By now you might have heard a lot about social media analytics. Right from the social media insights to track to the social media data gathering process, everything has now become an inevitable part of every marketing plan and strategy. With innumerable social media campaigns running all over social media, it is difficult to track and analyze what works for a brand and what does not. Social media marketing relies on analytics because it gives you a roadmap to plan your strategy.
Relying on the right social media reporting tools can help you go ahead with this process smoothly. While most of you are aware of social media analytics as a whole, a lot has changed since you last read up on this process!
Allow us to brush up your know-how on social media analytics with this blog. It is one thing to plan and ideate amazing content for your brand on social media and another to track, analyze, and improve the content performance. Here is where social media data analytics comes in handy.
Table of Contents
Let’s begin!
What is Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics is a process used by organizations to improve their social media marketing strategies. The process involves gathering data, tracking the data, and analyzing it to come to conclusions that can improve the marketing plans. Social media analytics is all about measuring the social media metrics that impact the brand performance on social media platforms. Not just brands, this process is used by content creators and corporate organizations as well.
Social media analytics also includes social media intelligence and social media listening, wherein you can decode the audience’s behavior and know what and how the audience is talking about your brand/organization on social media channels.
All of this together forms a part of social media analytics.
To simply put it together- With the help of social media analytics, you can make better strategic decisions for your brand/organization’s social media presence and performance.
Why is Social Media Analytics Important?
For those still wondering why social media analytics is such a huge deal, here are a few reasons why this process is crucial.
1. Gives you an insight into your brand’s social media performance
With the help of social media insights, you can measure the effectiveness of your strategies on social media platforms. Be it an Instagram marketing campaign or a Facebook marketing plan, the metrics you measure can help you detect how your brand is performing on social media platforms and what is the current position of the brand in terms of audience engagement, audience reach, and so on.
2. Social media analysis gives you an opportunity to improve strategies
The social media data you gather says a lot about what you can improve in your social media marketing campaigns. Track the content performance of your brand, compare the metrics, and you can decide what needs to be improved to get the desired results. For instance, a low subscriber count and low retention rate on YouTube can tell you what kind of videos are not working for your brand.
3. Understand the audience sentiment towards your brand on social media
To plan your marketing strategies, it is important to first understand how the audience perceives your brand on social media platforms. The process of conducting social media analytics will give you a glimpse of the audience’s sentiment. This will help you assess your brand presence too. Social media analytics tools can help you with sentiment analysis!
4. Social media analytics will help dig out marketing opportunities
Marketers often miss out on opportunities to reach their audiences on social media because they are unable to detect the gaps. With the help of a social media analytics report, you can detect where your content could have been better and how else could your brand reach out to more audiences. Compare your social media reports to find a pattern and implement a strategy that leaves no marketing opportunity unexplored.
5. Gives you an in-depth understanding of your competitors
Social media analytics is also applicable to analyzing your competitors on social media. Social media analytics tools like Unbox Social provide a dedicated feature for competition tracking. The social media analysis of competitors will help you detect what kind of strategies your market competitors are using to get maximum returns.
Marketing Elements That Need Social Media Analytics
We have already established why social media analysis must be part of your strategic planning process. But how you implement social media analysis in your marketing plan is still a tricky question. Let’s know how you can use social media insights and data to get the best results.
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Audience Analysis
Social media analytics will give you a comprehensive understanding of who your audience is. Right from audience demographics to their engagement, this data will help you with all. Marketers wanting to come up with new strategies and plans must conduct audience analysis because it will help them detect their target audience. Moreover, the insights can also tell you whether your audience selection is helping you get the desired results or not! The audience demographics data can also help you create a new audience set for your future marketing campaigns.
Framing an influencer campaign is more than just coming up with engaging content. The strategy requires strong and data-oriented research. Social media analytics can help you identify your target audience which can help you choose relevant influencers. Additionally, with the accumulated social media data, you can detect what kind of content keeps your audience engaged with your profile, which can act as a guideline for your influencer campaigns.
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Analyze the content performance of your brand
Social media analysis helps you analyze the content performance in detail. Get post-wise analytics on how each of your posts performed on a particular social media platform. This will give you a sense of whether the content is helping your reach your brand objectives.
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Improve campaign performance
With the help of social media insights, you will get a clear picture of what your target audience is reacting to and looking for. This will help you boost campaign performance. Marketers can study the data and make their marketing campaigns all the more personalized and relevant. This will also help them get the maximum engagement and reach.
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Frame strategies for the future
Right from detecting the social media platforms that work for your brand to knowing what kind of content type is working for your brand, everything can be analyzed with the help of social media data. The insights tell you which platform you must focus on for your upcoming strategies and what content format you must opt for to gain maximum audience attention.
Now that we know how to make use of social media insights from social media analytics reports, let’s move on to the metrics you must keep a watch on.
Key Social Media Metrics to Track with Unbox Social
Here are a few key social media metrics that should be tracked regularly and must be a part of your social media analytics report.
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Engagement metrics
The Unbox Social tool provides in-depth engagement metrics for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. The engagement metrics form the most crucial part of social media analysis because they tell you whether your content is serving its purpose or not. The engagement metrics include all the parameters that define audience response/activity on your posts. Some important metrics for engagement include reach, likes, dislikes, favorites (for Twitter), impressions, website and email clicks, and profile views.
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Hashtag performance
This metric is important for Instagram. Hashtags are important for your content reach and engagement on Instagram and it is necessary to track the hashtag performance. The Unbox Social tool gives you a detailed account of the top hashtags for your brand.
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Audience demographics
The Unbox Social gives you detailed data on audience demographics. Track the audience’s age, gender, location, and language. The tool also gives you insights into audience interest and audience quality.
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Retention rate
For YouTube marketers, keeping a track of the retention rate is crucial. This metric by the Unbox Social tool will tell you the percentage of viewers that were retained till the end. The retention rate signifies if your videos are fetching you the desired viewership and results.
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Videos added and removed from the playlist
The ratio of videos added and removed from the playlist of the viewer says a lot about their content preference and content consumption. The Unbox Social tool gives you data on the same.
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Favorited tweets
The graph of favorited tweets shows you the number of favorited tweets on your profile for the selected date range. This will give you a glimpse of the days wherein your tweets performed well.
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Mode of interaction
The tool gives you an account of how your followers interacted with your tweet content in a selected time range. The graph gives you data for different tweet formats and shows you the retweets and favorites for the same. This will tell you which content format worked well for your profile.
These listed social media insights are necessary to track for all brands and businesses. See to it that all your social media marketing strategies are framed as per your audiences’ preferences! Keep a check on the social media trends and create content that is relevant to your brand. The Unbox Social tool also helps with publishing and scheduling apart from analytics which makes it a must-have for social media managers. Not to forget, you can also track your social media competitors with the help of this tool!
Get the free trial of the tool now and set the pace for your social media marketing plans!
Key Takeaways-
- Social media analytics is all about measuring the social media metrics that impact the brand performance on social media platforms.
- Social media insights help you measure the effectiveness of your strategies on social media platforms.
- Social media analytics also includes social media intelligence and social media listening.
- Social media analytics will give you a glimpse of the audience’s sentiment.
- Social media analytics can help you identify your target audience which can help you choose relevant influencers.
- Social media analysis helps you analyze the content performance in detail.
- The engagement metrics like comments, likes, dislikes, favorites, etc. form the most crucial part of social media analysis.
- Social media metrics for every platform differ and need to be tracked separately to get accurate results.
- Some crucial social media insights include hashtag performance, audience demographics analysis, retention rate, mode of interactions, and videos added and removed from playlists.
- Unbox Social is a must-have tool for social media analytics, competition tracking, influencer marketing, and scheduling and publishing.