What is Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics plays an important role in measuring business performance on the platforms and helps companies reach their business goals. It is a great way to identify trends and new opportunities. More and more organizations are now put more emphasis on social media analytics to make wise business decisions and avoid their competitors’ pitfalls. Through proper analytical activities, you are able to find out what is working and what is not when you run your business.
It is crucial that you are comfortable with dashboards and reports if you want to be proficient in social media analytics. You can get a deeper insight into every aspect of your company through figures or charts produced from multiple analytical tools easily, thanks to advanced technology. Meaningful numbers are telling a true story about your organizations and you can make smart decisions with it. However, it does not mean that social media analytics is painful to analyze, and it is not even boring as well. Actually, it is really fun to work with different figures and reports with large amounts of data and generate oceans of valuable information.
Why you should use social media analytics?
If you wonder why it is so important that companies recruit professionals to analyze social media data in order to gain knowledge about their users, you may want to have a look at what goals these analytical activities can achieve.
To look ahead, you have first to look back. Historical data is extremely important to form insights and an accurate prediction that modern companies can harness to improve their competitive edge. By analyzing all the information collected from customers, your business can better understand their behaviors and the reasons behind them.
For example, if you notice that customers are less interactive with your new campaign, maybe you should try to create better content driving expected results. Additionally, social media can also help you with building your own brand as you can get real-time feedback from your customers about how they see your brands across social media networks after comprehensive analytics.
How does social media analytics work?
As mentioned above, it is not a pain to do social media analytics, thanks to the handy tools that we can easily get access to and master. There are a variety of tools we can choose from the market, and most of them are well designed and user friendly. No matter which one your company will use, they all use crawlers to collect data from social media networks. Either the user creates a search query or just tap a like button on the webpage, all the activities can be recorded and analyzed by analytical tools.
Every social media network has unique purposes and strengths. Before using analytical tools, make sure you are harnessing the right platforms to achieve the right goals first. Below shows the strengths of each social media, and examples of Facebook and Instagram analytical tools.
Facebook Analytics
Through the Facebook analytics tool, you will understand your audience more because you will see how they are engaging with your Facebook Page, and it makes tracking Facebook ad performance becomes easier. There are three built-in social media analytics tools in effect offered by Facebook, and key data points you can collect are listed below:
1. Facebook Page Insights: You will know the engagement of Page and post, the reach of post and story, views of the video, growth of followers, when your audience is online and their responsiveness.
2. Facebook Audience Insights: It is important to track demographic factors such as gender, age, language, job title, interests, life events and so on for both your existing and the overall Facebook audience if you want to target them more precisely.
3. Facebook Ad centre: You will see the amount of money you spend, the number of people reached, the engagement of posts, and clicks of links.
Instagram Insights
Like Facebook analytics, it is also essential to learn about the demographics of your Instagram audience but put more emphasis on tracking the performance of your Instagram posts and Stories.
Instagram Insights can be used to track audience and activity metrics for business and creator accounts. The information is divided into three parts:
1. Content: Track how people’s posts and Stories perform with metrics such as sticker taps, likes, and replies.
2. Activity: Track how many individuals see your posts and Stories. You can also see how they find your content, how many interactions, and your content receives.
3. Audience: Track your audience demographics and see when they are on Instagram.
What’s your biggest challenge in choosing between social media analytics tools? Any features you’re looking for? Or data points you have trouble tracking?
With WeBoost social media marketing, our extensive experience in social media help your organisation achieve your business goal. Contact us to learn more.