Social media was quite a novelty in the past, but today their importance is something that is no longer debated. Yes, most of the businesses have realized the true power of social media and they have accepted it as an indispensible part of their marketing and PR mix.
According to Social Media Examiner’s report, marketers place very high value on social media marketing:
- 86% of marketers stated that social media is important for their business
- 89% of marketers stated that increased exposure was the number one benefit of social media marketing
Social media is an extraordinarily effective marketing medium, but many businesses focus only on monitoring their Facebook followers, likes, shares retweets and other similar popular social media analytics. But in reality social media analytics actually offer other business metrics which are even more important; sadly many businesses either don’t know them or are actually ignore it.
You cannot miss on important metrics which can be derived from social media analytics as these can enhance your ability to drive major performance results from your social media marketing efforts.
What is social media analytics ?
Social media analytics involves exploring data on social media to take meaningful business decisions. Data is commonly congregated from blogs, forums and social media websites (like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.). This data is examined by transforming the qualitative data to quantitative data with the help of different techniques (like text mining and NLP). To put in simple words, Social media analytics are statistics and data which give you understandings into your social media marketing performance. It is the use of data to measure the impact of social media activity on a company’s revenue.
Read Facebook Ad hacks from Ashley Davis
Grow your business with these social media metrics:
Businesses find trouble in discovering appropriate ways to take their social media campaign ahead. One of the most important steps of any social media strategy is to keep a close track on the analytics. The social media analytics platform offers a wealth of information and long-term support for the agencies and marketers. This information if used correctly can be a direct ticket to digital marketing success. To grow your business with social media analytics consider the below conversions:
- Volume
Volume is a great early indicator of interest; this is one of the easiest social media metric to measure. It might sound to be a simple business metric, but it is much more than just counting numbers. This metric measures the number of messages floating about your brand, also the number of individuals talking about your brand, and further tracks how these numbers change over a period of time. Understand when the volume is high for a particular day or time, it means more people are talking about your brand. You can use this information and focus more of your own posts during such times and get more engagement.
- Reach/Impression
In a perfect world, each of your followers will see every piece of content you post, but the reality is not as perfect as you think. Not all of your fans will see every single post you publish. What are reach and impression? Well, Reach is the number of people who see your post, while impressions are the number of times an ad was seen. Reach measures how your content is spread across several social media platforms and also measures your effective audience, and the impression is a suitable metric for increasing brand awareness as it tells you how many times your audience viewed your ad.
- Engagement
Engagement metrics is one of the most important areas in social media which should be measured. Platform engagement basically means likes, retweets, shares, comments, follows, etc. This metric tells you how are people taking part in the discussion about your brand and what are they doing to share and engage with it. Engagement can actually measure a horde of different things depending on the platform and when combined together it can give you logic for how well your audience is responding to your content.
Read Insights on Twitter Analytics
- Conversions/Acquisitions
Conversions are basically the way to measure the “ACTION”. Ultimately, you want the work you do on social media to lead to somewhere- can be a form-fill, a signup or an e-commerce buy. Conversion metric tells you how many people entered your lead generation funnel and joined your marketing database. Some examples of conversion metrics to track include:
- Registrations for webinars and content downloads
- Online form completions
- Phone-in leads
- Online sales
- Audience demographics
Reaching the right audience at the right time has been one big challenge for the marketers. This challenge can be sorted if you could track up-to-date data on audience demographic.
For example, here are some stats from social media analytics study (Source):
- 77% of the social media users are active on Facebook, and if you go specific, 44% of online women and 56% of online men use Facebook. The age of these users varies from 18 years to 44 years.
- 21% users are on Twitter, and focused age group for Instagram is 18 years to 34 years. 26% of men and 38% of women online are active on Twitter.
By monitoring such analytics, your business can discover various ways to utilize social media platforms to its full potential and make sure you target the right audience set with the most appropriate message.
- Competitors tracking
Most of the social media platforms allow tracking competitors; you can easily visit your competitor’s Facebook/Twitter/Pinterest page and see what action is going on. Track engagement rates, likes, comments and shares and once you have all the data in place you can spot patterns which their audiences like to follow and incorporate them in your own strategy and tap your competitors market.
- Post-performance tracking
Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, and Twitter Analytics help to track the performance of your content once you start with the campaigning. Here you can track which type of post is working well for your audience and which is not, which post drives more traffic and engagement, and which are liked by your audience. Performance tracking is an important metric, as what might be trending today may not be there tomorrow. Hence be regular with the performance tracking. Succeeding in this process ensure increased conversions.
- Social media ROI
Without a doubt, ROI this is the metric which holds maximum importance for the business. Well, site traffic, social followers, and some of the others are important, but this one matters the most. Tracking Social Media ROI for your campaign tells you what’s working, not working, and why. This information is something every business wants to know because this is how they can make their marketing better.
Business benefits derived from social media analytics
Social media monitoring process helps the business identify real-time conversations happening on the social media about their product or brand. It also helps business to respond in the most accurate and timely manner. It is critical for businesses to assess what is going on the social media by taking out time to listen to each of the brand/product-related conversations. Here are some benefits businesses can derive from social media analytics:
- Gain a Competitive Advantage
- Learn from Your Customers
- Enhance Your Products and Services
- Better Target Marketing Efforts
- Market Innovation
Final call: Which social media metrics matter to you?
If you are spending time and money on social media campaigns you can’t let it fly blind. You need to know what they are doing for your brand and how to capitalize on that. So take some time to calculate and understand what’s happening in your social media campaigns. Then actively use this information to optimize the rest of your marketing strategy, you can even leverage it for better customer success and sales.
Also Read Growth Hacks from Top 30 social media influencers.
