In order to get the most benefit from social media marketing, you must have a thorough understanding of your customers. Social media analytics can give you deep insights into your audience, helping you to focus and fine tune your efforts.
Analytics Helps You Understand Your Customers
Analytics tells you many important things about your social media presence.
The size of your audience. You want to know how many people are following you on social sites. You may have a goal to increase your audience to a certain size. Of course, you want to do more than just attract more followers. Your audience has to be well targeted. Yet it’s also important to steadily grow the size of your audience.
Audience demographics. You want to make sure that your audience is right for your business. Depending on what kind of customers you are targeting, you want to know if your followers are male or female, hold old they are, where they live, their interests, income bracket, level of education and other facts.
Engagement. You want people to not only follow you but also engage with you on social sites. This includes commenting on your Facebook page, sharing and liking your posts and retweeting you.
Using Analytics to Monitor Social Media
Good analytics goes beyond keeping track of your current audience and levels of engagement, as important as these metrics are. However, it’s also beneficial to monitor conversations that are happening all over social media. This is a daunting task, as there’s an immense amount of content being added every second. Your objective is to sift through this content and gather useful information. There are several important ways that analytics can help you monitor social media.
Brand Mentions
You want to know when anyone discusses your business. While it’s good to monitor sites where people leave formal reviews, such as Amazon, Yelp and Angie’s List, you can also learn a great deal by monitoring conversations on Facebook and Twitter. Even the most offhanded comments can give you valuable insights into who is using your products and what they think about them.
In some cases, you can insert yourself into these conversations. If someone has a question about one of your products, you can answer it. You can also address complaints and misunderstandings. This is important for building your reputation and maintaining a positive image for your brand.
Helps You Understand Your Competition
In addition to tracking conversations about your brand, you also want to know what’s being said about your competition. Both positive and negative comments about your competitors help you make better decisions, both regarding your social media actions and your business in general. For example, if you see people complaining about a certain feature that your competitor’s product has, you’ll know not to add a similar feature yourself. On the other hand, you might want to emulate features that people are praising.
Helps You Find and Connect with Influencers
Influencers can have a big impact on your business. These are people with large followings who can help spread the word about your products. You may attract some influencers naturally, without having to make any special effort. They may have simply discovered you on their own. In this case, it’s still helpful to reach out to them and solidify the relationship.
You can go out of your way to attract influencers who haven’t yet discovered you. Analytics helps you do this by identifying the preferences and habits of these influential people. You might find influencers who would be a good match for you by doing keyword searches.
Develop a More Effective Content Strategy
Analytics helps you tailor your content to your audience’s needs and preferences. Content is really what determines whether or not people follow you and engage with you. By studying analytics, you discover what kind of posts and other content your audience prefers.
Using the Right Analytics Tools
There are a variety of tools and resources for social media analytics. Some of these are free while others require you to purchase software or services. You can make good use out of several different analytics tools.
You can start by using the free tools provided by the social media sites themselves. Facebook Page Insights gives you lots of useful data about your page, such as likes, reach and “talking about this,” which breaks down the demographics of people who are talking about your page. Twitter Analytics reminds you how many tweets you have and also tells you about tweet impressions, profile visits, mentions and followers. Google Analytics, best known for helping people track stats for their websites, has recently added Social Analytics to its repertoire of services. With this tool, you can track many metrics on multiple social networks from one dashboard.
In addition to these free tools, however, you may also want to have additional help to provide you with more detailed and specialized information. A social media analytics api can provide you with many benefits, such as data aggregated from billions of conversations taken from various social media sites. A good social media analytics service can also provide you with useful charts and reports that make the information easy for you to understand.
Analytics Helps You Understand Social Media
Social media now represents a large portion of internet activity. Many of your customers and potential customers are spending lots of time on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites. These sites give you the opportunity to get leads, sell products and build your brand.
It’s essential for you to learn as much as possible about your audience on social media sites. You also want to monitor conversations on social media that are relevant to your brand and your niche. Analytics help you make sense of all the data and conversations that are taking place on social media and use them to your advantage.
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