Social media is essential for businesses seeking to maintain a strong competitive advantage. According to Sprout Social research, as many as 98% of consumers intend to buy on social media in 2022. According to the same report, eCommerce on social media has a market potential of more than $1 trillion.
Social media analytics provides enterprises with actionable insights, metrics, and key performance indicators (KPIs). They assist businesses in tracking how customers interact with their social media channels. This knowledge is essential for developing your marketing strategy and enabling social media marketing.
Social Media Analytics for Enterprises Typology Methods and Processes
Enterprises are more demanding in all aspects of business operations, including software. It can be difficult to find the right tool or set of tools. Changes in the workflow process can have a large impact on your teams.
Social media analytics are as important for enterprises as they are for small businesses in today’s online market. Employees in the enterprise are constantly under pressure to deliver. Not only must you strive for positive business outcomes, but these outcomes must frequently exceed expectations.
In the age of social media, sophisticated analytics tools that provide in-depth insights on performance and user engagement with your brand are required to maintain and increase market share.
Social media analytics can provide your company with a 360-degree view of how users interact with your brands on social media. The ability to analyze and act on these data sets will result in a slew of advantages. You can improve the customer experience by identifying bottlenecks in the customer journey. You can then tailor your content to your target audience. Insights can also aid in the improvement of products and services. Finally, knowing what works and what doesn’t on social media allows you to improve targeting, increase conversions, and retain current customers.
Enterprise-Level Social Media Analytics Features
Enterprises, as expected, require software with greater capabilities and superior functionality. You’ll need tools that can process and interpret social media data. This data is critical for business decisions, branding, and driving growth. This entails large-scale data collection for businesses. You must be aware of what is happening on your social pages as well as the profiles of your competitors. When shopping for enterprise-grade analytics software, keep the following features in mind:
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to a system’s or program’s ability to “think” for itself. Machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence. Algorithms analyze large amounts of data and predict outcomes with increasing accuracy over time. The more data you have, the better your model will be. This is critical for businesses with a high volume of traffic on their social media sites. Your forecasting will become more precise as your analytics platform collects more data.
Natural language processing (NLP) technology is used by AI-based sentiment analysis tools to detect trends and show how users feel about a brand. The simplest versions of these tools can analyze text, image, and video mentions of a brand on forums or social media posts. Voice or even facial recognition capabilities are examples of more advanced features. These features can tell you whether customer feedback about a brand is positive, negative, or neutral.
Benchmarking and Competitive Analysis
Competitive benchmarking allows you to compare yourself to industry standards and competitors. You can compare organic search rankings, traffic frequency, and social media views. You can also contrast key metrics such as engagement share, impressions, follower growth, and so on.
Maintaining a competitive edge requires you to keep a constant eye on your competitors. Share of voice is an intriguing feature to keep an eye out for. This tells you where you and your competitors stand in terms of advertising costs in your industry.
Campaign Tracking
The ability to track and measure the success of your social media marketing campaigns is critical for optimizing ad spend. Measuring campaign performance can also provide strong indications of content popularity. If traffic is low but you notice that your budget is being spent at the time and place where your audience congregates, your content may need to be adjusted. The most effective solutions will be able to track both paid and organic results in the same dashboard.
Cross-channel capabilities
You’ll need a social media analytics platform that can integrate with all of your social channels as an enterprise. Up-to-date behavioral data from multiple sources will greatly improve the precision of your social media analysis. While some software is designed to collect analytics from specific social media platforms. Enterprise buyers should think about options that integrate well with all of their social channels.
Customizable Dashboards and Reports
Filtering for specific metrics is part of customizing a dashboard. Using drag and drop tools, these can be transformed into tables, graphs, charts, and so on.
You can export infographics and reports to help you make critical business decisions. Dashboards make use of automated data feeds to provide valuable insights into your social media performance.
Influencer Marketing
Companies of all sizes have realized that the majority of consumers trust social media influencers more than brands. According to a HubSpot report from 2021, more than 80% of marketers believe that influencer marketing is effective.
Attribution is a critical component in analyzing influencer performance. Your influencer marketing tool should be able to attribute specific influencer posts to clicks, impressions, reach, and conversions. The simplest way to accomplish this is to provide affiliate links to your product pages that include special discount codes.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs measure the performance of social media analytics. These include important engagement metrics like views, impressions, reach, return on ad spend, conversion rate, etc.
Knowing how to interpret these insights will help you make ad spend adjustments or change the type of content you post on social media.
Segmentation Tools
Segmentation is also important for developing your social media strategy. Look for software that includes at the very least basic segmentation and detailed demographics. Users are segmented based on their online behavior, user data, location, and preferences. As your company grows in size, the scope of your segments becomes more complex.
Analytics can assist your marketing teams in making sense of this data. Your social media campaigns will be more effective if you can identify and understand your target audience.
Social Listening and Monitoring
Social listening and monitoring tools enable you to track brand and competitor mentions on social media. These features keep you up to date on how your brand, products, or services are perceived on social media. When you launch a new product, you can monitor how well it is received by your target market. You can also watch how customers react to competing products and social media posts.
Social Media Marketing Analysis
Social media marketing is the process of using social media outlets to increase the reach of your brand or simply drive traffic to your website. This type of marketing relies on creating engaging content to capture readers’ attention. More importantly, these users share this content with their friends and other users. Instead of an untrustworthy third party delivering a message to consumers, word-of-mouth delivers the message from a reliable source. As a result, social media can now focus on earned media rather than paid media.
Social media marketing is an excellent tool for increasing brand exposure. At the same time, social media allows brands to improve customer service and other aspects of their business. Most importantly, when done correctly, social media marketing is a relatively inexpensive way for brands to engage consumers.
Measuring Social Media Marketing
Create
The ability to create profitable and engaging content for audiences is critical in social media marketing. However, if you don’t know where to begin, you could end up spending thousands of dollars and hours creating content that your audience doesn’t care about. The ideal solution is to use a variety of tools to aid in the creation and curation of social media content. If you’re not sure where to begin, tools like Hootsuite and Percolate provide fresh perspectives and methods for creating or curating highly engaging content.
Discover, Unmetric’s newest feature, is a social media search engine that provides marketers with access to millions of pieces of brand content from around the world.
Compare
When it comes to social media marketing, it’s critical to always be aware of what your competitors are doing through social media campaign analysis. Is your competition aware of your social media marketing secret, or are they still searching in vain? In either case, you must always keep score in order to compare your efforts to those of your competitors. Consistent competitive analysis of social media profiles will help you understand how your own efforts compare and, hopefully, keep your brand ahead of the competition.
Unmetric provides users with access to the social media performance of over 30,000 of the world’s largest brands across all major networks and 30 industries. Metrics such as fan growth, demographics, engagement, response time, administrative participation, and others can be compared.
For global brands, you can quickly determine which parts of the world your competitors dominate and which regions you excel in.
Measure
Although social media marketing can be an effective way to engage audiences, it is not a magical process. Instead, successful social media marketing campaigns are the result of regular social media metrics and marketing analysis. Knowing which metrics to use will allow you to make the necessary tweaks and adjustments to propel your brand to success. However, analyzing social media engagement is not always simple, and not all metrics are created equal.
Create, Compare, Measure – Win
Simply put, any social media marketing campaign will hinge on your ability to create, compare, measure the results, and make the appropriate tweaks to the campaign. Failure to do so can be costly and ultimately be the downfall of your efforts. Instead of aimlessly stabbing at it in the dark, Unmetric is an easy-to-use tool that effectively combines these three aspects.
- Unmetric provides insights and data analytics to inspire you to create the right content and share it on social media at the right time.
- Unmetric takes the confusion out of comparing the social media marketing efforts of your competition. Instead, you will have access to easy-to-read metrics that truly matter without all of the hassle.
- Unmetric allows you to quickly analyze your brand and your competition in the most relevant way possible. With over 50 available metrics across the top six social media platforms, you’ll be able to clearly understand what has happened and the best direction of your future social media marketing efforts.
Unmetric is the one tool you must have for an effective social media marketing campaign. With the ability to ideate, compare, and analyze in one convenient app. Unmetric integrates with your workflow and works in tangent with other services.
Unmetric provides all of the following in one place:
- Social media growth analytics
- Social media engagement analysis
- Social media profile competitive analysis
- Social media metrics analysis
- Social media marketing analysis
- Social media sentiment analysis
- Competitive analysis of social media profiles
How do you assess social media marketing?
The ability of your brand to create engaging content is essential for social media marketing. Your audience will be bored if you don’t include it. If your company doesn’t understand what resonates with its target audience, money could be wasted on creating meaningless content. To get the most out of your social media content, guide its creation and analyze it along the way.
Analyzing the data gathered from previous activities is the best way to ensure that you are getting the most out of your current social media strategy. When analyzing your social presence, there is no need to launch new social media campaigns; instead, the analysis should be based on currently available data. Based on interactions with your followers, as well as the performance of previous posts and any previous social media activities, make your assessments.
You don’t need to be on social media for very long to be able to analyze your presence. If you believe that your own data is insufficient to draw meaningful conclusions, begin by analyzing your competitors to gain a general understanding of what works in your industry. Data is essential for developing actionable improvement plans, so gather as much information as possible.
It is critical to understand whether your social media marketing strategy is working for you, and regular analysis of your social media performance will assist you in driving great results. To set your analysis up for success, you must understand what metrics and KPIs are important, as well as how to read them to ensure that your content is consistently delivering.
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 a sentiment analysis of campaigns to show whether it is having a positive, negative or neutral effect.
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.
Conclusion
Social Media Analytics can be a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. By using it to analyze data, understand your users, and grow your marketing efforts, you can improve your business in a variety of ways. making the most of social media analytics is essential for any organization looking to grow its operations.