Social Media Analytics - how to look at the data

We live in a time when social media platforms have become a second home for the vast majority of people.

It is clear that these social media tools became the future of marketing the moment they were launched.

Now that you're counting on the online communities you've built around your brand, you need to check social media analytics to see what's keeping the world going and how your marketing strategy is working.

Are you ready to learn everything you need to know about social media analytics?

1. What is social media analytics?
2. 7 benefits of social media analytics
3. Social media analytics segments

4. The best tools for social media analytics
5. What social media metrics you should pay attention to
6. How to track social media analytics performance data
7. What is social media listening

Social media analytics relies on the amount of data collected through your social media platforms to offer you insights into the evolution of your marketing strategy.

Every time you publish new content on social media, social data will be generated automatically.

Likes, comments, sentiment, reactions, shares, retweets, etc. are all information that will help your social media marketing campaign on its way to success.

Analytics for social media helps marketers design and implement a better social media strategy based on the needs of their audience and the desires of their customers.

Having access to a wide range of social media metrics allows you to see what's working and what needs to change when it comes to social media content.

Since your main goal is to attract more customers, you should always focus on changing your strategy to fit demographics such as age, gender, location, best posting time and more.

Don't forget that your social media audience has all eyes on you. Therefore, make sure you paint a great picture about your brand and that the numbers, graphs and data support it all.

With the power of social media analytics, you can see which social media platforms work best for your business and put all your efforts into them.

Moreover, you can always compare your current campaigns with previous ones, especially if they have a similar goal.

In this way, you will be able to track changes that may have occurred in the behavior or interests of your fans.

When creating a strategy social media, you need to consider some key tactics for which social media analytics plays a major role:

• Measure engagement by social channels
• Compare your ongoing social media campaigns
• Get insights from your competitors
• Track the results of influencer campaigns

Social media analytics provides you with useful data that will allow you to build a powerful marketing strategy to become an ace in the game.

Social media analytics reports help you increase brand awareness, develop better content, and build a loyal community in the online world that is always happy with your social media presence.

Yes, social media is not all about pretty pictures and videos with amazing edits.

Behind it all is a social media manager who puts in a lot of work, sitting on piles of data while periodically tracking key metrics to keep an eye on the evolution of his brand.

And because we know that anything worth having, like success, doesn't come easily, as a marketer you have to strive to get it right.

Being able to develop something bigger and better than what your competitors have is a difficult challenge, but the result is extremely rewarding.

Here are the benefits of social media analytics:

• Develop well-researched social media campaigns
• Support your ROI (Return of Investment).
• Track the effectiveness of your team
• Find trending topics
• Compare yourself with the competition
• Make better business decisions
• Meet influencers suitable for your brand's campaign

All of these benefits will give you the boost you need to make your content interesting, your audience curious and your competitors furious.

3.1 Audience analytics

When starting a social media campaign, one of the first things to do is to look at your audience.

Otherwise, how are you supposed to deliver the kind of content they want to see and are interested in?

Even though it may seem impossible for your social media content to be loved by everyone, you should do your best.

First, you need to target your posts to those specific users who show interest in the same topics.

By taking the time and clearly defining your audience, you not only increase your chances of gaining a loyal and authentic community, but also have the opportunity to save some money - if you're thinking about ads - which we'll discuss later.

Now think for a moment. How would you describe your ideal buyer persona?

How old or how young are the people you want to reach?

What is their online behavior like? What are their needs?

These are all questions that social media analytics can give you answers to. How great is it?

Once you know about your potential customers, you can start thinking about creative concepts and communication strategies.

3.2 Performance analytics

When you develop your first social media posts, you need to think about measuring their performance.

In this way, you will learn what type of content is appropriate for each social media platform, tailoring your strategy to the needs of your potential customers.

To learn more about your social media performance, it's best to check social media analytics.

Having a marketing strategy means knowing how to tailor your core ideas to different audiences, on different platforms.

Social media campaign analytics can offer you insights into what type of campaigns perform best on different social media platforms and help you make better decisions in the future.

Looking at social media metrics will help you determine what efforts you need to make to improve your game.

3.3 Fan sentiment analytics

Your main goal is to spread the word about your brand, products and services, showing everyone how proud you are of everything you've accomplished.

Of course, brands love it when people engage with their posts and comment, but there are times when this can't be considered a good sign.

They say that even bad press is good press, but if you look at the huge disastrous results for companies that have happened because of some communication mistakes or misunderstandings, it doesn't seem so anymore.

Social media sentiment analytics cannot be overlooked simply because it has the power to prevent major communication crises. And let's be honest, no one is in the mood to deal with a crisis, right?

3.4 Community management analytics

Feedback is always helpful, even if you receive positive or negative comments.

Consider engaging all of your followers, regardless of how they already perceived your brand.

The more you interact with your followers and the more you answer their questions and inquiries, the faster you will win them over. You may even have the chance to turn them into brand ambassadors.

To examine how open your brand is in communicating with customers, you'll want to look at your site's average response time, which will indicate how long it takes your site to respond to your customers.

This aspect of the communication process is very important, as it is one of the determinants of sentiment we discussed earlier.

To find out why comparing your brand to others is important, we'll go even further.

Not only that you need to compare your performance with your major competitors, but with the entire industry you are a part of.

It may seem like a lot of work, and truth be told, it actually is.

However, staying on top of the latest trends in your industry will help you understand how your marketing strategy should be shaped to get the success you are after.

An important note about all these segments of social media analytics is that they must be constantly monitored.

Important social and economic factors, such as the COVID19 pandemic, for example, can generate major changes in online customer behavior.

By constantly monitoring data, brands are able to adapt faster and more effectively in the event of a crisis.

NOTES: Socialinsider is one of the social media reporting tools that offers competitive analysis and industry benchmarking. Start your free trial!

In addition to the bold product promotion initiatives marketers can come up with to execute outstanding communication campaigns, a large portion of the marketing budget will always be directed toward advertising.

And when huge amounts of money are involved, you need to make sure the results are up to par with the investment. That's why social media analytics for your ads is crucial.

First and foremost, you need to make sure that the content invested in your ads is bulletproof. Take the time to analyze your audience, find out what content they resonate with the most, and then start creating your ad campaigns.

Constantly checking the analytics of your social media advertising campaigns will help you optimize them, as well as your budget.

In the emerging digital landscape we are experiencing today, where more and more brands are fighting for user attention, you must always keep an eye on your competition.

When doing competitive analysis, to really understand how you can outperform them, you need to see the whole picture.

This means that you have to go through all the social media analytics presented here, studying their pages just as you do with yours.

NOTES: You can analyze the performance of your ads with Socialinsider and get an idea of how much your competitors are investing in paid ones as well.

3.7 Influencer analytics

There is a moment in a marketer's life when he decides to increase his social media presence by working with influencers.

Well, when that time comes, you need to keep a few useful things in mind.

When working with influencers, you need to do thorough research to make sure you find the right ones for your brand.

Think about your audience and who your community can resonate with.

Are they a good fit for your company?

When researching influencers, you also need to pay attention to several metrics to understand their performance and identify any pains or gains if you decide to work with them.

With a quick look at these influencers' social media analytics, you'll be able to tell who has the potential to succeed in telling your brand's story:

• commitment rate
• account evolution
• frequency of posts
• Social media content performance

Socialinsider

Socialinsider is a social media analytics tool that provides premium social media analytics and reporting, competitive insights, brand metrics and social media campaign reports as a point solution.

With Socialinsider, you can measure the performance of all your social media accounts at the same time and track all the important metrics, including engagement rate, reach, impressions, follower growth, post evolution, demographics and more.

You can also access detailed information on any social profile or hashtag, conduct competitive benchmarking and generate presentation-ready reports.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a platform that is useful for any social media manager, from scheduling posts and organizing content to analyze ROI and create social media analytics.

This analytics tool allows you to manage all your social network accounts from one place. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest are all included.

You can make better marketing decisions with Hootsuite by gaining insights into what type of content works best or by monitoring the impact of your social media initiatives.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management and optimization software that helps manage all social media posts, engagement and analytics in one place.

Its social media analysis tool has the advantage of speeding up the data collection process, enabling it to see the big picture and thus improve its social strategy.

Iconosquare

It is a social media analysis and performance tool that helps clients track channel growth and optimize social media strategies.

You can automate your accounts on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter using Iconosquare.

It offers advanced analytics, publishing and monitoring services for small businesses, organizations and agencies.

When it comes to looking at the growth of your social media campaigns, it's best to focus on the most important metrics to track the changes that are occurring.

Social media metrics offer you the insights you need to create powerful content that is sure to have an impact on your readers.

Here's a list of the most important social media metrics you should keep an eye on when checking your analytics tool:

• Range - Refers to the total number of unique visitors who saw your content.
• Impressions - Refers to the total number of content views in a user's feed.
• Average engagement rate by followers- It measures an account's level of interaction through published content, divided by the number of followers and multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.
• Average engagement rate by coverage- It reveals how many people interacted with your posts among those who saw your posts beyond your followers. It is calculated by dividing a post's engagement to reach, all multiplied by 100.
• Engagement - This social media metric determines the number of likes and comments a post receives over a certain period of time.
• Best posting time - The time when a higher engagement rate can be achieved over a selected period of time.
• Video views - This metric takes into account all the video views that a given video content has garnered over time.
• Demographics - This metric contains the data you need to know about your audience, such as age group, gender and location.

6.1 Collect all your social media data

Regardless of the social media analysis tool you choose, the first step is to make sure it collects data from all relevant and available sources.

Depending on which segment you've chosen that aligns with your marketing goals, make sure the analytics tool provides you with all the data you need to create an overview.

6.2 Create social media benchmarks

Another important step in the social media analytics process is to establish benchmarks.

Conducting a competitive analysis on your main competitors or the industry as a whole can help you improve your content strategy, discover your competitors' social networking strategies, better budget your budget and stay on top of the latest industry trends.

6.3 Generate a social media analytics report

While creating analytical reports can seem intimidating and time-consuming, with the right tool, it can be an easy process.

Ideally, you should be able to generate a social media analytics report in just a few clicks, and Socialinsider is the tool that does it for you.

You can also create white-label reports, so you can use your logo and brand colors.

6.4 Draw conclusions and take action

Once you've generated a social media analysis report, make sure you've learned something, whether it's identifying trends and new opportunities or improving your customer experience or content strategy.

6.5 Repeat the process

Running a social media analytics report is not a one-time thing. If you haven't been generating such reports on a regular basis until now, it's time to incorporate it into your overall strategy.

Set a clear time frame for repeating this process and take notes to see how your performance changes over time.

7. what is social listening

Social listening provides you with additional insights into your audience's interactions with your brand. Essentially, this tool analyzes the overall landscape on the social media platform regarding how your brand is perceived and how users respond to your campaigns.

Your main goal is to collect as many positive responses to your marketing campaigns as possible.

With social listening, you get more data on new topics that are of interest to your business and are related to those you have already explored in your content.

By exploring the landscape extensively, you will be able to develop only those elements that will provide you with the information you need to complete your marketing strategy.

With social listening, you will be able to develop content that relies not only on industry reports, but also on your audience's mentions and campaign hashtags.

Final thoughts

Being a marketer is not all rainbows and butterflies. It's hard work, strategies to put in place and campaigns to build, looking at the data.

Even if it doesn't all sound fun, you need to make every effort count at the end of the day when you look at your brand's performance.

At the core of social media analytics is a bundle of data about your marketing strategy and audience to help you make informed business decisions.

And let's face it! You can't manage what you can't measure.

Keep in mind that there are always new things to discover, and hopefully this social media analytics guide is just right for you and your brand

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