Importance of Social Media Analytics

What is social media analytics?

Social media analytics is the process of gathering, measuring, and analyzing data from various media sources to understand how consumers are engaging with a company, person or brand. Consumer feedback is now available at your fingertips, and getting that feedback has never been easier. More and more of your customers feel like social media gives them their own platform to express their thoughts to the world. It is important to make sure that you are part of that conversation, helping guide the narrative and perception of your organization in the direction that benefits you. Organizations must be able to identify problems and uncover opportunities in their spaces to maintain a competitive advantage that is in tune with their customer.

Levels of  Analytics

Users of social media platforms provide the content; those posts can be analyzed to determine a number of things. Information can be gathered on the micro or macro level to provide insight. Micro analytics typically refers to data about a specific user, and macro analytics will give you a bigger picture from several posts or the interaction/engagement a single post may create.

Micro level (small picture):

This is the data for a specific user. At the most basic level, you can see influence and reach of a specific user. You can find out the frequency in which influencers are posting about your organization. Digging deeper you can get the data on the engagement with a specific post, either in the form of a reply comment, reaction (like, heart), or share/retweet.

Macro level (large picture):

Macro analytics is a collection of user posts analyzed to get the bigger picture. That can be a collection of individual user posts or the engagement/reaction from users to a post by another user. Posts can be looked at during a specific date range to uncover reactions to a specific product or service roll out.

Understanding the analytics:

Organizations want to identify and understand posts on social media in order to make the correct business decisions or to interact directly with customers. Each post provides data, that data can be represented as graphs or chats, so an organization can quickly digest and address situations in real time. The analytics can identify:

• Top users/influencers- who is posting the most content about your organization
• Platform- which social media platform has the most mentions or engagement
• Reach- the number of followers that a user has – translates to reach of their message about your organization
• Engagement- which posts are getting the most replies, shares, likes and reactions
• Location – where posts are coming from and identify geographic user base
• Hashtags- the attached tags to your posts or the posts with your organization attached
• Emojis- a visual representation of emotion represented as an emoji image
• Sentiment – using the reaction/interaction data to translate the reactions or replies as a positive/neutral/negative outcome

Implementing Analytics to meet your goals

If you have never used social media analytics before, then the current data will be your baseline moving forward. It’s important to look at the initial data to ensure that your efforts are producing the results you want. Just like tracking product sales, it’s important to track engagement with your social presence to ensure that your efforts are effective.

Use the analytic data to monitor the engagement of your social content. See how customers are reacting to product launches, promotions, and stories. Taking in that information you can direct efforts to things that are working, saving you wasted energy on efforts with low or negative reactions.

If you are using the data to identify issues with customers and resolving those quickly, does the sentiment of the posts trend in a positive direction with user gratitude or good feedback about the haste that you resolved their issues? If the customers are satisfied with level of care, ask for positive review on Google to help other people like them find your company.

Track the analytics of your competitors to uncover what is working for them. You want to understand what is happening in your space and resonating with potential customers. Pinpointing content/promotions/products that are getting good feedback will allow you to identify where you should be putting forth more efforts for your company. Copy successes and scrap efforts with low or negative engagement.

To find out more about the analytics available to your business through Newz Groups Media Monitoring Services, click here to request a demo: https://newzgroup.com/promotion/