With over 4.55 billion social media users, it becomes challenging for marketers and content creators to evaluate and improve the engagement of marketing campaigns and posts.
After a point, they become curious to find answers to the following:
✅ Who’s viewed their content?
✅ Who’s engaged with it?
✅ And, who are just one-timers?
Here’s when social media analytics comes into play.
In this article, we have discussed all about social media analytics and how content creators can leverage a seven-step formula to boost social media engagement in 2023.
Let’s dive in.
What Is Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics is the process of collecting, tracking, and analysing user data from multiple social platforms. Simply put, social media analytics allows you to centralise tons of user data and present it in an easy-to-understand format.
The insights generated from these analytics can later be used to improve company marketing strategies and make better data-driven decisions.
At first, it might seem daunting, but it’s no rocket science.
Certain key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics can help you generate in-depth insights into your social media marketing strategy on both macro and micro levels.
You can gauge customer sentiments, spot trends, and avoid PR crises before they happen.
In fact, measuring social media metrics can be one of your sought-after decisions as an entrepreneur or business owner.💯
Where Can You Find Social Media Analytics Easily?
Ideally, specific social media platforms like Instagram provide insights within the app. You can access it on the top section of your Instagram business profile.
However, switching to different platforms and gathering data can be overwhelming, considering you have many followers.
So data-driven entrepreneurs generally use social media analytics tools like Hootsuite, Google Analytics, and more to streamline their analytical process.
Among these, Google Analytics is a popular choice for social media marketers to analyse performance over time.
You can get a pool of information, from customer insights to demographics and total impressions to overall engagement rates – everything at one place!
That’s actually the best part.😉
Analytical tools allow you to centralise all your data from various platforms under one roof. However, not all data available is relevant to your business.
Hence, we have some proven practices to use social media analytics to your advantage.
7 Best Practices for Social Media Analytics for Content Creators
#1. Learn Everything You Can About Your Audience
Knowing everything about your target audience is the #1 practice because you can’t grow your engagement if you are unaware of your target audience.
Learn about your audience and what they are looking for on social media as much as possible. After all, knowing your audience is the first step towards building better relations with them.
Use social media analytics to get answers to the following questions:
- Who are your customers?
- Where are they from?
- What interests do they have?
- Do they care about your product or service?
- What do they think of you? Is it what you want them to think?
You can use Google Analytics to find answers to all. Just visit GA > Reports > User > Demographics.
#2. Measure What Matters
Priorities differ from business to business. You may track several social media metrics, from follower counts to engagement rates, but which ones actually matter to your business?
Think about it: A SaaS company’s priority might be to increase the conversion rate with time, while an advertising agency’s priority would be to increase brand awareness and visibility across platforms.
So, it’s always wise to choose what matters to your business. Ensure that the KPIs you track align with your marketing strategies and long-term business goals.
#3. Identify Your Top-Performing Content
76% of consumers are more likely to engage with your brand if you create more personalised content.
You can leverage social media analytics to identify which content format brings impressive engagements and which suffer in doing it. But why does it matter?
Research conducted by Aberdeen Group showed that marketers who leverage video content gained 66% more engagement than other content pieces combined.
Hence, identifying the top-performing content format can help you build marketing strategies around it and quickly boost engagements.
#4. Figure Out Which Channel Brings Better ROI
Note: Not every social media channel will provide the same level of engagement.
Typically, the channel engagement rate depends on the industry you’re dealing in. For example, LinkedIn alone is accountable for 80% of all B2B leads generated by companies and individual marketers.
So, LinkedIn is more inclined towards benefiting B2B companies. Likewise, for advertising companies and freelance content creators, Instagram and Facebook are the preferred channels.
#5. Competitor Research
Competitor research helps you to distinguish the unique selling point of your business from that of your competitor.
Simply put, Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is why customers purchase from you or your competitor.
Although measuring this sounds nearly impossible, social media analytics can highly benefit the cause.
SM analytics can help you compare a company’s performance with its competitors. Moreover, you can leverage the insights to identify future trends, build better marketing strategies and gain a competitive advantage over your rivals.
#6. Identify the best time to post on Platforms
Ya, you read it right. Social media analytics are powerful enough to provide insights as granular as this one. As an example, the best time to post on LinkedIn is between 10 AM and 12 PM.
Content creators can leverage insights like these to schedule weekly or monthly posts and use the extra time to create more content.
#7. Listen To Your Audience
The gen z audience doesn’t fail to put their heart out on social media. Not even while working out!
While most users engage with your post– like, comment, share, and follow. Others share feedback and reviews.
In one way or the other, social media analytics helps you blend these data to deliver insights on audience sentiments.
Certain KPIs, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), number of comments, Average rating, etc., can help you understand your audience’s relationship with your brands.
Wrapping Up
So those were the seven best practices you must follow when using social media analytics.
And since social media is no longer limited to guesswork, it’s high time for content creators to leverage social media analytics to boost engagement in 2023.
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