With social networks playing an increasingly important role in marketing overall success, social media analytics (or social media analysis) and campaign metrics are key sources of information in business marketing strategies.
With so much information being shared all the time on social networks, the tools that extract profile data, became a component in public analysis, competitive research and product research.
The heart of social media analysis is the collection and analysis of marketing and audience data to inform business decisions. It is the only safe way to access insights that you can use to optimize your marketing efforts and even product and service strategy.
Contents
Toggle- Understanding Social Media Analytics
- Four reasons where social network analysis is essential
- Where do you get the data?
Understanding Social Media Analytics
Social media analysis is the collection and analysis of social media data points to help inform your strategy and optimize your engagement around your efforts for organic and paid posting.
Ultimately, it helps you answer a crucial question: Is your strategy working?
Or even:
- Do you know the network trends that are relevant to your business model?
- Do you have a way of quantifying the type of ROI (Return on Investment) that is generating with each campaign or posting on different social media channels?
- Do you know what your audience expects and wants from your content and messages? How is your content perceived compared to competition?
Using the right tools, you can answer each of the above questions.
Remember, above all, that without measuring and analyzing your content and performance, there is no sustainable way to improve your results, or even put your results in the appropriate context to understand whether they are good or bad, how to adjust or change course!
Social media marketing professionals need a data-oriented roadmap to signal the way forward, so they know where to go and what to do. And that's what every solution for Social Media Analytics is designed to provide, in various degrees of success.
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Four reasons where social network analysis is essential
Before we go into the specific details and metrics you will need to analyze and how to interpret and make decisions based on data, I have separated four cases of critical and universal use for a solution of social media analytics. These examples demonstrate why social network analysis is so crucial to brands, and any good analysis platform will be built and developed with these cases of use in mind:
1. Measure and prove ROI and marketing impact
The final result of an analysis provides instant feedback on your company's performance on social media channels and whether the strategy you are implementing is effective. The KPI overview can make a difference between the success and failure of your social media campaigns.
If the strategy is not working properly, your data analysis directs you in exactly the right direction so you can make effective adjustments to the strategy before performance falls or becomes a real problem. Take any bends down quickly and sort them out as soon as you can.
Clear overviews also allow the entire marketing team to quickly and easily view the most important metrics and evaluate performance, so that you can always work with the latest data.
It is logical to seek to understand whether the resources you are investing in social media (e.g., promotion of paid content) are generating revenue – directly or indirectly. It is important to highlight that 61% of marketers still struggle to prove ROI of their marketing efforts.
The right tools are as important as the right method of calculation when it comes to ROI on social networks. To make things easier, there are two tracking tips for analysis:
- Add Facebook pixel to the main pages of your website and any page linked to your social channel, such as landing pages, for example. This allows you to accurately assign conversions and actions to a specific content or campaign, even if the user converts days or weeks after reading your content for the first time. If users do not convert at that time, Facebook pixel allows you to conduct remarketing campaigns, targeting users who have visited specific pages before, but have not performed any action.
- Add Google Analytics UTM parameters to the URLs (links) of your ads on the networks to understand how much traffic and how many conversions your social media marketing activities are generating.
2. Make better strategic decisions for business
A strong social media analysis will obviously provide the data marketing and insight teams that will help them identify what is working and what is not when it comes to social media and content strategy. However, social analysis also provides vital insights that help inform strategic decisions also outside of marketing.
This is increasingly true every year, as the amount of data posted on social networks constantly increases, as well as our ability to extract useful information from these insights as technology improves.
Some examples of how social media analysis can help improve important decision making both inside and outside marketing:
- Social listening: The best social listening tools will help tremendously with competitive and audience analysis. Social listening is the process of analyzing the large amounts of data posted on social channels every day and automatically extracting useful information relevant to business.
Social listening allows marketers and analysts to understand how the public feels about their brand, product or industry. These insights can help inform decisions about products, clarify the interests and values of their demographics, and discover trends relevant to your sector as they happen.
- Answer trends in a timely manner: Access real-time data to be able to act quickly on larger trends and move ahead of competitors.
- Minimize business risk: The data is there to signal your strategic path and show the right direction, so let the data guide your decisions and help you make the best use of your resources and be led by your performance KPIs.
Put aside emotion in your decisions, try to base your strategy on data. This will really prevent your team from wasting time on efforts that do not generate commercial results, optimizing what matters most. Save resources and time where you can make the biggest impact.
3. Compare your network performance with competition
What is the point of celebrating a good performance of your metrics if you have no idea whether it is better than the performance of the competition or how it compares to the average performance of the sector in which you operate? It is pure vanity to do so, and isolated metrics have no influence on real success.
The context is so important that, in order to measure real success, companies must compare with competitors and also with the average performance of industry and the region.
Benchmarking is always a good tactic, because it provides important insights and allows you to be authority and promote market trends.
4. Follow the efficiency of marketing teams
Simplified workflows are essential to administer a restricted marketing team, therefore often with only one or two members. Being able to visualize the efficiency and speed of the team is essential to guide them in the right direction.
Keep your work speed high and if possible, no bottlenecks. This is especially true in areas such as community management and online customer service, where a good tool will allow you to measure the main community management KPIs, such as response time and public feeling.
Companies need to understand once and for all that the customer journey can be difficult to manage in today's world, and a wrong step can mean a disaster. Or at least a social media crisis, which, let us face it, is also not healthy for the reputation of brands.
Leave micromanagement in the past and, with a good analytics solution, you can easily get the metrics you want to see and, on the other hand, the business owners can easily view marketing operations, check crucial first-line data, and identify trends that need more research by the marketing team.
Where do you get the data?
For social media analytics to be applied in practice, as I said before, it is worth hitting the key: having good monitoring and analysis tools make all the difference. There are many in the market, including those that offer posting scheduling or BI marketing monitoring.
From the most popular and high-end networks for companies, Instagram provides on its platform the “Insights” functionality, where it is possible to track virtually all metrics that form the total engagement of posts and ad posts. Virtually all networks have this option and that's what you need to start.
Tools like Mlabs and Hoot Suite are widely used to obtain complete data and reports, with competitive analysis and important suggestions to help in the best efficiency for social network analysis. Google Analytics is crucial to know the origin of network conversions and other information that adds to the needs for results.
To conclude:
There are many ways to be explored through social media analytics. It's like peeling an orange to find the segmented fruit inside it.In fact, the insights found through social media analysis can inform all parts of the brand's operations.
