A Thorough Guide to Social Media Analytics in 2023

A Thorough Guide to social media analytics in 2023

“Are you looking to gain a deeper understanding of your brand’s online presence? Look no further than social media analytics!

As social media marketing continues to play a pivotal role in overall marketing success, utilising social media analytics and campaign measurement tools has become imperative for strategic marketing insights. With an abundance of consumer information shared on social media every day, social listening tools are now essential for audience analysis, competitive research, and product research.

At the core of social media analytics lies the gathering and analysis of marketing and audience data, enabling businesses to make informed decisions and optimise their marketing efforts and product strategy.

Learn how social media analytics can provide valuable insights into your audience’s behaviour, preferences, and sentiment towards your brand, and how you can leverage this information to improve your brand strategy. Let’s dive in and unlock the full potential of social media analytics for your business.

What is Social Media Analytics?

Social media has become an essential platform for people to share their experiences, interact, learn, have fun, and even shop. It’s also a place where brands can connect with their customers, and this has intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns.

Marketers can leverage social media to enhance brand awareness, generate and nurture leads, find new opportunities and markets, build brand equity and authenticity, and increase their customer base and community. Research shows that in 2023, 73% of marketers believe that their efforts through social media marketing have been “somewhat effective” or “very effective” for the business

However, being present on social media means that brands must be prepared to engage, educate, and promote their products while being ready to address consumer feedback and complaints. To measure the performance of their social media strategy, brands must rely on social media analytics.

Social media analytics collects and analyses social data, both structured and unstructured, to provide insights into the performance of marketing campaigns, product development, customer support, and customer experience. By analyzing metrics such as likes, shares, and comments and monitoring brand mentions and consumer conversations through social media listening, brands can better understand consumer sentiment, identify emerging trends, and even anticipate potential PR crises.

What is social media data?

Social media data is a valuable tool that can help brands determine the effectiveness of their social media marketing strategy. By analysing social data with evalmyBRAND, brands can customise their social strategy based on demographics, social networks, location, and other factors.

Every time a brand posts on social media, social data is generated, including comments, sentiment, likes, shares, and retweets, which can be used to target social media marketing campaigns effectively. Social data mining can answer several crucial questions, such as the demographics of followers on each social network, the times consumers are online, the channels they use, and engagement with hashtags.

Social data can also reveal industry trends relevant to the brand and its products, consumer sentiment towards the brand and products, preferred post types, and what features and products consumers are asking for. Additionally, social data can help brands track their competitors’ actions and gauge consumer response.

4 reasons why social media analytics is essential

Social media analytics provides a wealth of benefits for businesses looking to maximise their online presence.

Gain insights into your audience: Social media analytics allows you to track your audience’s behavior, preferences, and sentiment towards your brand. This information can be used to better understand your target audience and tailor your content to their needs and interests.
Monitor your brand’s online reputation: By tracking mentions and conversations about your brand on social media, you can stay on top of any negative feedback or complaints and address them promptly. This helps to maintain a positive brand reputation and build trust with your audience.
Measure the success of your campaigns: Social media analytics allows you to track the performance of your social media campaigns in real-time. You can measure engagement, reach, and conversion rates to identify what’s working and what’s not and make adjustments accordingly.
Stay ahead of the competition: By analyzing your competitors’ social media activity, you can gain insights into their strategy and identify opportunities to differentiate yourself in the market.

By analyzing social media data, businesses can optimize their social media strategy and stay competitive.

How does social media analytics work?

evalmyBRAND, like other social media analytics tools, employs crawlers to gather publicly available information from various sources on the internet.

Once a user inputs a search query, evalmyBRAND scours the web for mentions of the query across different social media platforms, news sites, forums, and review sites.

Depending on the platform’s restrictions or partnerships, it can also access gated databases, including academic journals and offline content.

The gathered data is then categorised based on filters such as media types, country of origin, language, sentiment, and content type.

evalmyBRAND offers users a range of data visualisations to help them make sense of the information, including simple graphs and pie charts that display the number of mentions and share of mentions across different media channels.

Moreover, the tool provides more complex visualizations like a word cloud that displays the spread of a post, article, launch, or blog across the internet.

Key areas to use social media analytics

It’s common for social media teams to underestimate the importance of analysing specific areas of their marketing. Let’s take a closer look at which areas you need to measure, and why.

Here are the key areas:

Audience Analytics

Understanding your business’s target audience is critical to building an effective, audience-first marketing strategy that helps you nurture your communities towards converting. 49% of online shoppers rate receiving excellent communication on social media as “very important” when making a purchase.

Historically, audience data was scattered across social media platforms and the web, making it challenging to map out personas and report on them. However, now we, evalmyBRAND allow marketers to instantly see their digital audiences and ideal customers, ensuring their broader marketing strategy aligns with personas’ characteristics, interests, and behaviours. Tracking audience changes is also essential, allowing marketers to keep their content and strategies current and effective. Lastly, measuring performance levels over time is critical to optimising social media strategies.

Performance Analytics

Measuring your social media performance is crucial to ensure good ROI and understand which areas need improvement. It’s not necessary to delve too deeply into metrics at first; instead, focus on high-level trends. Key metrics to track include an overview of interactions across platforms, click-through rates, and follower growth over time. Tracking these metrics consistently over time will allow you to identify trends and understand the impact of your social media strategy, ultimately helping you see the return on your investment.

Competitive Analytics

Comparing your social media performance to that of your competitors is a crucial tool for CMOs looking to improve their company’s effectiveness and efficiency. By doing so, you can assess the effectiveness of your team’s work and strategy and determine your performance and ROI’s success in relation to the market. To stay ahead of the game, it’s important to run regular head-to-head analyses of your performance against specific competitors or compare yourself to multiple competitors. With modern social media analytics, particularly AI-powered evalmyBRAND, you can use a benchmarking tool to gain valuable insights into your competitors’ performance based on industry, country, and region. Neglecting competitive analysis can put your business at a disadvantage, as your competitors are likely to analyse your performance regularly. Use benchmarking to stay ahead of the game and improve your social media strategy.

Social media analytics spend

For businesses that spend a lot of money on social media advertising, understanding the effectiveness of their spending is crucial. It is essential to invest efficiently and ensure that every dollar spent on social media counts. Without knowing which paid content your audience will respond well to, it is easy to waste time and resources on promoting content that performs poorly. To combat this, some businesses are turning to AI-driven tools including evalmyBRAND that accurately predict the best content to put budget behind. Those who have adopted these tools are seeing great results. However, reporting on ad spend can be complicated as there are many channels, accounts, and profiles to manage. To keep an eye on spending, it is vital to bring all channels into one place before measuring.

Regularly comparing your advertising spend to industry and competitor averages is vital to stay competitive and optimise your strategy for efficiency and impact. It’s important to use up-to-date data rather than relying on monthly reports. Monitoring your paid social media metrics on an ongoing basis helps you spot trends, adjust your budget, and capitalise on opportunities to increase your share of voice.

Influencer Analytics

Influencer marketing has become an essential part of the marketing mix, and businesses need to verify influencer choices by tracking their key performance metrics. Metrics such as interactions per 1,000 followers, audience size, number of posts, and past collaborations can help you determine whether the influencer is a good fit for your brand. It’s crucial to measure these metrics to make the most of influencer marketing and ensure that it’s worth the investment. Analytics tools can help you organise every part of your influencer campaigns and measure the success of the campaigns. However, businesses should also be aware of influencer fraud and should do their due diligence before signing any contracts.

Sentiment analysis for customer service

Real-time sentiment analysis enables businesses to quickly identify any surge in negative mentions online and take prompt action to prevent a potential PR crisis. Negative comments spread quickly on social media, and ignoring them can lead to further backlash. By filtering by sentiment, such as happy, sad, or angry, businesses can prioritise and address the most pressing concerns. The key is to be proactive and address negative sentiment early to protect your brand reputation.

Some of the key benefits of using a social listening platform for the travel and hospitality industry include identifying customer trends, tracking brand mentions, monitoring competitor activity, and improving customer satisfaction. By using this information, businesses can make data-driven decisions to improve their operations and stay ahead of the competition.

Therefore, we encourage all businesses in the travel and hospitality industry to consider using a social listening platform to monitor and analyze customer feedback across social media channels. By doing so, they can gain valuable insights into their customer’s needs and preferences, make improvements to their offerings, and ultimately provide a better customer experience. Join the social listening revolution today and take your business to the next level!

Social media analytics tracking

Follow the five-step process described below to track your social media.

1. Define your goals:

Identify your objectives before analysing your social media data.
Clearly define your goals to measure progress and ensure social media efforts align with business objectives.
2. Choose the right metrics:

Focus on metrics that matter and track them regularly.
Common metrics include engagement rate, reach, impressions, clicks, conversions, and sentiment analysis.
3. Use the right tools:

Choose social media analytics tools that fit your budget and requirements.
Popular tools include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer, Google Analytics, and Facebook Insights.
4. Analyse your competition:

Analyse competitors’ social media presence to identify what’s working and what’s not.
Use this information to fine-tune your social media strategy and stay ahead of the competition.
5. Monitor and respond to feedback:

Use social listening tools to monitor brand mentions, track customer sentiment, and respond to feedback promptly.
Improving customer experience and building brand loyalty.

By breaking down these social media analytics tips into manageable chunks, it becomes easier to understand and implement them into your social media strategy.

What metrics can I track on each social channel?

While social media platforms offer inbuilt analytics tools, they can be limited in terms of the metrics you can retrieve and the variety of social networks they cover.

Using a single social media analytics tool such as evalmyBRAND to track multiple social networks simultaneously can provide more efficient and valuable results. Compared to relying on each social network’s analytics, it can save time and provide a more comprehensive overview of your social media performance.

Here are metrics you can track for each social channel:

Facebook Analytics:

Likes – choose a time and view your total page likes, including organic, paid, and unlikes
Where page likes happened – where your likes are coming from. When a user likes a page, Facebook recommends other pages to like
Reach – post engagement over time will help you find out what content performs well
Page views – you can learn which parts of your page are working and which are not, such as About, Photos, Home, etc. You’ll also discover where your traffic is coming from
Posts – identify how many fans viewed your page each day and what time of day they were online
People – learn your fans’ demographic, including location, men vs women, and language

LinkedIn Analytics:

The LinkedIn Company Page Analytics furnish insights and patterns regarding your company page, accessible solely to its administrators. You can retrieve the data through three tabs:

Updates

Updates – provides information about the audience targeted by each post, whether it was sponsored or not, and the number of impressions on members, clicks on content, company name, or logo. It also includes the number of likes, comments, and shares of each update, the number of new followers gained, and engagement metrics which calculate the interactions, clicks, and followers acquired divided by the number of impressions.
Reach/Impressions – a trend on how many times your updates were seen organically and paid, daily
Engagement – number of times members clicked, liked, commented, or shared your organic or sponsored posts, during a specified period

Followers

Type – total number of members following your page plus, organic and acquired followers
Follower demographics – a breakdown of your followers based on seniority, industry, position, and company size

Visitors

Page views – how many times your page was viewed.
Unique visitors – how many members visited your page? Similar to page views, but removes duplicate visits to a single page.
Visitor demographics – a breakdown of who’s visiting your page based on follower demographics.

Twitter Analytics

You can get a 28-day overview of your Twitter performance with Twitter Analytics. The most important stats you’ll find are:

Followers – how many people following your account
Impressions – how many times your tweets are seen
Engagements – retweets, mentions, replies, favourites, any other interactions

Continue scrolling down the page and you’ll find the previous 28 days with the same stats. Now you’ve got a comparison. Your followers can also be viewed in detail, including their language, interests, household income, and buying habits.

Instagram Analytics

With Instagram Analytic tools, you can see who your followers are, when they’re online, and how many people view your posts.

Follower demographic analytics

Location can be by country, or narrowed down to city. Time zone information is useful so you know what time it’s best to post your content
Gender and age shows how many followers you have, plus new ones gained Insights

View data on impressions, reach, website clicks, and follower activity.

By analysing the follower activity, you can determine the peak hours and days when your followers are most active and engaged. You can view this data either by hours or days and sort it by a typical day or a day of the week. Moreover, you can track new followers hourly and daily. Additionally, you can sort the most popular posts for each of the mentioned Insight categories within a 7-day or 30-day period

Pinterest Analytics

The Pinterest Analytics tool lets you see what people like about your profile and what they choose to save from your website. There’s also data about your audience – likes and dislikes, etc.

Pins – the daily average number of pins that happened from your website
Pinners – the daily average number of people who pinned from your website
Repins – the daily average number of how many times content from your site was repinned
Repinners – the daily average number of how many people did the repining
Impressions – the daily average number of times your pins showed up in main and board feeds or was in search results
Reach – the daily average number of people who saw your pins
Clicks – the daily average number of clicks to your website that came from Pinterest
Visitors – the daily average number of people who visited your website from Pinterest
Most recent – the most recent 100 pins from your website
Most repinned – you can choose either one specific day, the last seven days, or the last 14 days. You’ll be shown the 100 most repinned pins in your chosen time
Most clicked – you can choose either one specific day, the last seven days, or the last 14 days. You’ll be able to see what pins or images are driving the most traffic

YouTube Analytics

With YouTube Channel Analytics, you can monitor the performance of your channel and videos, find where your traffic is coming from, and find which locations work best for your brand.

There are also earnings reports showing which of your ads are successfully driving revenue. Audience retention graphs display which elements of your videos are working and which aren’t.

Hey, you can even see if a viewer rewinds and re-watches a video, fast-forwards, or bounces away.

Awesome!

General report

The overview gives you a detailed summary of how your brand messages have been performing for the last 28 days. You can check out demographic data about your audience and take a snapshot of your performance metrics. Including watch time, views, and earnings. The engagement metrics include comments, shares, likes, dislikes, and favourites.
With the Realtime report, you’ll find the performance data for your last five published videos. There will be two graphs with hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute stats – referring to the local time zone of the person viewing your video.

There’s a heap more information you can find on YouTube. Here’s a quick look at some of the sections.

Earnings report – all analytics linked to earnings related to your YouTube channel
Ad performance report – impressions and revenue from ads aired on your YouTube videos
Watch time report – a detailed breakdown of audience behaviour and activity when watching a video

Check out evalmyBRAND’s comprehensive and detailed analytics reports to understand your social presence online on all channels. With our social listening platform, you can gain a deeper understanding of how your brand is performing and resonating with your target audience on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more.

Through these analytics reports, you’ll be able to access a wealth of data and metrics that go beyond basic follower counts and engagement numbers. Dive into the specifics of your audience demographics, including age, gender, location, and interests. Understand the reach and impressions your brand generates, track the performance of your posts over time, and uncover the most effective content strategies for maximising engagement.

Furthermore, evalmyBRAND’s analytics reports allow you to compare your social media performance against competitors and industry benchmarks. This valuable benchmarking feature provides you with crucial insights into how you stack up against your peers, enabling you to identify areas for improvement and capitalise on your strengths.

With evalmyBRAND’s user-friendly interface and intuitive visualisations, you can easily navigate through the analytics reports and extract meaningful conclusions. The detailed breakdowns, charts, and graphs present your data in a clear and digestible format, allowing you to make data-driven decisions and refine your social media strategies for optimal results.

Whether you’re a social media manager, marketer, or business owner, evalmyBRAND’s analytics reports empower you with the knowledge needed to assess your social media performance, make informed decisions, and drive the success of your online presence across all channels. Gain a competitive edge, understand your audience better, and unlock the full potential of your brand’s social media strategy with evalmyBRAND’s comprehensive analytics reports.

Conclusion :

The blog is a helpful resource for social media managers and marketers who aim to enhance their social media campaigns’ effectiveness and improve their brand reputation using social media analytics. evalmyBRAND can provide brands with valuable insights into their audience’s behaviour and sentiment toward their brand, which can inform their social media strategy and result in business growth.