Social media data analytics is the foundation of an advanced, effective digital marketing campaign. It removes the need for marketing based on instinct alone. With social media analytics, businesses can see exactly how customers perceive and interact with their brand, allowing them to make strategic changes that move the needle for the business.
In order to gain insights from social data, first, you'll need to establish a reliable method of social media data collection.
What is social data?
Social data is information that’s collected from social media platforms. It shows how users view, share, and engage with your content. On Facebook, a social media giant with a return on equity forecast to be high in 3 years (38.82%), data includes the number of likes, increases in followers, or the number of shares. On Twitter, results include the number of impressions or retweets. On Instagram, hashtag usage and engagement rates are included in the raw data.
Once this information is mined, you can begin marking trends, measuring engagement, and drawing insights that will help you accurately and efficiently keep up with these five marketing goals:
Optimize your social content
One of your targets is to achieve the highest level of engagement possible, and that means optimizing your social content according to your audience’s preferences. When you collect social media data, you’re able to see which platform is the most popular among your customer base. You can measure what type of social posts perform best and what time of day your customers are hanging out online. Using these findings, you can create and publish posts that have the maximum reach.
Inform your content strategy
By identifying what your customers are sharing and posting about, you can design a content strategy that will answer their questions and remedy their concerns. You can also see whether they respond better to a professional or friendly tone. Your content strategy will be topical and applicable to the customer’s needs, enhancing effectiveness. 80 percent of consumers report that “authenticity of content” is the top influencing factor in their decision to follow a brand – find out if your strategy is working.
Update your SEO strategy
You can’t form a successful SEO strategy without incorporating social media data. Instead of targeting general industry keywords, you can start focusing on keywords that your customers are actually searching for across their social networks. Social networks are used along with Google and Bing as search engines – Facebook handled one billion search queries a day in 2012 and Twitter fielded 19 billion searches a month in 2010. Pleasing the customer should be a priority over pleasing search engines and you need social media data to ensure you’re hitting the mark.
Monitor brand image
Your brand’s online image is important – U.S. brands lose $41 billion every year because of subpar customer service, and there are approximately 2.1 million negative social media posts about brands published every day. Social media data tells you who is talking about your brand and whether or not what they’re saying is positive. By collecting and analyzing user-generated content, you can thank happy customers and address customer complaints.
Identify influential customers
Brand influencers, customers who share about your brand to a large following on social media, are invaluable assets to your marketing plan. Brand influencer integration can directly result in a sales uptick because 92 percent of customers trust an individual’s recommendation (even if that individual is a stranger) versus a brand’s own message. Social media data collection helps brands identify these individuals and grow their community of influencers.
Tools to get started
You can’t afford to leave out any social networks when you’re getting started with social media data collection, but you should especially pay attention to Instagram. Why? It has a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21 percent. That’s 58 times higher than Facebook and 120 times higher than Twitter.
Instagram is now the second most popular social network after Facebook, with 60 percent of users logging in on a daily basis. 30 percent of all Internet users have an Instagram account and 90 percent of all Instagram users are younger than 35.
Social proof marketing, when customers are influenced based on the actions of others, is proven to be most effective through the use of pictures. Your strategy should be centrally focused on how you can increase your brand’s reach on Instagram, and it starts with data collection.
This free Instagram analytics tool by Pixlee will help you comprehensively collect the information you need. You can track hashtags, identify the posts your followers like the most, and connect with brand influencers. See where engagement spikes so that you can focus on producing more content that speaks to your followers’ interests and avoid wasting resources on content that doesn’t ignite.
Ultimately, utilizing social media data collection tools can increase website traffic, personalize the experience for each customer, further your brand’s reach, increase follower growth, and produce sales – start with Pixlee’s free Instagram analytics tool today and see how the power of social data can boost your brand.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on pixlee.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
