To the general public, social media may be the way to connect with people and share and appreciate things on the Internet. But to companies and marketeers, social media is a wealth of information. All the updates users share, the interactions their followers generate, comments they reply to, etc. together form extremely useful business-friendly data.
‘Social media analytics‘ refers to the practice of amassing information from social media sites and assessing that data using specific analytics tools to arrive at business decisions. If you are on the selling side of things, the following are the reasons why you just cannot ignore social media analytics.
Helps Understand Your Audience
Using social data to understand your audience helps in multiple ways. For example, looking into past posts would help you ascertain the ideal time to share posts or upload content. Timing is crucial in social media marketing. Posting content when your followers are online would drive more traffic, engagement and sales. Therefore, dissecting social data and finding the right time to post are crucial. Some social networking sites offer built-in analytics that could be made use of.
Helps You Find Out Your Ideal Social Networks
Different social networks work differently, and therefore they are not meant for all. Even if an organization or individual has millions of followers on Instagram and Facebook, it doesn’t mean the engagement would be the same across the two platforms. At times, smaller networks, such as Flickr or Pinterest, could work better. Repeated testing is the only way to determine which social network provides more traction.
Helps Create Better Content
Tracking social networks would help understand the kind of content your audience prefers. On networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, you can find out whether links, videos or images fare the best. On more visual platforms, such as Instagram and Pinterest, you may check the kind of images that do well. The analytics tool of the respective social media sites would help figure out content that’s doing well.
Helps You Learn More About Your Competition
Competitors create content and run social media strategies too. If you study their data, you would learn what’s working and what is not. This shall help you steer clear of the mistakes they made and focus only on their fruit-bearing techniques. To find out competitor information, there are tools that show the traffic a website receives from the various social networks that drive the site.
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