Social media has become a necessity in today’s society. Facebook, alone, has nearly 3 billion users on its platform. I find myself checking social media every morning after I wake up. It helps me remember my friend’s birthdays, share life events, and get updates from brands and influencers.
Due to social media’s integration into our everyday activities, it has become a great space for businesses to market. Social media is a unique tool because it allows for communication and collaboration between brands and consumers. Rather than advertising to users, brands can find success by engaging and conversing with interested parties. This helps make the process feel more organic and adds ethos.
Marketing is a very strategic field. Therefore, most campaigns need analytics to help target the ads and decipher their effectiveness. Otherwise, brands would have difficulty reaching their market and their money would not be making an ideal impact. As social media becomes a more present marketing tool, individuals must understand analytics.
What is Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics is the process of dissecting value from insights found in social media data. A large benefit to social media data is that it’s instantaneous and timely. Additionally, due to the large number of users on each platform, there is a vast amount of data to utilize.
Data can be found in various places on each platform. Gohar Khan shares that there are eight layers to social media analytics. These include networks, text, actions, search engines, location, hyperlinks, mobile, and multimedia. The average user is likely looking at text and actions when analyzing success. The text consists of analytics found from copy, which includes captions, comments, tweets, blog posts, etc. This layer can be very beneficial in deciphering user sentiments. The other most common layer is actions, which is interpreting the behavior of the user in the form of likes, shares, follows, and mentions. This layer can help understand engagement levels because the user went beyond viewing your post. Each layer has incredible insights that are beneficial when building a campaign.
Types of Analytics
There are four main forms of social media analytics. The first is descriptive analytics which aims to understand a business opportunity/ problem by gathering forms of data. This is the form that most social dashboards explain: it displays metrics such as likes, comments, and shares. The second form is diagnostic analytics, which works to explain why social posts performed the way they did. Diagnostics uses behavioral analytics and retrospective analysis to understand social footprint and audience. The third is predictive analytics. This is a proactive analytic practice while the former were both reactive. Predictive analytics analyzes data to predict a future event and the audience’s reaction. Finally, the last form is prescriptive analytics. With this practice, the goal is to suggest the best practice for a future scenario. This helps optimize your content to fit the habits of your main markets.
What are The Benefits?
There are myriad benefits to investing in the analytics process. It can deliver insights into your target market, provide ways to improve content, help understand audience sentiment, and more. Another big benefit is that it can help you demonstrate the impact of social marketing on your business. Discovering your ROI (return on investment) can be difficult sometimes because social has both tangible and intangible value. The tangible value tends to be in the form of money-making actions, such as sales, market share, and cost savings. While intangible returns include increased awareness, community growth, and consumer engagement. These are both helpful for a brand, and social analytics gives you a method to make sense of both factors.
Staying Informed
Social media is continuously evolving. New networks emerge, such as Tik Tok and BeReal. Additionally, existing platforms make updates and changes that alter the way users interact with the apps. This is important to remember because it demonstrates that social media analytics will change as well. To gain the most effective insights it is integral to stay informed about network changes and their use of analytics. Luckily, there are many resources such as Hootsuite Labs to help understand the changing social landscape.
Sources
Khan, Gohar F. Creating Value with Social Media Analytics. CREATESPACE, 2018.
“The Latest Facebook Statistics: Everything You Need to Know – Datareportal – Global Digital Insights.” DataReportal, https://datareportal.com/essential-facebook-stats.