Social media analytics measures the success of your social media marketing campaigns and programs. It can help you understand how well you’re doing, where you need to focus your efforts, and what changes you can make to continue growing your social media empire. Not only that, but it can also give you insights into which platforms are working best for your brand and audience. Understanding this data will help you determine which tactics are most effective, where to allocate resources, and how to adjust as necessary.
What Can Social Media Analytics Tools Help You Measure
1. Volume
Volume is the first and simplest social media indicator to calculate. How many people are talking about your brand or campaign? A fantastic early indicator of interest is volume. People rarely discuss topics they genuinely care nothing about; instead, they choose to talk about subjects they either adore or despise.
Although counting tweets and wall postings could make volume appear like a straightforward counting statistic, there is more to it than that. It’s crucial to count the messages that mention your brand, as well as the number of people that mention it, and monitor how both of those figures vary over time. For instance, Facebook Insights includes a handy tool that assesses how many people are discussing a certain topic.
Learn when volume is higher – are there days or times when more people seem to be talking about your brand? You can use this information to focus more of your own posts during these times to get more engagement, which we’ll talk about in a minute.
2. Reach
The reach of a social media discourse is measured. Reach by itself can aid in your comprehension of the context surrounding your material. How widely is your message being spread, and how big is the audience that is receiving it? The prospective audience size is measured by reach.
Naturally, having a wide audience is beneficial, but reach alone cannot tell you everything. When compared to other interaction metrics, reach becomes quite effective. When formulating equations for measuring social media, use reach as the denominator.
Find Out How My Company Can Drive Massive Amounts of Traffic to Your Website.
Unlock huge volumes of SEO traffic with SEO. View actual results.
The amazing material that our team produces will be shared, linked to, and drive traffic.
Effective paid advertising.
To get an engagement %, divide significant action or engagement metrics by reach, such as clicks, retweets, or replies (more on this in a moment). How many people from the potential audience for your campaign took part? Other engagement measures are better put into context by reach.
3. Engagement
Speaking of engagement metrics, one of the most crucial aspects of social media measurement. How are people interacting with the discussion surrounding your company? What actions are they taking to promote your material and show interest in the subject?
The majority of social media platforms allow users to share and reply to material. Retweets (RTs) on Twitter and shares and posts on Facebook are useful for tracking who is sharing your content, whereas comments, replies, and likes are useful for tracking who is responding to it. Take some time to consider your social media objectives. Are you more concerned with getting engagement (replies, comments) or with getting the word out (retweets, posts)? Make sure the metrics you’re utilizing represent the current priorities for your brand.
And are there types of content that generate engagement? Start paying attention to what messages generate the most replies and RTs. It might surprise you what people interact with; it’s not always what you expect.
4. Influence
Who is mentioning your company and what effect do they have? There are numerous systems that measure social influence, and they all do it in different ways. Influence is undoubtedly the most contentious social media statistic. However, they all concur on the fact that influence is not always correlated with audience size. Someone cannot compel their followers to take any action only because they have many friends or followers.
We can draw conclusions about someone’s potential influence in the future based on prior behavior. When planning a campaign, it can be helpful to consider who to contact based on this type of possible influence. People are given an influence score by tools like Klout and PeerIndex.
On the other side, kinetic influence will assist you in identifying the individuals driving and contributing to the conversation about your brand and campaigns as well as the individuals who influence others to join in. Instead than only looking at people with the greatest followers, you may locate your brand champions by concentrating on those whose messages are spread by others.
5. Share of Voice
Finally, you should think about a share of voice statistic to truly comprehend how well you’re performing on social media. When compared to conversations about your rivals, how are people talking about your brand? Find out what proportion of the discourse about your sector as a whole is about your brand as opposed to your primary rivals. And take inspiration from your rivals’ achievements; because so many of these social media discussions are open to the public, you can readily gauge their influence in addition to your own.
6. Amplification rate
The Amplification Rate is the proportion of total followers to shares each post.
Avinash Kaushik, a writer and Google evangelist for digital marketing, coined the term “amplification,” which he defines as “the rate at which your followers consume your information and disseminate it through their networks.”
In general, your followers will extend your reach for you more as your amplification rate rises.
Divide the total number of shares for a post by the total number of followers you have. To calculate your amplification rate as a percentage, multiply by 100.
What are Social Media Metrics?
The information you use to assess the success of your social media strategy is called social media metrics.
You can learn a lot about how people are finding and interacting with your company on various social media channels.
You can see what you’re doing well and where you need to improve by concentrating on the key data.
This will provide you the opportunity to modify your social media approach and enhance the value of your brand.
Why Should Marketers Track Them?
Social media metrics are crucial because they let you know whether or not you are moving closer to your objectives.
Any social media plan must have clearly stated goals, and each goal has a corresponding metric to gauge your efforts.
You are playing a guessing game if you are not monitoring your progress toward specific targets.
You can be considerably more deliberate in the way you create content for social media thanks to the wealth of information that social media platforms give you.
Social media metrics provide you, as a digital marketer, with concrete information you can use to demonstrate to executives and other key stakeholders the value you add to the business.
Providing you can demonstrate the benefit your social media approach is adding
Social Media 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.
6. 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
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
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.
How to measure social media effectiveness
Key Performance Indicators
Look at your key performance indicators to determine how to evaluate the results of your social media efforts (KPIs). KPIs are variables that you can quantify and give values to. A number of KPIs can be used to assess social media performance, albeit they may differ slightly based on your objectives.
Measuring New Customers and Revenue
The obvious metrics for social media marketing are followers and post engagements. These KPIs can be significant, however other experts feel that there are other, more valuable KPIs.
For instance, according to CallRail’s marketing specialists, social media’s objectives shouldn’t change even though they may be distinct from your other marketing strategies: Even with social media, “your fundamental KPIs should remain the same across your marketing channels.” In addition, they add that even though there will be “circumstances in which pure ‘brand awareness’ campaigns could be advantageous, your long-term goals (should) always remain the same no matter what kind of campaign (you’re) doing.”
With a few exceptions, revenue and new customers are always going to be a business’s two primary KPIs. In the end, these are often the most important variables for your company, and social media marketing can have a big impact on them. Gaining and keeping consumers is one of the most crucial methods for businesses to boost their revenue, which is something they virtually always strive to achieve.
You can monitor these KPIs across all of your social media channels with the use of programs like Hootsuite and Google Analytics.
A useful reference on social media ROI is available from Hootsuite, and it contains instructions on how to utilize it in conjunction with Google Analytics to monitor ROI. Additionally, they provide a helpful social media ROI calculator.
Improving Customer Service
Social media is a great way to connect with your customers. The informal setting provides a platform for your customers to feel more comfortable asking questions about your product or service. This provides a channel to provide optimal customer service.
In fact, there are many exceptional ideas for companies to give great customer service to their social media customers, including the following:
- Answering customer questions
- Responding to comments and questions in a timely manner
- Sharing frequent updates about the company
- Sharing stories regarding company/product successes
- Apologizing to customers when mistakes happen
Customer outreach experts at Help On Click advise not to neglect your networking opportunities, but instead leverage your social media accounts to their full potential, and avoid giving scripted responses to questions.
Website Traffic and Post Engagement
Even though KPIs like the number of new customers, growth in revenue, and enhanced customer service are significant, they don’t diminish the importance of more conventional metrics for social media success. The value of followers, post engagements, and traffic conversions to websites must still be taken into account.
Brand recognition is one of the most advantageous things that can be enhanced by social media marketing. Your profile will be more visible the more followers you have and the more people will view it. Brand awareness is directly correlated with this visibility. Although it is beneficial to all organizations, brand recognition is particularly significant for startups and expanding enterprises.
Finally, post engagement demonstrates the effectiveness of your content. You can find out what your audience responds to the most by experimenting with various posts. This is a special insight that is not offered by other marketing channels, like emails. For instance, Facebook allows users to respond to postings with a range of emotions, whereas you may be able to track how many clients open emails and click on your links. In addition, submitting comments, queries, and concerns on each post is simple to do.
By giving businesses access to valuable information that they previously lacked and would not have otherwise, social media features and KPIs provide them a distinctive return on investment. Knowing what customers think and feel can help businesses establish better customer relationships, better goods, and perhaps even new products or services to address customer demands.
For the best marketing outcomes, you should make the most of social media platforms to communicate with customers.
what is Social Media Analytics
The collection and analysis of data points that help you measure the performance of your social media accounts is known as social media analytics.
These are the metrics that will assist you in evaluating your social media marketing strategy on both the macro and micro levels. They can help you gauge customer sentiment, spot trends, and avoid PR crises before they occur, in addition to assisting you in seeing how social media is contributing to your larger business goals.
You’ll look at likes, comments, shares, and saves to track social media analytics, but you might also monitor mentions and discussion of your brand or consumer insights by practicing social listening.
Social media analytics tools assist you in doing all of this math while also creating performance reports to share with your team, stakeholders, and boss to determine where you’re succeeding and where you’re failing.
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.
Conclusion
Social Media Analytics can have a profound impact on your business. By using it to measure the success of your social media marketing campaigns and programs, you can make sure that your messages are reaching their target audience and helping you achieve your desired outcomes. Additionally, by following simple tips, you can help increase the accuracy and timeliness of your data. Thanks for reading!