A substantial portion of internet usage today involves social media. Since the goal of companies has always been to reach customers, an interactive presence on social networks that helps companies build long-term relationships with their audience has become imperative. New marketing channels require new solutions for marketing analytics to ensure that audience engagement is running the right way. Social Media Analytics was created for this purpose!
What is Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from social media platforms and analyzing this data to evaluate and monitor businesses' digital marketing activities.
The main objective for Social Media Marketing is NOT to sell. It's all about building relationships with the current and potential customers, converting them from normal buyers to brand advocates, where not only they are loyal to the brand, but they also encourage other people to be!
To guarantee the implementation of this process, it should be tracked and analyzed, moment by moment, to know about how far the content reaches, how many people are engaged, and what brand image the consumer has in their minds. Then, all this data is analyzed to make whatever business decisions needed to reach the SMART goals planned.
What is being analyzed?
The main factors of the items that are usually analyzed revolve around brand awareness, engagement, conversions, lead generation, customer satisfaction, and returns on investments. Here you can find the most important KPIs for each of them:
These KPIs may differ from one business to another, and from stage to another in the same business according to which phase of the plan to focus on and which goals to achieve. Each stage of the marketing funnel has different KPIs to track. For example, the brand awareness stage KPIs are absolutely different from the business growth stage!
Brand awareness is more concerned with measuring the existing and potential audience and its growth over time. So, you will find its KPIs are focused on measuring impressions, reach, ...etc.
Engagement is also considered a sort of brand awareness for businesses. It can strongly analyze the brand image in the minds of customers. The main difference between engagement and reach and the other previous KPIs is that engagement KPIs are more concerned with users' active interaction, unlike the reach KPIs which focus on any interaction, even the passive ones. Engagement is the stage where the main objective is to take customers through the marketing funnel, converting them from potential to actual customers. Here comes the conversion KPIs! This shows how choosing which KPIs to track differs according to the business stage. Only an insightful strategy and valid techniques can help in determining which KPIs to measure.
How to analyze?
After figuring out what to measure and analyze, how will you go through these analyses? Basically, there are two solutions:
- Using the built-in insights & analytics boards of the social media platforms. They are free, easy, but these insights are separate and limited. This data can help you in a good manner if you're tracking a few social accounts. But what if you have more?
- If you can track all your digital assets in one place, gathering all possible data moment by moment, presenting it in an easy-to-read way, and report all this data periodically. This is what the custom-report tools actually offer!
Welcome, Vanilla Analytics!
Believing in the importance of social media analytics for any business, we introduce our new product: Vanilla Analytics, a comprehensive tool to monitor all your digital assets live!
This custom-reports tool will help you with more than social media analytics. You will get access to:
- Social Media insights (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn)
- Google Analytics
- Google my business
- Ads insights (Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn)
- Mailchimp campaigns
- SEO: Ranks Tracker, Backlinks Monitor...etc.
Also, you can integrate your Shopify or Woocommerce website so you can get all its data in an organized & easy-to-read analytics board. All data is updated instantly and you can schedule and download them as reports whenever you want. At Vanilla, we offer more than just reports, we help you choose what KPIs to track and when according to your objectives and business stage. There are many other features to know about Vanilla Analytics, so, if you’re interested, we look forward to hearing from you at: info@vanillasm.com.
Finally, whichever way you choose to analyze your business KPIs on social media, you will always have the challenge to improve them in higher results. This is precisely what we will talk about in our next article. Share your thoughts with us on how to improve Social Media KPIs and wait for our article. Until then, stay safe and healthy!