What is social media analytics?

Social media analytics is the process of collecting and analysing data from social media channels to gain valuable business insights. The data for social media analytics is sourced from multiple social networking sites, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Reddit.

Why do you need social media analytics?

Social media analytics helps businesses to quantify the impact of their digital marketing campaigns and improve strategic decision-making.

Marketers use social media analytics to get a deeper understanding of customer sentiments, expectations, and behaviours. Tracking social media metrics gives them real-time insights into their organisation’s performance and helps them align their digital marketing campaigns with customer preferences.

With social media analytics, companies can:

Understand customer response to their offerings
Identify the high-value features of their offerings
Understand the demographics and habits of their target audiences
Gauge audience response to their digital communications
Spot emerging trends
Evaluate the performance of competitor brands

What metrics does social media analytics track?

Below are the key metrics that companies track with social media analytics:

Performance analysis

Performance metrics help organisations to measure the effectiveness of their social media marketing campaigns. They include tracking -

Click-through rate to check whether embedded links are effectively driving traffic to the company’s website
Follower count growth to verify if there is a consistent increase in the number of followers
Interactions across platforms to gauge audience engagement

Sentiment analysis

Companies track brand mentions across various social media platforms to analyse how consumers perceive their business, product, or service. With sentiment analysis, they can assess if the audience sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral and make the necessary changes to their brand image.

Audience analysis

With AI tools, companies track the demographics and habits of their audience and predict customer behaviour. This helps them to develop more targeted advertising content.

Competitor analysis

A competitor analysis compares the impact of a business’s social media strategy with that of its competitors. It reveals the company’s strengths and weaknesses and uncovers potential threats and opportunities in the social media space.

Influencer analysis

Brands commonly leverage the popularity of social media influencers to improve their reach and performance. Influencer analytics tools enable them to measure the impact of their influencer campaigns. Some important influencer metrics to track are –

The number of interactions per 1000 followers
Frequently used hashtags
Likes, comments, and shares for an influencer post
Increase in brand mentions and website visitors after an influencer post goes out
Traffic and conversions from social media

Paid social media analysis

Paid advertising on social networking sites is a crucial part of digital marketing. AI tools can track the success rate of advertisements across all social media platforms. They can also predict which content has a high probability of performing well, reducing financial risks in marketing. The crucial paid social media metrics to monitor are: