An effective social media strategy can help your business build awareness, communicate with customers, and sell your products. But there’s a lot more to social media management than simply posting on Twitter or Facebook a few times a day. Social media platforms provide a wealth of data that, if harnessed correctly, can benefit your overall marketing strategy. So let’s dive into how you can gather marketing data from your social media content and the benefits of putting that data to use.

What Are Social Media Analytics?

Social media analytics give your team insight into who is engaging with your brand and what they’re saying about it. Understanding how many people interact with your brand and products online will help you set realistic and achievable goals for engagement growth. Analytics will also reveal your audience demographics, which will help you market more effectively based on age groups, gender, geographic location, and more. Plus, you can figure out the best days and times for engagement, as well as track comments related to your brand. Access to your social media data will help better inform your marketing goals and content strategy.

Where to Find Social Media Analytics?

There are many options to help businesses track their social media analytics. Platforms like Sprout Social, Socialbakers, and BuzzSumo are designed to extract these insights and help you understand your current and potential customers. These services can save significant time and money for your team, as well as provide more actionable and effective insights than may be possible in-house. When tracking social media analytics, here are 6 six things to keep a very close eye on.

Social Media Engagement 

Engagement rates indicate what content works best. Likes, comments, shares, retweets, and click-throughs are among the actions that provide you with detailed information about real-time engagement. This data allows marketers to better understand the effectiveness of their messaging and how it can be improved. 

Audience Metrics

An analytics platform can capture basic demographics to reveal audience insights. These include the percentage of males and females, the main age groups, and the primary locations of those who view and engage with your social media. Equally important, social media data makes it possible to track competitor strengths and weaknesses to identify points of differentiation and new opportunities. 

Days and Times

Learn what days of the week are most popular and what time of day or evening gets the most views. Understanding when your target audience is listening will help digital marketers schedule, manage and maximize the reach of messaging, content, deals, offers, and more. This data is particularly important for calculating return on investment when planning a spend on boosting social media advertisements.     

Geographical Location

Facebook and Twitter offer the capability to target search campaigns to run in specific geographical locations. Facebook’s lookalike audiences let you build up profiles of people who share the qualities of your key audiences, including location. And, when you overlap your social media metrics with Google Adwords and Google Analytics for website traffic, you get an overview that’s rich in geographical insights. By understanding how demographics vary in different cities, states, or countries, you can tailor your marketing strategy and ad placement accordingly.  

Discoverability

Videos are shared more often than other content, providing more engagement and wide accessibility to new audiences. Captions, subtitles and hashtags help make your videos more discoverable and maximize discoverability and maximize reach to consumers searching the web. Captions (and subtitles, depending on location) are particularly important —  an estimated 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound. With a service like Rev, you can cut the time and cost to create affordable and accurate captions for your videos. When you’re creating content on Instagram or TikTok, two platforms that don’t support closed captions, Rev’s burned-in (or open) captions can be hard-coded directly onto the video as a quick and easy solution.  

Audience Behavior

Your social media following will vary in quality. A big social media following does not always translate into real sales or converted customers. Track the engagement of your audience to see which content actually pulls in the most business for your brand. A deeper understanding of what your audience responds to will improve your marketing strategy and give your business a valuable competitive advantage.