We know by now you might be asking, why social media analytics are key anyway, right? Well, it might be surprising to learn that it’s 2022 and some businesses still haven’t wrapped their head around social media analytics, and how it can be used to supercharge the effectiveness of all of their marketing efforts.

Here’s the thing: If you’re wondering why you must have ocial media analytics, consider this – social media marketing plays such a critical role in overall marketing success- especially now, in 2022. Social media analytics tools available to us are a critical source of strategic marketing information.

There is a ton of consumer data being posted on social media every day, and social listening tools have become a critical component in competitive research, audience analysis, and product research.

At the end of the day, the core of social media analytics is the gathering and analyzing of marketing and audience data. Once you have this Intel, you’ll be able to make further business decisions. Social media analytics are the only sure way to access insights that you can use to optimize your marketing efforts.

Before we get into the details of the specific metrics you’ll need to analyze, and how to interpret and make decisions based on said metrics, let’s take a look at the critical and universal cases for a social media analytics solution.

These cases will demonstrate why social media analytics is so crucial for brands and businesses. With that said, let’s dive in!

Why Social Media Analytics are Key

Wait, before we go any further, let’s first address what we’re even talking about here…

What Is Social Media Analytics?

Ask yourself about this and your business – do you have an easy way to spot social media trends that are relevant to your space? Do you have a way to quantify the kind of ROI you’re bringing in with each campaign or post? How well do you know your audience? Do you know what they expect and want from your content and messaging? How do you think your content is perceived in comparison to your competitors?

Most importantly: Is your strategy working?

The reason why social media analytics software is critical is because it can answer every single one of the aforementioned questions. With the right tools, a single platform can answer all of these questions for every social channel you have in an easy-to-understand way. Don’t be intimidated by this. We mean no complex data analysis-  just a clear presentation of what’s working, and how you can fix what’s not.

The ultimate reason why it’s so important to know your analytics is because without measuring and analyzing your content and its performance, there’s no sustainable way to improve your results. You can’t even put your results in the proper context needed for you to understand their quality.

A good social media marketer will need a data-driven roadmap to signpost the path ahead so they know where to go and what to do and not to do. Every social media analytics solution aims to provide this information, in one way or another.

All of this to say, despite its great importance to performance and success, social media analytics solutions still (sadly) remain heavily underutilized. Most businesses (even your competition) are still failing to take advantage of these platforms.

The businesses who aren’t doing this are missing out on a multitude of more in-depth metrics. Not to mention, all of the data points and insights that are derived from contextualizing social media data across channels and across all of the industries. Bottom line, it’s time to get serious about analytics or be pushed out of the way.

More than half of marketers these days are missing the means to achieve their number one objective. A good analytics tool is easy to use, intuitive, improves transparency, and processes and structure too so marketing activities and strategy become sustainable and scalable.

In addition to undertaking daily monitoring, tracking, and analyzing of metrics and data trends, a solid analytics solution will allow you to overview your social media performance. This allows you to see where strategic opportunities exist, and where threats need to be nullified with adjustments to your strategy.

It Measures and Prove ROI and Marketing Impact 

The thing with analytics is that they give you instant feedback about how your company is performing across social media channels. It will also tell you whether the strategy your teams are executing is effective or not. Don’t worry about being too over analytical! Over viewing performance KPI’s is crucial to control and success of all of your social media campaigns.

And hey, if your strategy isn’t working, then your data analysis will point you in exactly the right direction. Once you know, you can make effective strategy tweaks before your performance dips and you get into trouble. If you catch any downward turns fast, you can remedy them right away!

You should know that the right tools are as important as the right method of calculation when it comes to ROI on social media.

Here are a few additional pointers to make things easier for you:

– Add a Facebook tracking pixel: You should add this to your site’s key pages, and any other page linked to from your social channel.

This will allow you to accurately attribute conversions and actions to specific content or campaigns- even if the user converts days (or even weeks) after first reading your content.

If users don’t convert, the Facebook Pixel will allow you to conduct re-marketing campaigns. This will target users who have already visited specific pages before, but who may have failed to take action.

– Add Google Analytics UTM parameters to your social ads’ URL:  This will help you better understand how much traffic and how many conversions your social media marketing activities are actually driving.

– Socialbakers ads benchmarks help you measure your social media ROI in context: Okay, so this will help you by understanding how the return on Facebook ads (or Instagram ads, for that matter) evolves across industries and regions over the course of a campaign, or really any period of time you choose.

– Socialbakers’ paid analytics will allow you to quickly track all your campaigns: If you have all of your ads in one place, there will be no confusion around advertising campaign performance. You should analyze entire campaigns, or individual ads, to make sure that you’re saving time and optimizing your budget. There are many moving parts within paid campaigns but, this solution will give you total transparency and actionable insights.

Make Solid Strategic and Business Decisions

A strong social media analytics game will obviously provide marketing teams with data and insights. These insights will help them identify what’s working and what’s not when it comes to social media content strategy.

The social media analytics will also provide crucial insights that help inform strategic decisions outside of your marketing efforts.

Here are just a few examples of how social media analytics can help improve key decision making both inside and outside of your marketing campaigns.

– Social listening: This is key. The best social listening tools will help you massively with competitive and audience analysis. If you’re unfamiliar, social listening is the process of analyzing and parsing the vast amounts of data posted to social channels. It automatically extracts useful insights relevant to one’s business.

Social listening is meant to allow marketers and analysts to understand how audiences feel about their product, brand, and industry. These insights can help inform major decisions, and shed light on the interests and values of your demographic. It will also help uncover trends relevant to your industry as they happen.

– Respond to trends FAST: It will allow you to access real-time data so that you can rapidly act upon the even bigger trends and get the jump on your competition!

– Minimize the risk – At the end of the day, the data is there to signpost your strategic path and show you the right direction. So you should let your data guide your decisions and help you make the best use of your resources. Don’t be afraid to be led by your performance KPIs.

There is little room for emotion in your decisions when it comes to certain parts of marketing. Oftentimes, you will need to base your strategy on data. These tactics will really save your team from wasting time on efforts that don’t yield any worthwhile business outcome. The name of the game is saving resources and time for where you can, and making the most impact!

Compare Yourself Against Competition

You will want to be able to compare yourself to your competition. Otherwise, what is the point in celebrating good performance if you have no idea if it’s better than what your competition is doing? It’s pure vanity otherwise, and metrics that stand alone really have no specific bearing on real success.

Remember that context is super crucial, and to measure real success, companies must compare themselves to competitors- and also industry and regional performance averages.

By bench marking you will be provided insights and see how you stack up against your competition.You’ll also be able to see how your performance looks up against your industry’s or region’s averages.

In Conclusion

Bottom line, social media analytics are absolutely crucial to social media marketing. After all, there really is no point in marketing if you cannot see whether you’re doing well or not.

Measurement and analysis will enable you to prove your impact, improve your performance, create strategy, optimize budget, and form genuine relationships with your audience. These are relationships that you will nurture through every touchpoint.

The message is clear, folks! Track, measure, analyze, and make sure you have all of the right tools to do so.

We would love to help you for all of our social media marketing needs. Please visit us at www.dalexdesigngroup.com www.dalexsocials.com to learn more.