6 Important Reasons why you Should Use Social Media Analytics
A Seriously Social Community Article by Mitt Ray
I've been wanting to include an article from Mitt for ages, and so I'm excited about this one. Particularly as it's about social media analytics!
We can get so focused on posting and scheduling to our social media channels, and even with engagement. But actually analysing the results of our social media efforts isn't done as often as we should. With social media analytics, we can track our progress and learn so much. But I'll stop there, and let Mitt explain...
Ian
Do you know there’s a wealth of information hiding behind all your social media activity?
It’s your social media analytics.
All those updates you shared, the interactions they generated from your followers, those comments you replied to and other activity amass together to form extremely useful data.
This unique information can benefit your social media marketing in so many ways.
So, I have listed out all the reasons why you should use your social media analytics and the social media tools you can use to track it effectively.
#1 They help you understand your audience
Taking steps to understand your audience using social data can help you in so many ways. For example, analyzing your past posts can help you find your unique best time to share.
Timing is an important part of social media marketing. If you post when your fans are online and at their highest level of alertness your posts will drive more engagement, traffic and sales.
Therefore, you should dissect your social data and find your unique best time to post on social media.
Some social networks let you do this easily through their built-in analytics.
On Facebook, you can find it by going to the ‘Post’ section in your insights.
You'll then see two graphs at the top of the screen.
They will show you the days and times at which most of the page’s fans are online.
If you post content at these times, reach will be high.
#2 They show you what your best social networks are
Not all social networks will work perfectly for you. Just because Facebook has over 2 billion users and Instagram has over 800 million users doesn’t mean they will drive the best results.
There might be smaller networks like Pinterest or Flickr that can help execute your strategy better.
The only way to confirm which social networks work best is through experimentation and using your analytics to measure how much engagement, traffic and sales you are getting.
This data can be utilized to focus more on social networks that are working for you and eliminating ones that aren’t.
You can also use the data to prioritize the amount of time you spend managing each social network. More time can be spent on the top performing networks and lesser on ones that bring in smaller results.
To figure out which social networks are driving the highest engagement, you should use a social media dashboard tool like Cyfe. It connects to several social networks and you can place data from all of them in one single dashboard to compare performance.
Here’s a screenshot of one of my dashboards containing data from different social networks.
Cyfe also has a feature known as mashups which can be used to mash data from different social networks to create one graph that compares performance.
#3 Social data can help you create better content
When you track your social networks, you will understand what content drives the best results.
On networks like Facebook and Twitter you will be able to see whether images, links or videos do better. While on visual-centric networks like Pinterest and Instagram you can check what type of images perform best.
To figure out what content is performing best you can use your social media page’s analytics. Some social networks like Facebook have built-in analytics that shows what types of media perform best. You can view it in the ‘Posts’ section of your analytics on Facebook.
As you can see in the screenshot below, links are performing best on this page.
You can also use analytics to check how your blog performs. You can see which content is shared more, the number of visits each social network sends, how much time they spent and how many of those people converted to subscriptions and sales.
To check your content’s performance on social media, you can use a tool like Buzzsumo.
And to check the amount of traffic a social network is driving you can use Google Analytics. This tool will also display other metrics like the amount of time these people spent on your site, the number of pages they visited, the bounce rate, etc.
#4 Help you Understand competitors
Your competitors are also creating content and running social media strategies. This will result in their own unique data.
If you analyze this data, you will be able to figure out what is working and what isn’t. It will help you avoid the mistakes they are making and only focus on techniques that bring results.
To figure out which social networks are working best for your competitors you can use Similar Web.
Just add the URL to any website and it will show you the percentage of the traffic your site receives from social media and the social networks driving it.
Then you can spy on your competitors’ top performing social media and content using Cyfe and Buzzsumo.
For example, on Cyfe you can create an Instagram widget and choose to track a competitors account instead of your own. You just add their username and select the metric.
Here I chose top posts by ‘Likes’ and I am able to view them.
I can click on each post and it will take me to the post on Instagram so that I can take a closer look.
#5 Social metrics can help you create a better strategy
You will not create the best strategy in your first attempt. You are bound to make several mistakes and use tactics that don’t work.
But if you study your social media analytics regularly you will be able to figure out what these mistakes are. Hence, when you optimize your strategy you can eliminate them and fortify it.
To figure out these mistakes using any good social media analytics tool will do. But along with it you should use social media listening to check the impact your strategy is having on people.
Social media listening can be defined as…
‘The process of tracking online conversations to learn what people are saying about a specific brand, industry, person, etc. and use the insights as a business leverage.’
Using social listening you can view in real-time what people are saying about your business online. This can help you modify your strategy to better connect with current and potential customers.
For executing social media listening you can use a tool like Sentione. Just sign up for an account and add in keywords like your product name, company name and other relevant keywords and the software will track all the mentions and list them out. It will also display the data in the form of graphs.
You can use this data to modify your strategy and create better content in the future.
#6 Social media analytics shows you how a social media campaign is performing
Once you launch a social media campaign you should regularly track it. You can check if it is panning out the way you intended it to.
If things aren’t going according to plan you can make changes to your campaign and rectify it. And if results are very damaging you can nip it in the bud.
For this, you can use a tool like Sentione as it conducts a sentiment analysis of campaigns to show whether it is having a positive, negative or neutral effect.
You can then decide on how to proceed.
Now begin spending more time on your social media analytics
As you can see above there are several benefits of using your social media analytics. It can help improve your presence in the short term and even in the long term. Data from your analytics also ensures you get more out of the time you spend.
For best results make sure you use the right tools to track your analytics and only track metrics that matter most to your business.
Do you use your social media analytics? How has this helped? Are there any other benefits of tracking it? Please leave your comments below.
About Mitt Ray
Mitt Ray is the founder of Social Marketing Writing, where you can download 100 Free Social Media Background Images.
Great article. It will really helps me lot. Thanks for sharing.
Hello Mitt, I didn’t give much importance to social media analytics but after reading your post, i have realized that how much Social media Analytics is effectively important to get social media success.
Cool Stuff. keep post blogs like this
Too many people don’t know the stats they should. Great article!
Yes i am agree with you as social media analytics help in many way like it help in decision making, making further strategy, analysis of audience so it help in many way. Thank you for sharing amazing article keep up the good work.
Amazing article i like it the way you present your article information. yes i agree that Social media analytic help us to measure traffic visit to our profile. it also help to make better strategy and how much bidding you should do on your paid campaign. thank you for sharing such a great article.
I occasionally read your blog,
This article mentions the benefits of using social media tracking tools,
Here’s a tool for tracking and analyzing ads on social platforms called bigspy.
Bigspy is a free ads spy tool.
It can be used to find competitors’ ads, monitor what competitors are running, find the best ads in the industry, and bigspy can be used as a repository for creative advertising.
Hopefully bigspy has your likes and recommendations, as well as some Suggestions!
Social media marketing is one of the important resources of marketing any business. informative content here as a business development business perspective.Thanks for sharing.
Hi Ian,
hope you all doing good who’re reading my comment.
data gathered from social media is known as unstructured information.
analyst make is informative for companies.
i was telling my friend about it who is nearly to start this project.
i would like to mention Adspy.com that you have been already advertise by your long comment in this post. don’t worry:
Hello Guys,
we structure the information gathered and analyse using tools later it is processed to useful results from that dataset.
which helpful for companies to grownup their business faster by improving those factors which are outcomes of social media analyst stream effort.
as it can also help me while how peoples react what they demand and how they respond in market to improve business. these are analytics and further days am also looking for very deep impact for every useful business running in world. microsoft linkedin twitter facebook instagram and other social media companies are part of this and these analysts help them improve their business comparing each others versus.
it also impact and helpful for smaller business also. where ever you will go can help those society and peoples to help them to improve their businesses.
i really like it, because it is interesting to gathering and processing on data from every individual profile activities.i will send you mine facebook page analytics and my iphone also has an analytics of the days.
where instagram also uses analytics portion to check progress of the profile.
same as every company check overall progress of comments likes reviews requests and many more by progress checking of last days.
then they decide which factor need to improve i just wrote above.
this cool to explain about my opinion on social media analytics.
what are your aspects? feel free to write
Stay Awesome,
Daniyal Younis
MCS-Student
Great information thank you for sharing this wonderful post.
Thanks for summarizing this up! With the help of prominent social media marketing management services, you can connect with your customers in a better way. To keep your brand top of the mind for your followers and remind them of new products, and more.
It can help you create better content
Hi Ian,
We’re AdSpy.com, the social media ad intelligence tool with the largest searchable database of Facebook and Instagram ads in the world with 44+ million ads across 183 countries from more than 8.7 million advertisers.
We came across your social media artice on 6 important reasons why we should use social media analytics and we would like to ask if you would be interested in featuring our social media ad intelligence platform even by just a mere mention of our brand in a related article of yours or having a published review about it to let your viewers know what AdSpy can do for businesses, entrepreneurs, startup founders, social media and marketing executives in terms of competitive research and intelligence, social listening, reputation management, getting feedback from customers, among others. With AdSpy, you can search by ad text, URL, landing page URLs, comments, affiliate networks or filter by age, gender, daily & total likes plus more.
We can provide a free trial code for you and your visitors and exclusive discounts. We always look for new ways to collaborate with strategic organizations and marketing coaches and experts like you by asking for suggestions on how we can help each other out.
Please let us know your thoughts on this and we would be waiting for your kind feedback.
Thanks,
The AdSpy Team
Social media analysis is needed for business perspective. It shows how your business is performing in online marketing and what more you have to do for making it more vulnerable. its great that post like this has been added. It is must for the user who want his/her business to grow and don’t know how to advertise or promote in market.
Simply It is age of Social Media, Digital Marketing Manager Needs such type of data. Social Media Platforms are now big Marketing Companies that helps a business to grow up. Marketing Budget should depend on the capacity of customers. This is why one need analytics to plan his budget as well as the expected outcome. This blog help to understand some keypoint.
Given the algorithmic updates in various search engines and the exponential rates at which people are sharing content that eventually gets viral, I agree that having a analytic tool to analyse this data can help not only in crafting better strategies and content, but as mentioned in the article it increases the chances to better engage with the audience and get familiarize with the competitors. I would also like to add a small point, having such matrices helps in maintaining the budget of marketing. Thanks for the post.
Social media is really useful source for marketing. But i read your blog and i agree with your information about social media analytics. I am glad to find it. There are so many developers working on this part but this is one of the best innovative post ever. Thanks for such post.
Worthy Article!!
about How we can use Social Analytics to manage and grows our Websites.
Too many people don’t know the stats they should. Great article!
Hey Ian,
It great to be reading your post again. I agree with your points, social media analytics is crucial to grow quickly and reduce the risk of failure. But I fear only a few are using it to max content.
By the way, Thanks for the great read Ian.
~ Donna