In the modern digital marketing landscape, social media is one of the most effective channels any business can use to expose their products or services to a wider audience, nurture new relationships, and grow their brand equity.
However, with the sheer amount of competition you’ll be up against across different platforms, being present isn’t enough. You need to have a firm grasp of social media analytics and the role it plays to ensure your campaigns are as effective as possible.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through six of the most effective tips for using social media analytics effectively and making incremental improvements for all-around stronger campaigns.
1. Start With Clear Goals and KPIs
Most social media analytics suites give you access to a wide range of metrics, but some of these are going to be more important than others.
Before you start to configure your analytics tools and form a plan of how you’ll apply them, it’s important to consider what your most important aims are with your social media marketing, and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you’ll use to track and report your progress.
By incorporating these KPIs into a clear, measurable goal to work towards, you’ll be able to start with a founding principle that guides your future analytics decisions and ensures you’re moving in the right direction.
Some examples of KPIs expressed as specific goals might include:
- Gain 2,000 new followers in the next six months.
- Increase click-through rate from social media pages to our website by 5% by next quarter.
- Increase return on ad spend (ROAS) by 10% by next year.
By starting out with a clear goal in mind, you’ll be able to focus your social media analytics resources on the things that matter, and avoid wasting time or energy by sifting through and organizing too many metrics.
2. Prioritize Personalization
The importance of personalization in today’s social media marketing can’t be overstated.
According to data from Exploding Topics, while only 60% of consumers say they’ll become repeat customers based on a personalized shopping experience, a much larger 89% of marketers report positive ROI as a result of content personalization.
If you haven’t already, one of the best things you can do to use social media analytics effectively is look for ways that different tools and datasets can be used to improve personalization.
Some examples of what this might look like include:
- Segmenting your audience into specific groups which you can tailor your content towards.
- Analyzing comments, likes, and other responses to gauge patterns that show your audience’s personal preference.
- Use A/B testing to identify the kinds of content and messaging that consistently resonate with your audience.
3. Identify the Best Time to Post
Analyzing post time and adjusting your strategy around it is often one of the most impactful “quick wins” a brand can achieve when using social media analytics to optimize their campaigns.
There’s a wealth of data available online showing the best times on average for posting on different social media platforms. This will give you a good starting point for targeting the most impactful times to post.
Once you’ve gathered a large enough dataset from your own posts, look for patterns in terms of engagement rate at different days of the week and times of day. This will help you narrow your posting schedule down to points in time that are not only better-suited for brands in your industry, but tailored specifically for the browsing habits of users who are already following you on different platforms.
4. Compare Content and Hashtag Performance Between Platforms
Like many brands, you might have a social media strategy that involves running profiles and campaigns on several different platforms.
While it can be beneficial to have a certain level of cohesion across different platforms that feed into your general marketing calendar, it’s important to compare how different types of content perform depending on where they’re posted, and use these findings to adjust your approach to different platforms.
If, for example, you roll out a series of posts that share a string of hashtags, and these show strong performance on all platforms except LinkedIn, this could be a sign that some of these hashtags aren’t suited to the general audience demographics on this platform.
This is just one example of how using social media analytics to compare a campaign’s performance on different platforms can help you fine-tune content for its environment, and maximize the chances of meaningful engagement with every new campaign.
5. Automate Where You’re Succeeding, But Be Hands-On Where You Need Improvement
More and more, automation is making its mark on all forms of content marketing, including social media.
AI powered resources, for example our own array of content creation tools for social media platforms, are helping marketers to become much more efficient when conceptualizing new campaigns, tailoring content for different platforms and audiences, and more.
While using these kinds of tools is quickly becoming standard practice across industries, we recommend focusing your automation on the areas where your social media marketing is already performing well, and maintaining a human touch where you still need some work.
If, for example, you’ve been using AI-generated Instagram captions for a string of posts that are all earning healthy engagement metrics, while your AI-generated Facebook posts aren’t looking so hot on your analytics dashboard, this could be a sign that your Facebook campaigns require a more manual, hands-on approach.
While manually reviewing all AI content is important to ensure quality and accuracy, using social media analytics to compare AI content’s performance in different scenarios will ensure you’re keeping a personal touch where it’s most important, and saving time where AI content is proving effective.
6. Don’t Forget the Competition
While tracking how your content performs is crucial for improving your social media marketing over time, it’s important not to invest too heavily in this and forget about your competition.
Turning your social media analytics tools towards close competitors can have a range of benefits, such as:
- Establishing important performance benchmarks, e.g share of voice, average followers, and rate of engagement, to see how your brand is performing compared to industry norms.
- Finding out the kinds of topics and trends that tend to earn a lot of engagement from the audience you share with your competitors.
- Learning from how competitors have addressed customer pain points in the past.
- Common traits you can avoid to help differentiate your brand from the competition.
Like with other marketing channels, there’s tons of potential you can unlock by studying key features about your competitors’ social media activity, such as the kind of platforms they’re most active on, the hashtags and topics they tend to invest in, and most importantly, the engagement metrics their content tends to bring in.
Though you shouldn’t let your social media strategy become too defined by what other companies are doing, using social media analytics to understand your place in the market can go a long way in making better-informed, more effective decisions.
Making the Most of Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics tools have masses of potential. However, like any tool, they need to be applied in the right way to extract the most value possible. We hope these analytics best practices have given you a good starting point for applying your tools, growing your brand, and getting ahead of the competition. For more insights, here are further analytic methods to apply for your social media marketing strategy.
To see what our robust analytics suite can do for you, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
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