Approximately 3.5 billion people around the world use social media today. And with an audience this size, it’s no surprise that businesses are working hard to engage them on the platforms that their audiences love the most.
But at the same time, creating a social media strategy takes time and effort, so companies must prioritize their efforts and ensure that they see tangible results.
That’s where having a way to track performance and analyze data can be so beneficial.
Using a wide range of social media analytics tools, you can stay on top of how various campaigns are performing, how your audience is behaving, and what you might need to change to get the most out of every dollar you spend.
Let’s look at some of the most significant insights you can gain with social media analytics.
Find the Best Platform for Your Market
There are more than 75 social media sites that businesses can utilize for marketing purposes. And that list is growing every year.
But as you can imagine, maintaining and growing a presence on that many social media channels is not possible. Nor is it practical.
Your audience likely doesn’t hang out on every obscure and niche social media platform there is. In some cases, they might not even hang out on some of the biggest and most popular social media sites because of their unique interests or demographics.
That’s why it’s essential to figure out how you can prioritize your time and target those social media platforms that will actually help you interact with your audience and make more sales.
And that’s where approaches such as tracking social media traffic with Google Analytics can be so beneficial. By understanding how your audience is interacting with your social media and whether those followers actually end up being customers will help you calculate the direct ROI from your efforts, simplifying the decision of what to focus on.
You can also look at the engagement numbers on the social media platforms themselves, finding out where people like to interact with your brand the most and whether the audience is a good fit for your brand and the type of content you post.
Create Better Content
Social media is the perfect testing ground for your content ideas. No matter what you post, you will usually get instant feedback on whether it was good or not in the form of views, responses, reactions, and shares.
By learning more about your content and its performance, you might be able to use those insights outside of social media as well, translating your success on your website.
The same goes if you want to test how different content types perform on various social media networks.
You may find that something that works very well on Facebook performs poorly on Instagram, and something that does well on Tik Tok isn’t well-suited for Twitter.
Collecting and analyzing data will help you better curate content on different platforms, customize it to match your audience’s expectations, and get it shared as widely as possible.
Understand Your Audience
If you want to move forward as a business, you must figure out ways to learn more about your audience. But usually, that requires you to run surveys and interviews, which can be very time-consuming and difficult to put together.
However, you can get a lot of similar data by simply interacting with your audience on social media. By responding to questions, asking questions, or even participating in the comments section, you can showcase your brand voice while also gaining insights about how your audience thinks.
These types of interactions will also be reflected in your analytics data, which you can then use to make better decisions in the future.
Seeing which posts work and which don’t, looking into which interactions generated the best results, and even finding out whether your audience likes the way you run your social media platforms are all ways you can gain valuable insights that will be helpful not only on social media but throughout your marketing efforts.
Keep Track of the Competition
Most of the social media analytics focus on your own performance, and that’s understandable. By tracking how your audience responds to different things, you can make more informed decisions and gain an edge over the competition.
But you can also go to the competition and look into their marketing efforts, which can be incredibly valuable on their own.
Sure, you can’t look into the specific engagement and other data as well as on your own social media channels, but there are tools that can provide you a lot of insights on their own.
For instance, by analyzing the traffic that comes into your competitor’s site, you can find out which social media channels generate the most visitors (and potential leads). Since your audiences are likely to be similar, you can understand what works for them and try to figure out how you can emulate and build on their success yourself.
You can also learn which areas they are underutilizing, discovering social media platforms where competition isn’t as steep, and you can quickly establish yourself as a thought leader.
Gain Insights About Your Marketing
Finally, you should focus on your social media analytics because it can help you make more educated marketing decisions.
Social media is an indispensable part of running successful marketing campaigns, even those that aren’t directly related to your social media presence. For instance, if you know more about your audience, you can use that data when running Facebook or even Google ads.
You can also find out which influencers are the best match for your products and brand image, identifying the best opportunities, and maximizing the likelihood of success.
And since there are so many comprehensive tools that make tracking social media performance easier, there’s no excuse for not putting them to use and allowing yourself to base your decisions on real data instead of having to guess the direction you should go in.
Final Words
Social media can be incredibly useful for growing your online business. But to make the most out of what it has to offer, you must know how to collect and analyze data that your campaigns produce.
Some of the advantages social media analytics can offer include:
- Focusing your efforts on the most promising platforms;
- Creating better content;
- Understanding your audience better;
- Keeping track of the competition;
- Gaining broader insights into your marketing strategy.
