3 Ways Your Business Can Utilize Social Media Analytics Data

In recent years, social media has become relatively the most effective marketing way to get your voice across over to consumers. The catch, however, is that you must have an efficient means of measuring your outcome. You’ll not want to waste your money even though social media is cheaper than the traditional media of advertising. You’ll also want to know how your business can utilize social media analytics data.

The methods that are used to measure social media analytics data initiatives are numerous.

The first thing you’ll want is a template of what you want to achieve as a yardstick to guide you in the proper direction of the entire social media analytics program. It has undoubtedly become more of a science to analyze the information gathered from social media. The following are the three world’s best practices.

1. Pick metrics that track to goals.

As a business, your ultimate goal will undoubtedly be to make a good ROI on the money you must have invested in social media activities. Your aim may not necessarily be to prove that social media is leading to purchases or conversions directly. You must be able to establish that it’s a clear contributory factor. The underlying factor is to come up with the social media analytics data points that can effectively track specific goals. Always seek for ways to gather the requisite measurements.

According to Ruben Ugarte, founder of marketing analytics firm Practico Analytics, “Many companies don’t get that far. It’s important to discuss the pros and cons of each metric that’s a candidate for [a] key metric. Everyone will want to understand how measurements can affect the perception of the initiative’s progress, and so that those doing the work can navigate their way to better results.”

You need a lot of brainstorming to come up with metrics that suit your goals.

When your goal is to increase sales, it can’t be achieved in isolation. You must initiate some other measurements and mini-goals to bring about this.

2. Knowledge of the medium.

You need to have a good knowledge of the medium you wish to use. The knowledge is fundamental in finding out the suitability of a goal for the platform and if the social media analytics data metrics you want to utilize are appropriate.

For instance, what you expect from Facebook and Instagram will be quite different from that of LinkedIn. Facebook and Instagram can be used effectively for driving traffic, while LinkedIn is for building communities.

With Linkedin, you don’t look for traffic but overall growth. Once you have a clear knowledge of your medium, you will precisely know what to measure.

3. Using analytics to set realistic future targets.

The whole idea behind your analytics initiative for the data is to enable your decision-making process. With social media analytics data, you can choose what to post in the future, who to target, and where to funnel your resources for maximum ROI.

Your decision-making process, however, shouldn’t be based exclusively on your own performance, as you will only have one side of the story.

You must take into consideration what goes on in the market out there. If you are equipped with the right data, you have virtually all the arsenal you need, and you can bring about a quick turn around in the fortunes of your organization. You have a whole lot of possibilities, but the clincher is that analytics enables you to strategize. You’ll be able to sieve out what’s working and what’s not, and where you have to delve in. Watch so that you don’t invest and sink in more resources than you should.

Once you are backed up with data, then your decisions are safeguarded.

Yaniv Masjedi, chief marketing officer at voice over IP company Nextiva, says, “Social media analytics data can also help marketers create more effective and extremely detailed ways to test theories. Organizations can also utilize social media metrics to discover trends that are most likely going to affect progress toward goals.”

What you should be immensely interested in after all is what will increase click-through rates (CTR).

You need to monitor every post over the long term to discover trends in your user engagement and CTRs. If you want to come up with a comprehensive analysis, you can go further to track different types of posts. Find out how long a prospect dwelt on a page, monitor time spent on your website, and whether or not that prospect ended up placing a sales call or was converted to a customer.

Don’t be put off if a post does not immediately score click-throughs — it doesn’t signify a failure.

Your sole concentration should be that at the end of the day, your social media engagements should translate into click-throughs to your own website and, eventually, conversions. You have virtually not achieved anything if you keep carrying conversations on a social media platform which you know belongs to another organization. You are just creating business and revenue for that organization. Always work to bring up the bottom line for your own company.

Source: https://readwrite.com/2019/09/12/the-3-ways-your-business-can-utilize-social-media-analytics-data/