Social media analytics are like mining.
On the surface, likes, shares, and comments are quantifiable indicators of engagement. But if you dig deeper, you’ll find more trends and patterns that provide valuable insights for making better marketing decisions.
In this article, we’ll explore what social media analytics is, its benefits, and important metrics to track for growing your brand.
What Are Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics is the tracking, gathering, and analyzing of data from your social media accounts to improve your decision-making. Beyond monitoring metrics such as likes, shares, and followers, it also involves analyzing this data to draw insights for refining your marketing strategy and achieving your goals.
For instance, if one of your posts goes viral, analyzing it will help you understand why it was popular. Your learnings can help you create more high-impact social media posts.
Benefits Of Tracking Social Media Analytics Data
Using social media for your business helps you build more brand awareness, drive more conversations about your business, and learn more about your audience. However, you can’t improve or know what works if you don’t track your progress.
Here are five advantages of tracking your social media analytics data:
Study Your Audience
Analyzing your social media data lets you know the demographics that interact with your content and are more likely to buy what you offer. This insight also ensures you target the right people when running social media ads.
Develop Product
Knowing your audience’s pain points is the foundation for building a successful product. One way to gain this understanding is to track your audience’s social media conversations. While at it, you might discover opportunities you hadn’t considered. You can also create surveys and polls to investigate consumers’ needs and validate your product ideas.
Understand The Customer Experience
Consumers often air their frustration and satisfaction on social media. Monitoring these conversations is an easy way to get detailed and unfiltered feedback on your existing products and services. This feedback lets you iterate on what you offer and helps you create a great customer experience.
Know The Competition
Scouring your competitor’s social media lets you learn what they’re doing right or wrong. Of course, copying what competitors do isn’t the goal. Instead, you want to get inspiration from their best-performing content to improve yours.
By listening to your competitors’ audience, you can know what customers want and use these insights to improve your products and content.
Improve Efficiency
Tracking social media analytics data lets you learn what’s working and what isn’t. These insights will help you improve your social media marketing strategy, increase your marketing ROI, and eliminate constant trial and error.
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Common Social Media Analytics Mistakes To Avoid
While tracking and analyzing social media data is essential for success, many businesses make mistakes that hinder their ability to draw meaningful insights. To make the most of your social media analytics, avoid these common pitfalls:
- Focusing Only on Vanity Metrics: It’s tempting to get excited by metrics like follower count or likes. While these numbers are important, they don’t necessarily indicate success. A high number of followers or likes doesn’t always translate into actual engagement or sales. Focus on metrics that truly reflect audience behavior, such as conversions or customer sentiment.
- Not Defining Clear Goals: Without clear goals, your analytics can become overwhelming and meaningless. Whether you aim to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive traffic, establish specific, measurable objectives. This ensures you track the right metrics and can accurately assess progress.
- Overlooking Platform-Specific Metrics: Each social media platform has its own strengths and features. What works on Instagram might not work on LinkedIn or Twitter. Focusing on platform-specific metrics will help you tailor your content and strategies to each audience. For instance, Instagram may prioritize engagement, while LinkedIn values clicks and professional interactions.
- Failing to Track ROI Properly: Social media efforts should contribute to your business objectives, whether that’s driving traffic, increasing sales, or boosting brand awareness. If you’re not measuring your ROI effectively, you may miss out on opportunities for optimization. Use tools like Google Analytics to track the actual financial returns from your campaigns and validate your social media strategy.
Measurement Of Social Media Analytics
There are many social media metrics you could measure and analyze. Below, we recommend seven to prioritize for your social media report.
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Social Reach
Reach is the number of unique users who saw your content. Social media platforms like YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter do not offer the reach metric. Others like Meta, Instagram, and TikTok let you track your reach.
Audience Engagement
Engagement is a broad term covering how people interact with your content. It measures metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and clicks. A high engagement rate suggests your audience resonates with your content.
Impressions
Impressions are the number of times people see your content, including multiple views from the same user.
Number Of Mentions
This is the number of times people mention your brand (or keywords related to your brand) on social media platforms. Track this metric to gauge your brand presence, understand customer sentiment, and address customer grievances before they become a PR issue.
Social ROI
Social ROI measures the financial return of your social media marketing efforts. According to a Sprout Social report, proving ROI is the second biggest problem for social media teams. Fortunately, tools like Google Analytics can help you prove your social ROI.
Social Listening
Social listening involves tracking and analyzing conversations and trends related to your brand. It’s like the number of mentions metric. The core difference is that social listening focuses not only on brand mentions, but also on industry trends and conversations.
Social Interactions
Social interactions differ across various social networks. Here’s how that looks:
- Meta: Includes likes, shares, and comments
- Instagram: Includes likes, shares, comments, and save
- TikTok: Includes likes, shares, comments, and save
- LinkedIn: Includes likes, comments, reposts, and send
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How To Use Social Media Analytics Effectively
Social media analytics tools are powerful for tracking performance, but understanding how to use them strategically is key to unlocking their full potential. To truly benefit from analytics, consider these approaches:
- Set Clear Goals: Before diving into the data, set specific, measurable goals for your social media efforts. Whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or growing your follower base, defining your objectives helps you focus on metrics that matter most.
- Identify Trends Over Time: Social media success isn’t always about short-term spikes in engagement. It’s important to monitor trends over time, whether they’re daily, weekly, or monthly. Spotting patterns helps you predict what content will resonate with your audience and improve future campaigns.
- Experiment and A/B Test: Social media analytics tools give you the ability to A/B test your posts, ads, and strategies. Run tests on different content types (images, videos, captions) and analyze which formats perform the best to optimize your efforts.
- Track Performance Across Multiple Platforms: To get a comprehensive understanding of your social media efforts, track performance across all relevant platforms. Each platform has unique features, so it’s important to tailor your strategy to each one while analyzing the overall impact on your brand.
- Refine Your Strategy Regularly: Social media is ever-changing, and what works one month may not be effective the next. Make a habit of reviewing your analytics frequently, tweaking your approach as necessary to keep your content relevant and engaging.
5 Great Social Media Analytics Tools
CoSchedule Social Analytics
CoSchedule’s social analytics is part of the CoSchedule Marketing Suite — a family of products for organizing your marketing in one place. Our Marketing Suite replaces tools that perform a single function. As a complete solution, the CoSchedule Marketing Suite gives you access to a social calendar, marketing calendar, content organizer, work organizer, and asset organizer.
Price: Get started for free with our Marketing Calendar here.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that can track social media visits to your website and mobile app. With Google Analytics, you can know what visitors do when they arrive on your site — e.g., filling out forms, watching landing page videos, or making purchases. That way, you can prove social ROI and improve your marketing strategy.
Price: Free
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is an enterprise-level social media management tool. It includes extensive engagement, publishing, analytical, and listening features. Sprout Social integrates with most social media platforms — including WhatsApp — so you can manage all your social accounts from one convenient location.
Price: Starts at $249/month
Hootsuite Analytics
Hootsuite is a less expensive alternative to Sprout Social, which makes it appealing to budget-conscious users. The best part? Hootsuite offers all the features you’d expect from a comprehensive social media analytics tool.
Price: Starts at $99/month
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is perhaps the most advanced customer research and social listening tool on the market. It boasts of having the most extensive social data of any company on the planet. Plus, it has an intuitive interface for helping users draw insights from their data.
Price: Custom.
