A social media analytics tool will help you understand how your audience interacts on social media. It gives you key metrics so that you can improve the way your organisation works with social media. This post introduces you to the different types of analysis, and the advantage in using them. Social media analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing and reporting on social media data. While the intuition behind social media analytics may be simple, social media analytics is anything but. Analytics gives concrete data that can help you interpret your marketing and social media efforts.
Social Media Analytics Basics
Social media analytics is a way to understand your audience, and it’s an important part of any social media strategy. You can use social media analytics to track all sorts of different things, from how many people are engaging with your content to what kinds of posts get the most impressions. It is is a way of measuring the effectiveness of your social media marketing. It helps you understand what’s working and what isn’t, so that you can make more informed decisions about how much time and money to spend on each piece of content.
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.
Social media analytics is the process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting on data from social media platforms. Social media analytics can help you understand your audience and identify trends in your industry. It’s also a great way to see what kinds of content they enjoy and how they interact with it.
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.
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.
Social metrics can help you create a better strategy
You will not create the best strategy in your first attempt. You are bound to make several mistakes and use tactics that don’t work.
But if you study your social media analytics regularly you will be able to figure out what these mistakes are. Hence, when you optimize your strategy you can eliminate them and fortify it.
To figure out these mistakes using any good social media analytics tool will do. But along with it you should use social media listening to check the impact your strategy is having on people.
Using social listening you can view in real-time what people are saying about your business online. This can help you modify your strategy to better connect with current and potential customers.
For executing social media listening you can use a tool like Sentione. Just sign up for an account and add in keywords like your product name, company name and other relevant keywords and the software will track all the mentions and list them out. It will also display the data in the form of graphs.
You can use this data to modify your strategy and create better content in the future.
Social media analytics shows you how a social media campaign is performing
Once you launch a social media campaign you should regularly track it. You can check if it is panning out the way you intended it to.
If things aren’t going according to plan you can make changes to your campaign and rectify it. And if results are very damaging you can nip it in the bud.
For this, you can use a tool like Sentione as it conducts
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.
Types of Social Media Analytics
1. Descriptive Analytics
Descriptive SMA tackles the questions of “what happened and/or what is happening?” Descriptive analytics gather and describe social media data in the form of reports, visualizations, and clustering to understand a well-defined business problem or opportunity. Social media user comments analysis, for instance, falls into the descriptive analytics category. Comment analysis can be used to understand users’ sentiments or identify emerging trends by clustering themes and topics. Currently, descriptive analytics accounts for the majority of social media analytics landscape.
2. Diagnostic Analytics
Diagnostic SMA analytics looks into the questions of “why something happened?” For example, while descriptive analytics can provide an overview of your social media marketing campaign’s performances (posts, mentions, followers, fans, page views, reviews, pins, etc); diagnostic analytics can distill this data into a single view to see what worked in your past campaigns and what didn’t. Enablers of diagnostics analytics include inferential statistics, behavioural analytics, correlations & retrospective analysis and outcome being cause and effect analysis of a business issues.
4. Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics involves analyzing large amounts of accumulated social media data to predict a future event. Thus, it deals with the question of “what will happen and/or why will it happen?” For example, an intention expressed over social media (such as buy, sell, recommend, quit, desire, or wish) can be mined to predict a future event (such as a purchase). Alternatively, businesses can predict sales figures based on historical visits (or in-links) to a corporate website.
5. Prescriptive Analytics
While predictive analytics help to predict the future, prescriptive analytics suggest the best action to take when handling a scenario (Lustig, Dietrich, et al. 2010). For example, if you have groups of social media users that display certain patterns of buying behavior, how can you optimize your offering to each group? Like predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics has not yet found its way into social media data. The main enablers of prescriptive analytics include optimization and simulation modeling, multi-criteria decision modeling, expert systems, and group support systems.a sentiment analysis of campaigns to show whether it is having a positive, negative or neutral effect.
Conclusion
Social media analytics help you understand how effective your social media channels are. If a channel is not producing results, you can make changes to increase traffic or engagement. You can also see which posts specifically perform better than others to increase the chances of success with future posts.