How to Best Utilize Social Media Analytics
What is it?
Social media analytics is the practice of gathering and aggregating information from social media sites and analyzing the data to provide insight for a business.
Why is it important?
Companies thrive off of information about their consumers. Social media analytics can provide insight such as:
Understanding the customer - What are their values? How do they spend their time? What are their attitudes and opinions?
Forecasting consumer behavior - Will a customer buy a product or engage with content? Why or why not?
Targeting the customer - What are the best ways to reach a target audience? How can a business most effectively engage a certain demographic?
What tools can I use?
Google Analytics - Free and easy to install, Google Analytics provides cross-platform analytics software. You can customize data collection and report creation, and utilize Google’s free online training for the platform. However, there are limitations to the free program and businesses may have to upgrade to a paid premium account
Hootsuite - As a social media management company, Hootsuite became a popular platform for brand management. Earlier this year, they acquired UberVU to strategically expand their analytics offerings. Now, real-time analysis is a tool on their social media engagement platform.
Buffer - Similar to Hootsuite, Buffer began as a social media organization tool, but has since begun to offer clients data to help track effectiveness of strategies. Buffer for Business includes “free” analytics as part of a paid package deal.
Salesfusion - Salesfusion focuses on marketing automation solutions for medium sized B2B companies. They’ve added social media analytics to their platform as an integrated offering in their publishing and sharing tools. Their software gives you pre-built reports in easy-to-use dashboard formats and allows you to schedule report delivery to key executives.
HubSpot - This SaaS company has developed a inbound marketing software platform that helps companies attract, convert, and close potential customers. Their Social Inbox can tie into your contact database, and their software integrates marketing analytics and CRM to help show the big picture when it comes to social media engagement.
How can I best utilize social media analytics?
Once you’ve chosen one or more platforms, take some time to strategize: identify your core competencies when it comes to social media, as well as any weaknesses that stand out. Social media analytics blog Quintly reports that social media analytics solutions are in a “massive growth phase” as stakeholders continue to broaden social media marketing activities. Here are basic steps you can take with social media analytics tools that can have huge impacts on your business:
Determine your reach - One key metric to track is the volume of conversation surrounding your business. Track your daily, weekly, and monthly mentions and measure growth over time. You’ll be able to learn which days of the week and times of the day are most effective for dialogue by noting when there are spikes in the number of mentions you receive. You can also see if volume of conversation increases after a marketing campaign to help determine relative success.
Gauge consumer sentiments - In addition to watching the quantity of conversation, analytics will help you determine the quality of conversation. Are people happy with your business or product? How do they react emotionally to a certain marketing strategy?
Focus on channels that are most effective - Most social media analytics tools will allow you to take data from multiple platforms. You can use this information to determine which social media channels are appropriate for your content. Maybe customers respond best to content on LinkedIn but ads on Facebook. Make sure that your marketing dollars are being well-spent by focusing your attention on whatever social media platform fits your business best.
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