A lot of companies today think that SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGEMENT is just about creating content, posting it and creating more content and posting it, but it is a lot more than that. It is equally important to analyze social media campaigns to see whether they are achieving the set goals and make necessary changes as you go. Given the explosive and sustained growth of social media; implementing a social media analytics strategy is critical for any business hoping to drive leads and conversions.
Loosely defined, Social media analytics is described as the collecting of data from social media campaigns evaluating that data to make economic and time effective decisions. Social Media Analytics has 3 stages namely; data identification, data analysis, and information interpretation. For value maximization at every stage of the analytics process, marketers should come up with questions to be answered like, Who, What, When, Where, Why and Who to aid better understanding of their research results. Below are five reasons why it is important to have active social media analytics as part of your social media marketing strategy.
- Help you understand your audience better
Analytics help you understand your audience better and aid better engagement you’re your audience which can improve your reach and return on investment. For example, through constant analysis, one can pick up the best times and days to post their content. There is no universal time for all kinds of businesses when it comes to posting the content, hence there is always need to constantly analyze the engagement and reach generated by each post to help improve content scheduling.
- A better understanding of which Channel to use
Different social media channels may require different social media strategies and just because Facebook has over 2 billion users and Instagram has over 1 billion users does not mean it will work for your business. For instance, research has stated that LinkedIn works best for B2B companies followed by Twitter, with Facebook on the third position, whereas Facebook is considered the best social media platform for B2C companies followed by Twitter, with Instagram in the third position.
Knowing which channel works better will help when it comes to allocating funds to campaigns and allows the marketing team to put more time on channels that have a high return on investment. Analytic tools like Hootsuite, Social Bakers and Sprout Social that use social media dashboards will help you figure out which social media networks are driving the highest engagements during and after your social campaign.
- Creating better content
Social media analytics can also help you ascertain what kind of content is working, increase the reach of your posts, improve the effectiveness of your ads, and get your whole social media team working in tandem. Analytics tools have in-depth features that give you a clear understanding of your campaigns’ performance across platforms. It is important to understand that social media is not just a medium for content promotion, but it also works as a medium for content testing. As it stands analytics is a tidy little cycle of analysis, planning, creation, promotion and analysis again, and over time you learn what works and what doesn’t.
You will get to know whether links, videos, images will do better for your campaigns or not as it points out which posts got the most shares, reposts, how much time spent and how many visitors were converted.
- Understanding competition
Analytics tools can also be used to keep a tab on the competition. With the right social media analytics tools, you can monitor competitions page growth, number of posts per period, levels of engagement on each of the posts etc. Through constant analysis of the strategies being used by your competitors, you can get an idea of what others are doing plus what is working and what is not working.
- Refining your overall Social Media strategy
Businesses should be comfortable with the fact that not everyone will be able to create the best strategy on the first attempt. Social metrics will help you over time to determine what works and what doesn’t. It also helps with decisions on whether to continue with a campaign, make changes or nip it in the bud. The use of social media listening will also help you check the impact your strategy is having on the people through picking up what people are saying about your brand.
Most small to medium-sized business are now using social media in an attempt to grow their businesses, and in most of these organizations, this work is the responsibility of the most junior person on the marketing team who usually does not have a full understanding of the social media management cycle. Hence all they do is develop good looking posts, push them out and hope that they work. Unfortunately, most of these organizations are not getting a good return on their investment.
Having a full social media marketing strategy which includes robust analytics is a sure way of getting a good return on investment and working with a professional agency that fits your budget can help you achieve this.