We are living in the 21st century, and clearly, social media is taking the marketing world by storm. It has been of great use for businesses. In this regard, the need to understand social media analytics arises. This article concentrates on what it is and how you can use it to your advantage.
What Is Social Media Analytics (SMA)?
In simple terms, it is a process whereby you gather and analyze data from social media platforms – Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, among others. It can also be extended to blogs, news outlets, and even review sites as well. The process not only analyzes retweets, shares, and likes but goes beyond to try and develop a better idea about social consumers.
Social media analytics and market research are powerful tools majorly used by marketers for tracking online conversations about their products or companies of interest. However, there are much more perks that come along with social media analysis, which include:
A Better Understanding of Your Audience
By anything you post online, you are obviously targeting some audience, and therefore, understanding the audience is essential. Through analyzing social data, say your previous posts, you can identify the best time to share.
It is worth to emphasize that timing is critical when it comes to social media marketing. Always post when most of your fans are online to drive higher engagement, sales, and traffic. Therefore, make sure you establish the best unique time that works in your favor.
You Get to Know What Social Networks Works Best for You
Although it is advisable to cast your nests everywhere, some social media platforms will work perfectly for you, while others won’t. The fact that Facebook and Instagram are the most used social networks with over 2 billion and 800 million users, respectively, does not mean they will earn you the best results. Twitter or other smaller sites like Pinterest may
Social media analytics helps you analyze all social networks that you are using and identify where to concentrate more, based on engagement and sales conversions.
You Can Create More Quality Content
Once you apply social media analytics, you can tell the kind of content that drives perfect results. In most cases, you will note that on Twitter and Facebook, videos and links derive better results compared to visual-centric platforms such as Pinterest and Instagram, which thrive best with images. With good analysis, you are better placed to tell what to post where.
Some social networks, for instance, Facebook, have inbuilt analytics that shows media performance. Therefore, it is easy to tell the type of media that works best on them.
Helps to Understand and Monitor Competitors
The good thing with social media it that you have access to everything your competitors are sharing and even their frequency. Make use of sites or software that can help you analyze your competitors’ data. You simply add a competitor’s URL to the analyzing website, and you will analyze their traffic and compare it to yours.
Study what your competitors are doing and use it as a benchmark parameter and tune your content to place yourself on a better edge.
Monitor Social Media Campaign Performance
From time to time, you will launch a social media campaign and seek to know how it is performing. Social media analytics is a perfect way to track and gauge campaign performance. If it is not panning out as expected, you can make the necessary changes. However, if the results are worse, you can choose to abort the campaign.
Choose the right tools to analyze campaigns to tell whether the impact is neutral, negative, or positive.
