Social Media Analytics: Why You Need Them & How to use them

Why do you need social media analytics and how to use them to grow your business or brand!

The "secret treasure" you are probably searching everywhere about your social media activity, is actually much closer than you think! It's your analytics!

The posts you've shared, the interactions you've had with your followers, all the comments you replied to, and all the other activities are extremely useful data.
This information can help your social media marketing in so many ways.

Let's see some of the reasons you should utilize your social media analytics and the tools you can use to track these data effectively.



1. They help you to get to know your audience better
Understanding your audience with the help of social media data can help you in many ways! For example, when you analyze your past posts you can find your unique best time to share. Timing has a key role in social media marketing. Posting when your followers are online and at the highest level of their alertness your post will gain more engagement, traffic, and sales.
Hence, you should analyze your social data and find your unique best time to post on social media.


2 They can reveal to you what the best social networks are for you
Not all social networks work for everyone. Just because some networks have almost or more than 1 billion users doesn't mean they will drive the best results.
There're smaller social networks, that have a more targeted audience and can help you execute your strategy even better.
Experimentation and the use of analytics to measure engagement, traffic, and sales are the best ways to figure which network will work best for you.

This data can be used to focus more on the networks are working for you and which not. You can use these data to prioritize the amount of time you spend on each social network.

A great tool you can use to figure out which social networks bring you the highest engagement you can use a social media dashboard tool, such as Cyfe. A tool like this connects several social networks and you can place data from all the networks in one single dashboard to compare their performance.


3 They can help you to create better content 
Tracking your social networks will give you a better view and help you understand what content gives the best results.

On social networks like Facebook and Twitter, you are able to check whether images, videos, or links perform better. While on visual networks like Pinterest and Instagram you can see what type of content performs best.

Analytics can also help you check how your blog performs. You can check which content is shared more, the number of visits per social network, and even how much time the users spent and how many of them have converted to subscriptions and sales.

A tool you can use to make things, even more, easier is a tool like Buzzsumo

4 Analytics will help you understand competitors 
Your competitors are creating content and running social media strategies too and this gives them their own unique data.
If you analyze their data, you will find out easier what is working and what's not. This will help you avoid the mistakes they've probably made and you'll focus on strategies that bring results.

A cool tool to help you with that is Similar Web. You just add the URL to any website and will show you the rate of the traffic the site gains from social media and networks. Then you can "spy" on your competitors' performance on social media and their content using the two tool you saw before, Cyfe and Buzzsumo.

5 They can help you create a better strategy
No one has ever created the best strategy in his first attempt. It takes time and hard work and social media analytics and help you out. Studying your social media analytics frequently will give you the opportunity to find out the mistakes you've made. Therefore, optimizing your strategy can help you eliminate those mistakes and boost your strategy.

Social media analytics tools are really good for that, yet, you need to use a technique that's called "social media listening"

What's social media listening? It's the process of tracking conversations to read and study what people saying about a specific brand, industry, person, business, etc. and to use this data as a leverage for your business.

Social media listening gives you in real-time what people say about you and your business online.
A great tool to give you a helping hand with that can be Sentione. You simply sign up for an account and add in keywords like your brand, product name, company name, etc. and the software will track all the mentions to these keywords and list them out and display the data in the graph report.

6 They will show you how social media campaigns are performing.
Once you start running a social media campaign you need to track it frequently to check if it's moving the way you wanted to.

If it's not going the way you planned it to, you can always make changes to the campaign and improve it and if the results are really bad you can stop it from running.
Sentione can also help you with this too, as it carries an analysis of campaigns to see whether it's having a positive, negative, or a more neutral effect.

Now you know more, you can decide on how to proceed. It's now the time to start spending more time watching and studying your social media analytics to improve your presence in both short term and long term. Having these data from the analytics will also ensure you get more out of the time you spend on social media networks.

Do you use your social media analytics? Is this helpful? Have you noticed any other benefits of tracking it? Please leave your comments down below.