With the fast pace economy, internet explosion, and high use of technology, there is so much data outburst. Not simply managing but also analyzing this data and synthesizing it into reports and dashboards is vitally important in any sector of business and marketing. If you're working in a marketing analyst role supporting a marketing team or even running your own business it's important to understand how social media analytics work and its impact on the business.
Now, the big question is: Do Social media platforms track analytics? The answer is pretty much all of the popular social media platforms have some amount of analytics built into them. Sometimes these require a free, pro, or business account to access but there's at least some basic information available. You can find built-in analytics for YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even TikTok. However, there are plenty of other third-party platforms like Sprout Social and HubSpot that not only help you schedule your social media calendar but also let you extract information and data from those platforms. These platforms have built-in dashboards that aggregate the performance of your accounts together so you could analyze and effectively calculate the return on investment (ROI) on your social media campaigns. Moreover, you can also compare how your company is performing in relation to its competitors. You can also track how your business is performing on different platforms in an aggregated easy-to-read way.
Beyond the platforms that we most commonly think of as social media, there are other areas that are often lumped in as well. To illustrate, customer sentiment mining is a unique metric on certain forums typically like LinkedIn. Social media analytics help look for information on the positive-negative or neutral perception of customers as they comment about a specific product or even a specific service. Social Media Analytics on different forums is often dedicated to a specific thing that a company is doing.
Have you ever tracked what are people saying on Reddit or forums that are industry or topic-specific? What type of data is available? There is a fair amount of variation from platform to platform about what's available. The naming for different analytics or metrics can vary but there are a few key things that seem to show up on every platform. Even if it may be called something slightly different, the major metrics that cross all platforms include the following:
Followers show how many people are requesting to see your content and support your content
Impressions are how many people saw the post or video content
Engagement measures how many pages of your post a user clicks through to within a single visit from those who saw the content that was posted. How many interacted with it depending on the platform. This could be video views, link clicks, likes etc. It is one of the most important metrics across social media platforms because it shows if people are interacting with your posts.
Engagement rate is the number of engagements divided by the number of impressions, click-through rate, or post clicks. These aren't exactly the same metric, but the availability differs by platform shares, how many people shared your post, or retweeted your content shares.
Beyond these universal metrics, you'll also find additional metrics depending on the platform including information such as: How people found the content? Where do they refer to it? Did they find it on search? Was it a suggested video on YouTube? These types of metrics can be very helpful for building a future strategy to continue growing on a channel or a platform.
Let’s now talk about practical analytics: How can social media analytics drive business improvement? Tracking different social media metrics can indicate what things are working well and which things aren't. This can clue you in as to what may need to be changed. For instance, if the content is getting a very high number of impressions but the engagement rate is low then you don't need to focus your efforts on getting the content viewed. Whether that's video, text posts, photos, etc. put in front of more people, rather one must focus on how to make it more meaningful for the people that do see it. It's also very important to know what your goal is for a specific piece of content be it a video, a photo, or a text post. For instance, you have special holiday hours and you’d like everybody to be aware that the storefront has different hours. In this case, you don't necessarily need people to comment or be very engaged. Instead, you just need them to see it. They don't necessarily need to interact with it. All they need is a clear update on your business hours. However, if you're launching a new product, your goal is to probably convert people viewing your content into paying customers. Consequently, your goals are very different for posting a product versus posting an announcement of a change in hours.
There are undoubtedly a lot of different social media metrics. So how do you decide which are the most important to analyze? Track metrics that align with why the content is being made in the first place. Focus on what you're trying to accomplish with and put in place standardized metrics across the platforms that you can analyze. Using analytics, you can also understand if you're accomplishing the set goals. Sometimes the goal is awareness and sometimes it may be fundraising and at other times it might be product sales. Knowing these goals across the platforms can be helpful to drive your social media marketing strategy and adapt while periodically checking the metrics. When you get more familiar with tracking metrics, you may discover other trends over time and which metrics perform better. Are things improving or are they staying the same? Are they declining? Social Media Analytics can inform business decisions regarding brand performance and promotions. Additionally, a social media expert should focus on the action users take and the interest users show on your profile as it can be a great indicator for your company’s next decision in the ever-evolving digital landscape. Although it's interesting to look at the numbers, a good social media expert tracks and analyzes metrics and can articulate the analysis to drive change with better decisions. Conducting A/B testing can help you understand how to tweak your content to improve metric performance.
Social Media Analytics set a pathway to strategizing your company’s branding and marketing activities. Social Listening can indicate what’s happening now and analytics help you anticipate what’s next. So, are you ready to launch your firm’s success pathway with Social Media Analytics?