The importance of Social Media Analytics.

A systematic computational analysis of statistics and data, and the information that derives from said analysis — that’s what analytics entails.

In close to anything in the world of business, analytics plays a very important role in many aspects of it. From what to sell, when to sell it, who to buy from, at what time of the day, week, month, or year it should be made public, etc., analytics is always involved.

In the world of Social Media, analytics is paramount. We typically refer to them as KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), which ultimately evaluates the success of what goes on in our social media accounts. Midwest Marketing simply puts it as “a system that allows for the collection, aggregation, and standardization of social media data to discover and communicate meaningful patterns. Social analytics helps us simplify data from dozens of networks, millions of people, and a variety of activities. Social analytics can give you a far deeper understanding of user behavior and demographic data than Google Analytics ever could. And that is why social media analytics are important.”

One of the most important benefits of Social Media Analytics is that it allows us to better understand our audience. It gives us a window into comprehending when our audience is online, what they are looking at, clicking on, and following. This in turn helps us with determining when to make posts, and who to target more specifically.

Social media analytics also helps us determine what, or rather which, is the best platform to help us meet our goals. Just because one platform is used more than others, or has a larger amount of users than others, doesn’t necessarily mean that it would be the best for what we need it for. For example, I personally would not use Twitter for my personal interest social media account on children’s book reviews, if my purpose is to write long, in-depth book reviews. Rooted Web further explains the importance of this, by explaining how each platform reaches different audiences, and how “ultimately establishing your marketing goals and strategy and sticking to your plan will help you pick which platform or platforms are worth the time and effort.”

Social media analytics also helps us in being able to create better content, and what drives better audience engagement. Some social platforms, like Facebook, have built-in analytics that shows us what types of media perform best within the platform. We are able to find information on every single piece of content that we post, allowing us to analyze which were shared the most, liked the most, lead to a follow, or a subscription, etc.

Besides helping with understanding our audiences, which platforms to use, and how to better our content, social media analytics also helps with comprehending how social campaigns are doing, how to create a better strategy, and even how to better understand our competitors. All in all, it will definitely help us with improving our social media presence.

These analytics can also help us with how to report out what we are learning. Whether we are analyzing them daily for ourselves, weekly for an immediate boss, or even monthly for management teams.

For monthly reports, according to Later, they explain that the report should include a lot more than just numbers, but rather showing our data being turned into actionable insights. Some of the best practices recommended are:

1. Identifying your social media marketing goals — they should always tie back to your short- and long-term business goals.
2. Keeping it short and sweet — your monthly social media report should highlight and sum up your wins, losses, and opportunities.

Numbers don’t tell a story alone, and therefore it is up to us to make sure the story makes sense. The report should be presented in a results-oriented way, emphasizing your goals, and methods for reaching them, and the desired outcome.

The monthly report should include metrics that provide a monthly overview, a breakdown of the platform, key learnings, and takeaways. Honing in on important KPI’s, and how they tie back to our overall strategy. For each platform being used, we should include the strategy for that platform, the metrics targetted, the MoM (month over month) growth, growth & wins, and highlight insights. Also, no matter what we may consider a win, we need to make certain that we showcase the metrics that prove the win, which will help us explain why we should or perhaps should not, continue with any given strategy.

For weekly reports, I would focus on a couple of the metrics used in monthly reports. I would focus on gathering the data that will ultimately compile to add to the monthly one. Definitely trying to look for the data that shows the wins and the losses. For daily reports, I would look for the metrics that help us understand what will be needed for the weeklys. Focusing on the smaller insights, like how many clicks a post got, how the reach was, how many new followers did we gain or lose, etc. I see it as a pyramid of information gathering. Starting with big amounts of information for dailys, and slowly narrowing it down, and summarizing for the monthlys.

To conclude this riveting blog on the importance of social media analytics, I will quote Atera, on the impact and future of it, by saying, “Social media analytics has become an important part of many businesses’ digital marketing campaigns because it provides valuable insight into what consumers are interested in. By tapping into this big data, marketers can structure and implement a more effective marketing plan.”. And aren’t we all marketers at the end of the day? Let’s us the tools given to us by these incredible platforms, and let them work for us instead.