The Role of Social Media Analytics In Digital Marketing
You would hear marketers tell you to “use social media” as one of your primary online marketing tactics. True enough, you already have your social network page set up on multiple fronts. You have LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other social networks your target audiences use. Therefore, why aren’t you racking up enough traffic and qualified leads yet? The answer is because you have never done social media analytics before.
What is Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics is all about gathering the number of reactions, comments, reviews, and other items that help you understand more about your audience. It is inevitable some professional social media managers make things confusing by throwing a slew of incomprehensible data at you.
However, marketers with effective data presentation help you make crucial decisions fast. For example, you see that people are reacting angrily with your newest product. Upon consulting your specialist, they show you data that indicates the precise reason of your audiences’ displeasure.
Successful social media campaigns make it seem like the companies know their social network target audiences. In fact, it seems they can communicate with them deeply on another level.
The truth is these companies might have only had a small idea about their audience. For example, they might have collected their audience’s average demographic, earning power, preferences, and other factors.
The rest is about testing different social media post types and analyzing their results. Therefore, to achieve this, the companies used social media analytics.
Famous Brands That Took Advantage of Social Media Analytics
For example, Airbnb is a famous peer-to-peer rent-a-property service. Back in 2016, live streaming was a pretty new thing. While some companies were doing it, Airbnb tried to use livestream to share the unique experiences of their customers.
The company jumped into the fray with their “We Are Here Campaign.” They asked some real-life customers to livestream their activities including their Airbnb hosts.
The results were astounding. Airbnb’s social media campaign earned 6.2 million views from just 6 livestreams of real-life customers worldwide. Now, this is one proof that in-depth social media analytics can result to something really amazing.
Social media gives every company a digital beacon in a social network. In addition, it gives businesses a huge boost when it comes to other aspects of digital marketing.
While social media has no direct correlation in improving SEO scores, its role as a sales funnel entry point helps improve content visibility. To do this, most businesses share their company blog posts and pages on their social media page.
Additionally, social networks offer a pay-per-click advertising campaign that gives every post you make a visibility boost. These PPC features are effective research tools as well as for bringing high traffic to a website.
Which Tools Are Best to Use This Year?
Now that we’ve explained the power of social media networks and analytics in improving your business, it’s time to look at the best tools to analyze your social media post performance. Here are some of the best to use this year and into the future.
Google Analytics
Google’s own free-to-use social analytics tool helps you analyze both SEO and social media performance at the same time. Additionally, it gives you plenty of insights in the following aspects:
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- Website Traffic Sources from Social Media: It helps to know which platform gives you better results. This feature does that.
- Social Media Post Milestones: This helps you monitor whether you have achieved your post performance goals over time.
- Social Media Posts Conversations: You can monitor audience conversations for each post from every social network you register.
BuzzSummo
Paid platforms will never perform poorly (although there are some rotten apples out there). One of the best to use is BuzzSummo.
This content analytics tool helps you discover the competition’s latest achievements and the methods they used. It does this through brand monitoring, social listening, and competitor research. Here are some of its social media analytic features:
- Content Discovery: Which links see most shares in social media using tags, mentions, and comments as parameters? This feature tells that to you.
- Content Analysis: Which domain, content type, platforms, and other content formats dominate social media at a given period? This feature helps you answer it.
- Influencer Marketing: Need a top influencer to help you spread the word? You’ll find the best ones classified according to niche or industry here.
Brand24
Another paid analytics platform, Brand24 combines both web and social media analytics. First, it allows you to monitor brand-related keywords. Then, it helps you track these keywords (including hashtags relevant to you) and see their social media reach, engagement, mention volume, and more.
Here are some top features of Brand24’s social media analytics:
- Keyword Performance: Brand24’s keyword feature also extends to all possible social networks.
- Engagement Metrics: Track the engagement in each social media post.
- Influential Metrics: Check if any critic or influential authors talk about your brand locally or globally.
I Can’t Understand All These Data! What Do They Mean?
Now that you know the top three social media analytics tools for businesses, you might come across some technical terms that are difficult to understand once you start your research. These are the following:
Audience Growth Rate
This social metric allows you to see whether your social marketing efforts are yielding profit. Any business owner will want to see this summary, and social marketing manager or digital agencies will always present this to you.
The higher your growth rate, the better your digital campaigns are. Therefore, tracking this metric is definitely important.
Average Engagement Rates
Aside from the number of new social media followers, you want to see whether these new and old followers interact with your post. True enough, for your social media campaigns to work, you need to know if you’re speaking to the right people.
The average engagement rate allows you to check the time of day your posts get the most attention. This tells you more than what Facebook reactions or Twitter likes tell you about your audience when it comes to engagement.
Visitor Frequency Rate
This metric shows you the depth of engagement and strength of your social networks in grabbing the attention of your two visitors: new and returning ones.
Most of the time, you’ll want to always see new visitor numbers rise and confirm that your reach and audience show growth and profit for your campaigns.
However, returning visitors are equally valuable because they value the content they receive from your social media networks and websites. In fact, they can improve your campaigns by sharing some of your content to their networks too.
Assisted Social Conversions
Click-conversion metrics show you the efforts you’ve done to achieve a single conversion. However, it is not complete data because it doesn’t show your efforts to build trust and influence on social media.
Assisted social conversions show you additional information about these aspects. To do this, the tool follows social-media referred visitors through their journey in the sales funnel. Then, it helps you see whether they converted into other factors.
For example, a funny Facebook meme may not guarantee a sale, but you can record that you have a hundred customers who shared the post and remember your brand.
Analyze Your Social Data Correctly And See Huge Improvements Quick!
Your social media presence isn’t the only thing to help you spread the word about your business and create conversions. To fully utilize this cost-effective publishing channel, you need to know about the right data to observe helping you make the right decisions for your campaigns.
