Tracking leads and converting customers through social media efforts can be accomplished by investing in analytics tools and services. Furthermore, you will not only save money and increase profits for your company, but you will also get to know your audience for long-term healthy customer relationships.
In this post, you will learn the significance of social media analytics so that you can make informed decisions when developing the best strategies for your business.
What Does Social Media Analytics Do
Know the Best Time to Share
The importance of timing in social media marketing cannot be overstated. You don’t just post whenever you want and appear to your audience as a social media wall flooder. To increase engagement, site traffic, leads, and sales, post when your target audiences are actively online.
You will gain a better understanding of your target audience by using social media analytics. You can determine the best time to share by reviewing your previous posts and relevant social data.
Some social networks, such as Facebook, make it simple to do this by displaying the times and days when the majority of your fan page followers or target audience are online in the ‘Post’ section of your insights.
2. Deep Dive Analysis
You’ll be able to assess your social media at the highest level by using a Social Media Audit Template, allowing you and your team to make better social media marketing decisions. You’ll be able to conduct a deep dive analysis and understand the effects of key social media marketing metrics thanks to analytics.
Knowing your metrics will allow you to take effective and actionable steps based on the data from wall post engagement. It provides insights into the best content pieces that hit the mark in terms of branding. Social media analytics will also reveal the content that sparks a brand’s conversation and social media sharing.
You can compare your current content strategy with your competitors by delving into your social media metrics.
Social media metrics include the following:
- Impressions
- Social Engagements
- Comments per post
- Shares per post
- Likes or Reactions
- Clicks
Create the Best Content
Content marketing and social media marketing are always collaborative efforts. Using social media analytics, you’ll be able to determine which topics or content produce the best results.
You will also gain a better understanding of how links, infographics (text-based graphic images), audio, videos, and images affect your metrics.
Social media analytics allows you to analyze how your blog performs, such as what content is typically liked and shared, how long visitors spend navigating your page, and how many visitors convert to paying customers.
Here are some of the best social media content trending today:
- Tutorial Videos: Makeup, DIY, or cooking tutorials
- Feedback-seeking Questions: Posting a question about what other people think about your brand or soliciting feedback.
- Ad Videos: Video advertisements are better than static ads.
Know Your Best Social Media Networks
While there are numerous social media networks from which to engage your audience and post your content, not all are suitable for every niche or business. Driving results entails much more than simply joining a multi-million-member social media platform.
You may discover that smaller networks, such as Flickr or Pinterest, can be more beneficial to your marketing strategy. As a result, using social media analytics is critical when experimenting with the best social media network for you and measuring your traffic, engagement, and sales.
Here’s how social media analytics can help when determining the best social media networks for you:
- You can use the social media data extracted to focus more on the suitable social networks that work for you.
- The data can be used to set the right amount of time to spend on managing each social media network. For Instance, you can spend more time or prioritize working on top-performing social media networks that bring in greater results.
- Social media analytics allow you to connect with several social media networks and place data in a single dashboard for faster and easier performance comparison.
Know What People Say About Your Business
Your social media reputation is critical to the success of your company. Social listening boosts your online reputation and presence by allowing you to see what online users are saying about your company in real time. It will also assist you in modifying or developing better strategies for connecting with your audience.
Sign up for an account and enter relevant keywords, such as your company name and product name, to conduct social media listening using social media analytics tools. The social media analytics software will track and list all mentions and metrics, displaying data in graphs.
Better Understand Your Competitors
Just like you, your competitors aim to stay on top by creating appealing and informative content and effective social media strategies. Without data analysis, your social marketing efforts will likely be put to waste.
By knowing the social networks that work best for your competitors, like influencer marketing, you’ll have an idea of how to run your social media marketing strategy effectively. Social media analytics allow you to create a widget and track your competitors’ accounts by simply adding their username and selecting the metric you want to check.
Create Better Social Media Marketing Strategies
Many are not successful in creating the best social media marketing strategy in their first attempt – several mistakes are committed and ineffective tactics are used. However, if you use and analyze social media analytics regularly, it’s easier for you to determine the reasons why mistakes or errors happened.
Once you’re able to optimize your social media marketing strategies, you can keep those that are working, modify those that need to be improved, and remove or stop doing those that are poorly performing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What is Social Media Analytics Tools
Social media analytics tools are pieces of web application analysis software that are used to monitor, assess, and ultimately improve the performance of social media platforms. They are simply a subset of web analytics tools that are designed to collect and make sense of web performance data produced by social media sites and platforms. They include the standard graphical dashboard and data visualization techniques that provide the user with a clear understanding of the performance of their social media presence.
A successful social media campaign requires the use of social media analytics tools. It enables social media experts to monitor and assess the performance of various aspects of a social marketing campaign, such as sales, customer service, and sentiment analysis.
In terms of sales, these tools demonstrate the effectiveness of a social media marketing campaign by displaying all positive turnovers or purchases that originate from social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. These sites are useful for disseminating purchase or signup links and directly correlate to traffic that can be detected by a specific social media analytics tool. Some tools for brand recognition and sentiment analysis can mine data from social networking sites to find or discover people’s attitudes toward a brand or business using methods such as natural language processing and pattern recognition.
Conclusion
Social media analytics displays relevant data to help you determine the best content that gets your target audience’s attention. Also, it tracks the performance of your social media campaign. If things are not going according to your plan, then you can simply change or correct your social media campaigns.
With social media analytics, you’ll be able to track the key metrics that greatly affect your sales and marketing goals. Using such a tool can help you create better social media marketing decisions and avoid wasting your efforts on strategies that don’t work.