4 Benefits of Social Media Analytics
Just keep posting, they say. Your social media page will grow overnight, they say. Well, unfortunately, that is not the case.
Unless you are Dory and were born a fish, you just don’t wake up knowing how to swim without taking lessons and practicing.
Well, the same goes for managing social media networks. In order to make sure you are meeting your goals, attracting consumers, and creating compelling content, you must review your social media analytics. How else would you know what’s working or not?
Don’t believe me? See for yourself! Below are four reasons why social media analytics are essential
1. Understand Your Audience
First things first, social media analytics are important because they provide you with a clear understanding of your audience.
Using the data from your social media platforms and campaigns can help identify what your consumers are attracted to and the best times to reach them.
Basically, it provides you with an understanding of your audience’s behaviors and attitudes, which you can use to apply to your new campaign strategies to ensure success.
For example, after reviewing your social media analytics, you can create new accurate personas and scenarios that describe your audience based on the results.
2. Create Effective Strategies
This leads me to another benefit of social media analytics, which is the ability to create effective strategies based on the results.
Through the analytics, you can get a clear understanding of what type of content drives the best results from your audience. Then, you can use this information to create new campaigns and strategies that guarantee engagement.
Plus, it also provides you with insight into the campaigns that didn’t resonate with your audience.
With this knowledge, you can save time and avoid these types of campaigns.
For instance, after reviewing your social media analytics, you can focus your time and resources on the kind of content that your audience enjoys.
3. Identify Useful Social Media Networks
Additionally, social media analytics are important because they help you identify which social media networks are most popular with your audience.
This allows you to focus on creating content for the platforms that your audience prefers and develop engaging content to meet their needs and yours.
For example, you may find that your audience rarely uses Facebook and prefers Instagram through your analytics. Therefore, you can save money on Facebook ads and instead prioritize content for Instagram.
4. Understand Your Competitors
Lastly, social media analytics are beneficial because they offer you insight into your competition.
You know what they say, keep your friends close, but keep your competitors closer. Yes, we believe what “they say” this time.
Side note: if you aren’t aware of who your competitors are, you should take a step back and create a competitive analysis.
Through social media analytics, you can better understand your competitors, which you can use to find out what strategies they are using and whether they are successful or not.
Furthermore, this data will help you avoid making the same mistakes as your competitors and instead only incorporate techniques that bring positive results.
Now that we’ve got that part out of the way, I am sure you are wondering how to properly report social media analytics and the metrics to include.
Well, don’t look any further! Here is a quick summary of the metrics that should be included in a report depending on the recipient.
Daily Metrics For Yourself
When it comes to creating a daily report for yourself, you should be as detailed as possible.
The metrics should include engagement data (likes, comments, and shares) from account mentions to the total number of engagements and brand awareness data (impressions and reach).
It should also include ROI, the share of voice, and customer care metrics. All of this information can be stored in an excel spreadsheet to help filter and merge data daily.
A detailed daily report allows you to monitor your success and easily create reports for superiors.
Weekly metrics for your immediate boss
As far as creating weekly reports for your immediate boss, it’s okay to leave some details out.
The information in the report should reflect your company’s goals with a quick recap of the results.
The weekly reports’ metrics should include engagement and awareness, specifically outlining the post engagement rate and the brand’s perception.
Plus, it should incorporate ROI metrics, referrals and conversions, which help measure the campaigns’ impact and worth.
The report can be presented as a word document.
Monthly metrics for your company’s management team
When it comes to monthly reports for your company’s management team, the key is remembering that less is more.
The report’s information should also reflect your company’s goals with a quick recap of the results.
These types of reports should be entertaining, simple, and straight to the point.
It should be presented in a PowerPoint or Word document with plenty of colors and graphs.
The metrics that should be included are the totals and percent changes of your follower growth, engagement rate, impression, reach, clicks, and ROI.
Each of these metrics helps to measure your success and outline the goals for the next month.
With that said, if you are in the social media industry, there should be no question about the importance of social media analytics. It’s a critical part of the job!
Happy analyzing!
