Social media analytics importance - Why it matters

Social media is a powerful and high-yielding platform for brands to market themselves. And marketers, having understood the importance of social media analytics, heavily rely on data to develop effective social media strategies.

A large number of marketers already use social media to reach their diverse marketing goals.

But why do they choose social media over other channels and how does social media analytics help them?

That’s exactly what we’ll uncover in this post.

So, let’s dive right in.

Why choose social media?

The reason is simple—the social media user base includes people of all ages as shown in this survey by Pew Research Center. If you have something to sell, there is a great chance that social media has an audience for you.

Source: Research Gate

But as promising as it is, marketing on social media can get overwhelming, causing businesses to lose their focus.

That’s where social media analytics proves its worth.

By analysing different social media metrics, you can derive invaluable insights that can help you craft a highly competitive and result-oriented strategy.

Do you need some convincing about the importance of social media analytics and how it can power your business strategy? Read on to learn how it can be advantageous for your brand.

6 ways social media analytics can benefit your brand

The importance of social media analytics for businesses of all kinds is undeniable.

Here are 6 reasons why you should consider investing in social media analytics to power your marketing efforts.

#1. Helps create better buyer personas

One of the fundamentals of all marketing strategies is to understand who you are marketing to. Without defining your audience, your marketing campaigns are like arrows shot in the dark.

Social media analytics tools can gather a variety of data on your followers’ interests, demographics, habits, and buying patterns. This data can be leveraged to understand your target audiences’ attitudes, preferences, and behaviours.

When equipped with accurate buyer personas and customer segments, you are in a better position to cater to your audiences’ needs.

With targeted and more personalized messaging, you can win their attention and move them down your funnel. This is particularly important for B2B sales lead generation as you’d have to connect with multiple stakeholders from a single organization using the account-based marketing approach.

Each stakeholder would need to be targeted with different messaging even though they’re from the same organization. And the only way to accomplish this is to study the audience thoroughly and split it into hyper-focused segments.

#2. Take more strategic decisions

The importance of social media analytics lies in extracting valuable, accurate, and real-time insights on your reach and engagement.

It dives deeper into data than merely measuring likes and shares to give a clear understanding of how your social media campaigns are performing against that of your competitors.

What this essentially means is that you can make data-driven decisions to focus your efforts on achieving specific goals.

For instance, if you’re selling online courses, it’s important to reach your target customers where they are. And that’s where social media analytics can come in handy.

When you’re empowered with insights, you can choose the right platforms, opt for the right type of campaigns, and better utilize your social media marketing budget to target those who are most likely to engage with your content.

#3. Conduct sentiment analysis

Social media is a platform where people openly share their emotions, sentiments, and opinions. This unstructured data can be extremely valuable for marketers to create campaigns that better resonate with the emotions of their target audience.

That's where the importance of sentiment analysis comes into the picture. Social media analytics tools are capable of analysing both positive sentiments as well as negative ones.

Let’s say you are marketing on Instagram or Facebook for brand building. You can imagine what a great value-add sentiment analysis can be for your strategy. You can leverage positive sentiments about product satisfaction as social proof.

At the same time, negative sentiments about customer service, pricing, product features or delivery process can be quickly addressed by making amends to maintain a healthy brand reputation.

This is particularly crucial for improving your online PR. If you fail to curb negative sentiment among your audience, there’s a good chance that it could snowball into a major PR crisis. Analyzing public sentiment quickly and acting on it can help you avoid such a mishap. The Pepsi ad backlash is one such example of a PR crisis where sentiment analysis could have helped curb it quickly.

#4. Create more engaging content

The value of high-quality content can never be underrated. To understand the importance of social media analytics, you should consider what difference it can make to your content creation strategy.

With analytics, you can figure out the kind of content that clicks with your audience. Based on the insights, you can confidently test some of your out-of-the-box campaign ideas to ascertain which one works the best for you.

Posting at the right time is a crucial part of your social media marketing strategy and you need to post at the time when your audience is more likely to actively engage. You can review this curated list by Attrock to leverage the best social media management software for scheduling your social media posts.

Furthermore, social media analytics gives you insights specific to each social media platform which can help you customise your content to suit your target audience on each platform. For instance you can use linkedin automation tools to automate your manual activities on Linkedin.

This increased relevance can help in boosting engagement and reach of your content on each platform you target. And that, in turn, can increase your chances of conversions as well.

Backed by all this analysis, you can better leverage your advertising software and create ads that not only engage but boost your sales.

#5. Take your customer service a notch higher

Did you know that the global customer experience management market is worth $11.34 billion?

But why is it so important?

That's because 81% of consumers say that positive customer service increases their brand loyalty.

Source: Zendesk

And social media analytics tools can go a long way in taking your customer service to the next level.

Thanks to the insights collected from social listening, you can analyze what customers are saying about you and respond to them accordingly.

The insights derived can be used to create personalized recommendations and messages. And you can leverage these for email marketing too. Once you build a strong email list, you can nurture your leads at different stages with more meaningful communications.

By doing that, you are establishing yourself as a credible and trustworthy brand that cares about its customers.

#6. Measure your performance and ROI

The importance of social media analytics is not only felt before or during a campaign but even when it concludes.

It helps measure how your brand is performing across various social media channels.

Social media analytics is one of the best ways to analyse whether you achieved the goals that you had set and how successful the strategies you adopted were.

It also plays an important role in determining the ROI for ads, contests, and giveaways. With analytics, you can calculate the sales they were able to generate, directly and indirectly.

Also, you can get insight for a platform such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram influencer marketing campaigns and find out which platforms are more effective for your business.

With actual numbers and insights in your hand, you can precisely determine the success of your business strategy and work on areas that fell short of your expectation.

Continuously analyzing your performance and making such tweaks to your strategy can help you boost your ROI in the long run. It’s also a great way to ensure that your marketing campaigns keep pace with the latest trends in the industry and don’t end up lagging behind peers.

Are you ready to invest in social media analytics?

I am sure you are now certain of the importance of social media analytics and how it can supercharge your business strategy.

There are several feature-rich social media analytics tools in the market that can provide you with deep insight into your social media performance.

Go ahead and equip your marketing team with such tools. When your strategies are backed by quality data, there is no stopping you from achieving success.

Have any questions about the importance of social media analytics? Ask them in the comments.