Many companies regularly post content to their social media channels but aren’t looking at their analytics on a regular basis. If you aren’t looking at your data, you aren’t really achieving social media success.
Social media analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing data and reports based on metrics from one or multiple social media accounts.
Social media analytics provides insight into a number of important factors that are directly tied to the success of your marketing efforts and your business as a whole.
One of the keys to social media success is to know what types of posts on which platforms are most effective in resonating with your followers. This will enable you to consistently produce engaging content and can turn prospects into clients, recruits into employees and help you retain clients.
It’s a good idea to look at your social analytics at least once a week. Do a deeper dive into the data once a month by running a social media audit. This can help shed light on specific topics such as the types of posts that most resonate with your followers, the social networks that are working best and the networks should you rethink/rework.
Here’s a list from Hubspot explaining the importance of social media analytics:
- Develop a deeper understanding of who your target audience is and where they spend their time
- Identify which social platforms receive the greatest amount of traffic
- Determine what type of social content leads to the most conversions, engagements, etc.
- Discover what type of social media post has the greatest reach and resonates best with your audience on certain platforms
- Learn about what is and isn’t working in terms of social media campaigns and ads among your audience while they’re live and after they wrap up
- Develop a stronger social media strategy for your business’s specific goals related to your marketing, sales and service efforts
Decide on which metrics you’ll and focus and track
Next, decide which social media metrics you’re going to track. I always get these confused, so I thought it would be helpful to list them out for you. Here are some commonly used metrics applicable to virtually every social channel.
- Reach is the total number of people who have seen your content.
- Engagements are all interactions including shares, likes and comments.
- Impressions are the number of times or content is displayed on someone’s feed.
- Mentions are the times your business and brand are referenced on social media by audience members or other businesses.
- Social ROI provides insight into whether the investment you’ve put into your social media marketing is resulting in an increase or decrease in customers, sales, brand awareness, and customer loyalty.
- Social listening is when you monitor conversations about your business and brand on social to see what customers and audience members are saying about you.
- Likes are when an audience member taps (or double taps) on your social content to show they’re a fan of your post.
- Retweets/ shares/ reposts are when audience members post the content your business published on their profiles.
The next step is to choose a social media analytics tool – or you could just start out using the major social channels’ basic company page analytics. Some are paid and some are free. Social media analytics tools will show you which tactics and strategies are working, and which aren’t. This allows you to better focus your time, effort and budget.
Analytics also help you create social media performance reports to share with your team and stakeholders. Some of these include Hootsuite Analytics, Google Analytics, Sprout Social and Agora Pulse.
Remember, information is power, especially when it comes to your social media marketing efforts.