Starting a social media strategy? Learn how analytics play a crucial role in shaping effective marketing, understanding audience sentiment and achieving ROI through data-driven insights.
When creating your social media strategy, youre choosing goals and objectives that you want your marketing efforts to hit. But if youre not monitoring your social media analytics, metrics and performance, how will you know if youre hitting those goals?
Social media analytics are key to proving return on investment (ROI) and making informed business decisions. Luckily, nearly every platform offers its own form of native analytics. Plus, there are a number of social media analytics tools that can help you monitor your performance in even more depth.
Throughout this article, well touch on why social media analysis is so important and the types of analytics you need to be paying close attention to. We’ll cover which social media analytics tools you can use to help measure your success. We also made a video covering which social media analytics will help you dive deeper so you can uncover insights for your marketing—and overarching business—strategy.
Social media analytics is one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s toolkit. But what exactly is it, and how can you use it to grow your business? In this comprehensive guide we’ll explain everything you need to know to leverage social media analytics for success.
A Basic Definition
Social media analytics refers to the process of gathering data from social platforms, then analyzing it to extract meaningful insights This typically involves using software tools to collect information about things like
- Mentions of your brand, products or services
- Customer sentiment and conversations
- Engagement metrics like likes, shares, and comments
- Your content’s reach and resonance
By studying this data, you can quantify the impact of your social media efforts. Analytics helps you measure what’s working well, spot potential problems early, and optimize your strategy going forward.
Why It Matters
Here are some key reasons social media analytics is so valuable for marketers today:
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Track campaign performance. Detailed metrics let you gauge the ROI of individual social initiatives like ads or contests.
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Benchmark progress. Analytics provides concrete quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year comparisons, so you can showcase growth.
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Listen to your audience. Find out what customers are saying about your brand so you can address concerns.
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Identify opportunities. Uncover new audiences to target, or ideas for improving your products.
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Beat the competition. Keep tabs on competitors’ social activity and how it stacks up.
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Prove your impact. Hard data shows the value social brings when it comes to leads and revenue.
Key Metrics and KPIs
Many different data points make up the full picture of social media analytics. But generally, marketers examine a few high-level metrics:
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Reach/impressions: How many people did your content get served to?
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Engagement rate: What % of people interacted after seeing your post?
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Clicks/traffic: How many clicked through to your site or took an action?
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Conversions: How many became customers after engaging?
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Sentiment: What’s the tone (positive/negative) around your brand?
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Share of voice: What % of discussion is driven by your content?
Choose 2-3 KPIs aligned with your goals to track regularly. Common examples are revenue generated from social, cost per conversion, or lift in brand awareness.
Gathering Data
Now let’s get into the nitty gritty of actually tracking analytics. There are a few main techniques:
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Platform tools: All major networks have built-in analytics, like Facebook Insights.
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Third party software: Services like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Brandwatch provide robust reporting.
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Listening: Monitor mentions to assess sentiment and perceptions.
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Surveys: Ask fans questions to get feedback directly from the source.
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Website analytics: See how social drives actions on your site using Google Analytics.
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UTM campaign tagging: Track clicks from social to site with campaign tags.
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Hashtag tracking: Follow brand hashtags to see who’s engaging.
Turning Data into Insights
Of course, analytics is pointless if you don’t act on what you learn. Here are tips for deriving insights:
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Set benchmarks to have goals to measure against. Is engagement up 10% quarter-over-quarter?
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Compare performance across different platforms, post types, and campaigns. Find what works well.
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Look at trends over time. Is awareness rising steadily? Or fluctuating?
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Segment your audience to see how content resonates with different groups.
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Get stakeholder input to help interpret what the numbers mean.
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Highlight wins and opportunities in regular reports for executives.
Optimizing Your Approach
The real payoff comes from optimizing your social strategy based on analytics. Ways to act on insights include:
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Tweak the social channels you’re active on based on where you get traction.
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Double down on high-performing content types and themes.
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Shift budgets to better performing campaigns or platforms.
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Address feedback from listening to strengthen perception.
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Test new initiatives informed by the data on your audience’s preferences.
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Create more engaging content by analyzing competitors’ top posts.
Tools and Tips for Success
Here are a few final tips to help implement social media analytics successfully:
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Start early. Track data from the beginning so you have benchmarks. Don’t wait until you’re established.
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Be consistent. Analyze data on a set schedule to spot trends. Aim for at least monthly.
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Leverage automation. Use tools like Hootsuite to automatically generate reports.
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Keep stakeholders informed. Get buy-in by showing executives the value of your efforts.
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Make data-driven decisions. Numbers should guide your strategy, not gut feelings.
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Blend quantitative and qualitative data. Talk to real customers too via surveys or outreach.
The Bottom Line
While social media analytics may seem complicated on the surface, it’s quite straightforward once you break it down. By regularly analyzing performance data and audience insights, you can refine your social approach to maximize results. Consistent analysis helps move the needle on both branding goals and concrete business objectives over time.
In today’s digital landscape, analytics is no longer optional. It’s an indispensable tool for demonstrating your impact, informing strategy, and staying ahead of the curve. By embracing data, you can elevate your social media efforts and become a more strategic marketer.
What is the importance of social media analytics?
Social media analytics help marketers with a number of tasks, from informing their strategy to planning campaigns and inspiring content ideas. There are five major benefits of tracking social analytics:
Trendspotting is the act of pinpointing upcoming trends before theyre mainstream. Keeping a close eye on your social media analytics can help you do just that. Some of the trends that your social media analytics can help you determine include:
- Which platforms are gaining or losing traction and popularity
- Topics of interest that your audience is talking about (and brand mentions in conversations)
- Types of ads that interest your audience
- Rising influencers and products in your niche or industry
- Types of content that your audience engages with most
If analyzed properly, your social media analytics reports can be a huge help in identifying what you should post more of, what types of content are becoming more popular and what your audience wants to hear more about in the next quarter or year.
Brand sentiment illustrates how people are feeling about your brand. It includes all positive, neutral and negative feelings that are discussed online. By looking through your social media analytics, you can review and measure your brand sentiment through a sentiment analysis software.
This helps ensure your audience is happy with your business and enables you to detect opportunities to make amends with unsatisfied customers. And you can uncover opportunities to improve your business.
For instance, through sentiment analysis you could discover your customers are asking the same questions about a particular product feature, enabling you update your FAQ page or help center. Sentiment analysis can be used with competitor analysis because you can pinpoin new competitors and related topics your customers are buzzing about that you may have not considered before.
Value perception (or perceived value) refers to the overall customer opinion of your brands product or service and whether or not it can meet their needs. Perceived value is key to determining demand and the price point of a product or service. For example, if your product has a low perceived value, customers wont be willing to pay much for it.
You can measure value perception by using social listening tools and monitoring data from other digital marketing dashboards, such as Google Analytics. This can help guide the content you create to improve value perception and make sure youre showcasing how your product or service can hit key pain points.
What is social media analytics?
Social media analytics refers to the collection of data and metrics that help you measure your overall social media performance. This helps marketers understand which types of social media content best resonate with their audience so they can shape and adapt their strategy accordingly. Reviewing social media analytics reports empowers teams to make data-informed decisions about how to transform their marketing efforts and grow their businesses.
Marketers can conduct social media analysis natively on platforms such as Instagram, TikTok and X (formerly known as Twitter). Marketers can also use social media management software like Sprout to dive deeper into the numbers.
Social Media Analytics
What are social media analytics tools?
Social media analytics tools typically incorporate listening into more comprehensive reporting that involves listening and performance analysis. Learn key benefits of generative AI and how organizations can incorporate generative AI and machine learning into their business. Register for the IDC report Why is social media analytics important?
What is social media analytics?
Practitioners and analysts alike know social media by its many websites and channels: Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and many others. Social media analytics is broader than metrics such as likes, follows, retweets, previews, clicks, and impressions gathered from individual channels.
How can social media analytics help your business?
Social media analytics tools, such as SocialPilot, provide you with a detailed analysis of your social media accounts. This can help you improve performance, optimize your budget, prove your impact, and form audience relationships that will guide them to the point of purchase.
What is the difference between social media analytics and web analytics?
The main difference between the two is that social media analytics collects demographic and behavioral data from social media networks, while web analytics gathers data from a particular business website. In other words, web analytics measure your website’s traffic to give you insights into how users are interacting with your website.
