social media analytics report template
To prove the value of your efforts at work or in your business, you need to record and analyze social media performance. You can begin by creating a report that will help you keep track of key metrics for different social networks.
This social media analytics template helps you report on metrics like followers, engagement, shares, views, click-throughs, and more with your team. You can replace the metrics with those that matter to your brand.
3. HubSpot social media report template
If you need to report the results of a social media campaign, the social media report template from HubSpot offers a free way for you to share the data clearly and effectively.
The comprehensive template is downloadable in Word, PowerPoint, Google Docs or Slides, and PDF. You can describe the social media channels you use, offer details on brand posts, audience, total engagement or as a percentage of the audience, and changes month over month for each metric.
You also get the earned media data, which includes potential reach, number of mentions, potential impressions, and more.
The template offers a section for you to include your goals, opportunities, key initiatives, and wins for each social media channel.
4. Talkwalker social media report template
If you want to find out what works and what doesn’t in your business or organization, you need to track your social media strategies and owned accounts.
The Talkwalker report template helps you prove that your team’s efforts are effective as it shows that targets are being achieved.
The template helps you compare social media channels to find out the most favored ones among your followers and which ones bring the most success with minimal effort. You also get to see the content that’s working, replicate your successes, and improve failures.
You can compare your market impact with your competitors and see if you’re missing any opportunities to grow your online fan base. This template helps you see the bigger picture and make decisions to prioritize resources based on channels with the highest return on investment (ROI).
5. Slidebean social media analytics template
In order to present a complete and full social media analytics report, you need all the actionable insights at your fingertips. Some platforms have different metrics, varying them in importance in relation to others so you need to establish your focus areas early enough.
No matter which channel you use, you need to consider how each post affects the user and define your strategy based on how effective the platforms you use are.
Doing this helps you make tough decisions faster and provide the necessary measurements in the long run.
With this social media analytics template by Slidebean, you’ll get all the visual aids you need to understand the success of your brand on each social media platform.
6. Sprout Social’s social media analytics template
If you’re in charge of managing the social presence for your business or organization, you may feel a bit under pressure to show how your efforts are paying off. Your team may also want to know that you’re on the same page, and these are totally fair concerns.
The challenge lies in presenting the data in a way that makes sense to everyone. If you’re struggling to convey your social activities to your team, this template helps you step up your social media reporting.
The template takes your reporting to the next level by providing information by network or cross-channel reports. You can also build it your way to make sure you meet all your needs.
You can also adapt it to your business and the preferred social media channels in a matter of clicks. It’s also easy to edit via Apple Preview for Macs or Adobe on other PCs.
7. Social media analytics template by Buffer
You can use a template to complete the task more quickly if you’re in a hurry and need a quick and easy approach to catch up with your business or company’s social media metrics.
Buffer created an easy-to-use, free social media analytics template that you can use to gather all of your stats in one location. As it’s simple to populate with a data export, it’s both time and lifesaving.
You can integrate your social media statistics into the template, view the most recent week’s statistics and how they compare to those from previous weeks or to your monthly benchmark.
Just export your data or manually input stats, and the template will take care of the rest.
8. Social media analytics template by Keyhole
When there is no data-driven social media reporting strategy, posting on social media platforms can feel like a black hole.
You will need to provide reports on the outcomes of your campaigns whether you manage social media accounts for yourself, your business, a digital marketing agency, or simply as a freelancer.
It’s difficult enough to try to determine what does and doesn’t work. Even worse, you have to deal with the more difficult problem of connecting with and demonstrating that value to other team members.
This free social media reporting template from Keyhole simplifies your life by summarizing your social media strategy, highlighting achievements, communicating essential metrics, and emphasizing future actions.
You can customize the 38-slide template to your own branding, input your KPIs and goals, report on all social media platforms, and perform influencer or social listening reporting.
9. DashThis social media analytics template
This comprehensive template by DashThis helps you track your performance on social media platforms while optimizing your campaigns and showing measurable results to your team.
This way, you’ll spend less time reporting so you can have more time to grow your community, become an influencer, or build your social media strategy.
The report is easy to create and has everything you need to get started quickly. Among its features include standard, pre-built social media metrics and KPIs, and you can customize it to visualize the data you need, however you want.
Whether they’re Instagram analytics stats, tweets or hashtags, the DashThis template can help you track your entire social media performance at a glance.
You won’t need PowerPoint or Excel sheets anymore as this time-saving template gives you everything in one place.
You can also optimize your ROI with the preset KPIs for all your social media platforms, including LinkedIn and Facebook Ads.
A widget is included that can track page likes, new likes, follower growth, the number of followers or subscribers, and more KPIs. The most important part of social media is your visibility, and this template ensures you get to improve this aspect as it tracks everything in the given timeframe.
You can track your reach, impressions, and frequencies for your daily, monthly, or quarterly reports. The template also shows you how engaged your audience is as it reports on KPIs such as likes, retweets, social shares, clicks, comments, video views, and more.
You also get to see your top-performing social media posts using the multi-column list widgets. The widgets sort and display the number of posts by engagement, engagement rate, click-through rate, demographics, and any other metric you want.
10. MavSocial social media analytics template
MavSocial provides important social media reports that can keep you one step ahead of your rivals. The template makes it easier to monitor your social media performance and incorporate the learnings into your marketing plan.
By doing so, you may enhance your social media strategy, demonstrate the value of your work to your boss or clients, save time, and position yourself for success.
With just a few clicks, you can quickly display the performance of your social media channels by updating the Google Slides file template with your own information and branding.
Apps for Social Media Analytics
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Brand24
You might not be familiar with Brand24, which is unfortunate considering they offer one of the greatest social media monitoring tools available.
Our is a paid tool that offers a 2-week free trial (like all the others on this list). This implies that before making a final choice, you can dip your toes in the water and thoroughly investigate the platform.
The key aspects of social analytics monitoring include getting a ton of social analytics from various platforms, viewing engagement and influence metrics, finding trending hashtags, and viewing a variety of significant hashtag statistics.
Don’t forget to check out Brand24; it’s a platform you won’t want to miss. With their comfort
Cyfe
One of the greatest social media management analytics tools is Cyfe, a company dashboard tool. It can sync all of your data from all of your platforms and marketing tools in one location.
The topic of analytics extends beyond social media to include advertising, email, monitoring, sales, SEO, and website analytics.
The enormous variety of integrations that may be included in a single dashboard makes Cyfe stand out. You may sync and combine data and statistics from 19 different social media and other types of accounts using the platform.
No matter how many accounts you have open at once, this enables you to use data and make wise social media engagement decisions while relaxing in the comfort of a single panel.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is likely the greatest social editorial calendar available, in addition to being a fantastic social media analytics platform. It excels in this area since it enables you to evaluate how well your social media posts are performing.
CoSchedule will provide suggestions for enhancements and recommendations to you across all channels using this data.
Not only that, but the calendar also provides information on the ideal time, day, and kind of content to post.
You should give CoSchedule a close look if you need social media analytics for everything from social engagement to social sharing, as well as everything in between.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch completes our ranking of the top social media analytics tools. Comparatively speaking to the other tools on this list, the platform operates a little differently. It gathers mentions from blogs, news websites, discussion forums, social media sites, and other publicly accessible sources from all over the internet.
After combining all of these mentions with other analytical tools that are already there, it generates comprehensive reports in either an easy-to-read HTML or PDF format.
Additionally, the site strives to offer information on a variety of topics, including influences, places, image analysis, and demographics.
If you wish to add mentions in your reporting, take a look at Brandwatch.
Buffer
Buffer is a great tool that will help you in two main ways. You can write a few of posts at a time and choose which social profiles to send them to, and then Buffer will spread them throughout the day or week so that you don’t have to be at a computer all the time in order to have a social media presence. It also shortens your links and tracks engagement so you can see how many people clicked on them.
Why You Should Use Social Media Management Tools?
Actually, there are several justifications for employing social media management solutions.
You can use the ability to track the success of all social media posts across all channels in addition to the obvious tracking and indicator performances for marketing.
This power allows social media marketing teams and managers to more precisely identify the posts and/or paid campaigns that are creating the most discussion and engagement.
Teams can work on developing plans they are confident will succeed in the future with the help of this expertise and insight.
What Features Should You Look For?
One size probably doesn’t fit all when it comes to social media scheduling tools and software. Many of your final decisions will be influenced by both your personal preferences and the actual needs of your business.
Despite this, no matter whatever platform you ultimately choose, there are still several things you should make sure you have access to. Here are some key characteristics to consider.
Competitor Analysis
Let’s face it: you want to be able to monitor both your own social media analytics and those of rival efforts. It is crucial that the social media analytics platform you choose has this feature included for this reason.
You will learn what is and isn’t working for your competitors as a result.
Follower Analysis
Yes, it’s crucial to be able to observe how your followers respond to your content. However, you want to ensure that you can go a step further and learn more about the geography and demographics of your followers.
What works in one location and population might not in another. Improved engagement type knowledge is essential in this case.
Content Engagement Analysis
Similar to follower analysis, this is. It’s crucial to understand who is truly engaging with a post in addition to how much engagement it receives.
This enables even more precise targeting of customised articles and strategies, enabling your company to really connect with some segments.
Attribution
When followers are more precisely defined, you can reach out to them more directly to promote business material or posts with people like influencers and potential brand champions.
Remember that it will also be important to determine which followers have the most extensive networks.
Reporting
Custom reports and the ability to provide clear and concise reporting standards have always been a challenge in this arena.
Social media analytics tools will help improve the reporting process by giving you access to a dedicated reporting tool instead of just the typical spreadsheets and other notes. All of this is particularly useful when it comes to key metrics across the board.
Conclusion
Social media analytics using Excel is a great way to analyze your social media accounts. The data can be used as a way to understand your customers, improve your products and services, and even find new customers. Social media analytics can be a lot of fun. It’s also a great way to get to know your customers and what they want, which can help you make better business decisions. But if you’re not careful, it can lead to a lot of frustration and confusion. One way to avoid this is by using Excel to manage your social media analytics. It might seem complicated at first, but once you get the hang of it, it’ll become second nature.