Data Analytics and Social Media Success

Have you ever wished you could know what content and marketing strategies would be successful before even starting them? Data analytics won’t let you see into the future, but it can give you the knowledge to make more credible predictions. If you haven’t considered applying data analytics to your social media campaigns, you are passing up the opportunity to boost the success of your content and marketing efforts.

Data is largely how we make sense of this digital age. In the digital world of social media, an incredible amount of data is produced daily. An analysis of social media data is extremely beneficial for marketing now more than ever.

An essential part of the progression of any company is data analytics. In fact, Rutgers points out that “data analytics technology has produced profound impacts on business.” Here are some tips for using data to help plan your next social media campaign.      

 

Define Your Audience(s)

One of the first steps to creating successful, engaging content is to have a firm understanding of who you are putting your content out to. Analyzing the traffic to your social media sites can help reveal many aspects of your target audiences. Imagine knowing the perfect place to post your Instagram that would captivate your target audiences and get them talking about your brand and knowing when to post on LinkedIn to maintain visibility among the professionals in your industry. Reaching the right audience at the right time is paramount to your social media content and marketing campaigns.

Your audience produces lots of data, and enlisting in tools like Google Analytics can give you a strong insight into your audience’s demographics. Metrics such as age, gender, location, etc., all use various social media platforms for different reasons. This data could show you that on Facebook, you have a following of males, age 18-34, who consume your content. At the same time,  another demographic — females, age 18-28 shows a strong following on Twitter. Knowing this information, specifically that your different audiences have different interests, will help eliminate the guesswork when producing content for your different social media platforms.

 

Engagement

Engagement is a metric that can be looked at in two ways: your activity as made on social media via comments, mentions, shares, retweets, etc., and how your content is reaching and growing your audience. It’s important to understand the metrics that pertain to how well your content is being received and shared to reach others. These numbers are explanatory in that they give you a sense of how your content is resonating with your audiences, who in your audience interacts with your content and your potential in reaching new members.

 

Influence   

All of those shares, likes, and retweets will help you gauge the success of your content, but will also reveal valuable audience members. Analytical tools will help you take a look at the engagement and interactions between your audience members. The influencers of your audience, the people that get the most shares, retweets, comments and other methods of strong engagement, are audience members to gear content toward. You can extend your reach and even generate leads from the influencers of your audience, as they are respected and looked up to from other members of your target audiences.

 

Acquisition

Measurements of the frequency and reasons new and existing audience members come to your site are a measurement of your content and marketing success, as well as a calculation of growth. Metrics such as click-through-rates can give you an accurate evaluation of visits to your site, time on site, and return visits, which will give you an analysis of the strength of your engagement efforts, and the reach of new audience members.

 

Competitor Analysis

You can use most, if not all, of these social media metrics to understand why you aren’t doing as well as your competitor. Or if you are doing better, you can use the metrics to see what not to do. Gain an understanding of the success or failure of competitor content and engagement for a better grasp of efforts to try and efforts to abandon. Furthermore, you can stay a step ahead of the competition when they try something that doesn’t go over with the audience, and go another way with your content or marketing strategies.

Data analytics and software are becoming increasingly popular and even necessary to be able to compete in the world of social media marketing. It is extremely vital for the hyper-optimization of content and marketing strategies, as well as reaching the right audiences at the right times. Data analytics for anything, including social media marketing, can go to incredible depths — however, the above metrics are a great start and will help you pinpoint details of your audiences. In doing so, you will make your social media content and marketing campaigns a success.

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You might also be interested in a great Motivational Speaker Video for best social media practices!