What is social media analytics and why is it important?

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Don’t talk to a wall. 

Match the numbers with personalities and know what drives them to you. 

Social media analytics can help dispel the veils of mystery that prevent brands from truly understanding their audience.

What is social media analytics?

Defined by a process of harvesting and analyzing data from within social platforms, social media analytics can create a springboard for strategic decision-making that drives improved outcomes. Whether it be LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok, data encapsulates an objective measure of how your social content is performing. 

When companies study this data, they can: 

  • acquire sound input for product development
  • determine the return on investment (ROI) of a campaign
  • diagnose the gaps in services and customer experience 
  • discover trends related to offerings and brands
  • garner visibility over what’s being said by followers and outside users (earned media)
  • make more targeted marketing decisions and reduce associated costs
  • seize real-time interaction with customers
  • understand the messaging and topics that resonate with the target audience

It’s safe to say that companies who aren’t using data to drive decision-making are sitting on a gold mine of untapped opportunity.

Study metrics with purpose

For social media analytics to be meaningful for businesses, the way it’s used needs to be grounded in a strategy. At the start of any strategy is a goal. 

This could include:

Once a goal is determined, data-sets that align with it are ideally collected to form the baseline of the necessary actions to see it through. 

Match metrics with objectives

Beyond the overarching goal that directs the strategy for which data metrics are used is the need to understand how data metrics can be matched to the objectives that fall underneath. 

Here’s our take on what that looks like:

1. Brand awareness

Reach – refers to the volume of people who see your content. It’s important for brands to understand what percentage of their reach consists of followers versus people that are yet to follow. If content is consistently reaching people outside the follower network, it may be an indication that content is being favored by the social algorithm

Impressions – encapsulates the number of times content appears on screen. This metric is often higher than the reach as the same person can view your content more than once. 

Audience growth rate – measures the rate in which brands acquire new followers on social media over a reporting period. To calculate the audience growth rate, divide the number of new followers by your total follower-count on the platform and then multiply by 100. 

New Followers ➗ Total Followers ✖ 100 Audience Growth Rate

2. Performance by audience engagement

Engagements – involve post comments, shares, likes and reactions. It encapsulates how willing the audience is to interact with the content. 

Engagement rate – measures the number of engagements you receive in relation to the size of your audience. To calculate the engagement rate, divide the total number of engagements over a reporting period by your total follower-count and then multiply by 100. 

Total engagements ➗ Total followers ✖ 100 Audience Engagement Rate

Video views – show how many people have viewed the video (is this most straight-forward metric ever?). It’s important to remember that each social platform determines what counts as a view differently. With some, a mere few seconds can count as a view. 

Video completion rate – measures the ratio of people that watch the video all the way to the end (another straight-forward metric – yay!). This can act as a sound indicator as to whether content is resonating with people. A consistently high video completion rate is one of the key ingredients at play in determining whether your content is pushed by the social algorithm. 

3. ROI 

Click-through-rate (CTR) – measures the frequency in which users click a link in your post to access external content (e.g. blog, product range, store, our services page, etc). This metric is important to study to determine the effectiveness of marketing efforts – How many users saw your post and were inspired to learn more? To calculate the CTR, divide the number of clicks for a post by the number of impressions and then multiply by 100. 

Number of Post Clicks ➗ Number of Post Impressions ✖ 100 CTR

Conversion rate – measures how successful your social content is at moving users through the digital sales funnel. In other words, this refers to the content’s ability to inspire users to perform an action which leads to a conversion (e.g. consultation booking, subscription, number of downloads, sales, etc). To calculate the conversion rate, divide the number of conversions by the total number of clicks and then multiply by 100. 

Number of Conversions ➗ Total Clicks ✖ 100 Conversion Rate

Cost-per-click (CPC) – refers to the amount you pay each time an individual clicks on a social ad. It’s important to study this metric in relation to the conversion rate to determine whether the initial cost is contributing to an overall profit. 

ROI – measures the amount of money a business earns from an initiative after the costs involved in producing the initiative are removed from the equation. This metric determines whether a campaign is contributing to business growth or if it’s draining company resources.

Closing the gap between brands and customers

Studying social media analytics brings brands closer to their customers as it encapsulates how successful their social marketing efforts are at inspiring people to convert. By revealing what works and what doesn’t, businesses have the insights they need to create more enjoyable customer experiences as well as higher profit margins. 

According to recent data from LinkedIn, proving the effectiveness of marketing is still one of the biggest challenges that face marketing leaders. 

One of the key reasons for this enduring challenge is that social analytics are sequestered in the databases of individual platforms. Taking the time to extract the necessary data from each platform and then recording it across multiple spreadsheets spells the recipe for a migraine.

You can sidestep this struggle when you connect all your social accounts into the Digivizer platform. When you do this, all the data you need can be found in one place. In seconds, you can access the insights you need to create more targeted content, form educated predictions about customer behavior, and drive optimal outcomes as a result.

Sign up for free to make this your reality today.  

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