Do you promote your business on social media? Of course, you do!
Today, every business uses social media to promote its services and products. Almost 91.9% of US companies with over 100+ staff members used social media in 2021.
But do you know your social media is a flux of data that you can manipulate to increase brand awareness?
What!
All those comments on your Facebook posts, views on LinkedIn articles, and likes on Instagram Reels are raw data for businesses. Social media analytics is a crux of unfiltered information for brands to promote themselves better online.
But what exactly is social media analytics, and how can it benefit my business?
Let’s scroll down to find all about social media analytics and its benefits.
What is Social Media Analytics?
Social Media Analytics, aka SMA, is data collected from different social media marketing channels to make important business decisions. It is a deeper analytical process than monitoring the number of retweets or views on blogs.
Marketers use different marketing tools and KPIs (key performance indicators) to draw conclusive SMA. Here are the common social media metrics monitored by marketers:
- Content metrics to understand the value of the content you share on social media and determine the content type that users like the most.
- Timing metrics allow you to know when your targeted audience is more active on social media.
- Audience metrics help you analyze whether your targeted audience is engaged with your content or not.
- Social media listening metrics dig deeper to tell you what people are commenting and saying about your brand online.
- Competitor metrics provide a sneak peek into your competitors’ social media marketing strategies.
- Engagement metrics help to evaluate the performance of your social media content.
- Brand metrics are vital for keeping your social media marketing strategies aligned to your brand value.
- Social media management metrics to check the overall performance of your marketing campaigns.
- Goal and summary metrics show whether data collected from different social media channels are aligned to your business goals or not.
Importance of Social Media Analytics for Business Promotion
Social media is the number one digital marketing channel for businesses around the globe. Again, though, the US and China stood in the top spot in the context of social media ad spending in 2021.
So, if you are also aggressively pumping funds to improve social media marketing reach, analyzing the results is highly important. Social media analytics can help you improve SMM ROI and gain the following benefits:
1. Better know your audience
No matter what people say today, social media’s initial purpose is to establish a community of like-minded people. It is a place where businesses can directly connect with their targeted audience and understand what they like or dislike about the brand.
Every social media platform today has built-in engagement and performance analysis tools that can provide insight into your audience, such as:
- At what time your targeted audience is more active?
- What type of content do they like the most?
- How do they react to a particular content? Etc.
Leveraging social media analytics, you can better understand your audience’s pain points and active hours. This knowledge will help you further improve your social media content quality.
For example, if you have an Instagram Business account, you will get a View Insight button with every post. This will provide basic information about impressions your post received from hashtags, home, profile, and other sources.
It is basic social media analytics that can help to improve your social media post reach. Though, suppose you want deeper analytics on your different social media posts. In that case, you should use third-party tools like Buffer, Semrush, etc.
2. Find your social networks
Not all social media platforms are perfect for your business. For example, in 2021, Facebook and YouTube might be the most popular social media platforms with 2.89 million and 2.29 million active users, respectively, but for many businesses, they are not useful.
Pinterest or Telegram has become a better social media platform for many small businesses.
So, when you spend some time on social media analytics, it helps you find the right platform to promote your business. You can know social media platforms where your audience hangs out the most through analytics.
However, if you don’t have a clear idea about your audience, you can experiment with different social media channels. You can find the marketing channels that brought more traffic and qualified leads your way.
For example, due to constant monitoring, Solitaire Bliss has found that only 789 people opened their emails out of 5,000. So, they used this analysis to improve their email marketing campaign and drive more email registrations. As a result, they increased the open email rate by 86.3% and the total number of games played per user.
Similarly, social media analytics help you spot weaklings in your marketing campaigns and fix them to drive maximum results.
3. Select your high performing content type
Nowadays, you can find several types of content rolling around social media networks. You have Reels, Stories, Polls, Surveys, and many other content formats circulating on social media.
All social media platforms are not for you; no content types are for you. Specifically, not every content type works for B2B businesses.
B2B is not lucky like B2C brands where relatable and engaging content can bring leads. No B2B marketers have to understand the core value of their brand and audience before selecting the content type.
Can you imagine Bill Gates creating cool AR filter Stories on Instagram? That’s even weird to imagine.
So, here use your social media analytics data to know which type of content works the best for you. And then, based on that knowledge, create social media content for your brand.
4. Gain a competitive edge
Social media marketing is no buzzword today. But, everyone knows how it works and what benefits social media marketing has? Even your competitors!
Your competitors are also creating engaging and informative content to steal your audience. So, you can’t blindside today and focus on your social media marketing strategies.
You have to be alert and constantly monitor what your competitors are up to. Also, you can learn from your competitors’ mistakes. It is better than making your own mistakes.
In this case, your social media analytics can keep you informed about what type of content your competitors are producing, which content style worked for them, etc.
Thanks to tools like SimilarWeb and Buzzsumo, you can easily spy on your competitors’ social media strategies.
Note: You should compile a master Excel sheet after drawing data from different tools so you can create a better social media marketing strategy than your competitors.
5. Create a stellar marketing strategy
Let’s understand this – you cannot create a perfect social media marketing strategy in one go.
No matter how experienced a team and expensive tools you have by your side, you will learn by experimenting only.
Theoretically, you can compile a marketing strategy that can promote your business up to a certain extent. But when you aim to create a viral social media campaign—
- You have to understand your past content’s performance
- Evaluate your competitors
- Measure your high performing content
- Find shortcomings in your failed campaigns and so on.
And for all this, you need to monitor your social media at every step. You have to constantly analyze your social media performance from every new comment to like. This way, you can make real-time changes in your marketing strategies to achieve your objectives.
6. Room for innovation
Innovation is the only thing that can generate constant organic traffic for you. By analyzing different social media trends, you can know what others are doing?
That means you know what you don’t have to engage your audience because it’s already been done.
You can run your creative juices and produce innovative social media marketing plans to establish brand authority.
7. Tabs on each social media campaign
Are you running multiple marketing campaigns simultaneously?
Then, social media analytics can tell you how an individual marketing campaign performed at a particular point.
This knowledge will empower you to find the marketing campaigns that have worked the best for you.
Suppose you are running ads on Instagram and LinkedIn at the same time. However, Instagram ads are generating more leads compared to LinkedIn ads. So, you can direct your LinkedIn ad budget to Instagram and generate more leads.
8. Expand your audience base
As of October 2021, 4.5 billion people were active on social media. Now, all of these are not your audience, but some of them can be.
Usually, businesses are so hung up on one type of audience base that they won’t expand their horizon and target other audience groups. So instead, you can experiment with different targeted marketing strategies like account-based marketing, influencer marketing, and social media analytics.
This will help to expand your business reach and implement targeted marketing campaigns. Plus, you can be more innovative and creative in your approach by using different marketing strategies to target new audience groups.
Start Social Media Analytics Now!
Mostly, marketers are so engrossed in creating new and better marketing plans that they forget to analyze the results of their previous marketing campaigns. And that is their biggest mistake.
Without knowing how your previous marketing campaigns are converting, you cannot think of a new way to promote your business online. Therefore, you should not take social media analytics lightly and make a full plan to measure different metrics to drive maximum value from each social media effort.
Now, don’t sit idly and start gathering your social media data.
