Back in the day, small businesses had few opportunities to promote themselves. This has changed with the emergence of digital marketing and especially social media. A business must develop a solid social media marketing strategy to take advantage of social media. Marketing decisions can’t be based on gut feeling alone, and they should be based on consumer data acquired through social media analytics. A business can do their own social media analysis since advertising platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and others offer it within their Business Suite features. While all this data and information is useful, it might still be confusing how to use it to make strategic decisions.
This article discusses how social media analytics should be integrated into your businesses’ marketing strategy.
Why your business marketing strategies should leverage social media analytics
The most important functions of social media analytics tools are to:
- Get feedback from customers on your products and services
- Track how social media campaigns are performing
- Brand reputation management
- Lead generation
- Measuring the ROI on social media marketing
- Reporting on performance to all members of the organisation, stakeholders, and clients
Social media analytics gives your business access to data that allows you to understand your audience better, and in return, help serve them better. However, you need to cut through online noise in pursuit of actionable market, competitive and consumer intelligence, coupled with consistent monitoring to track conversational fluctuations over time is the mark of effective social media analytics.
How to use social media analytics in your marketing strategies?
Engagement
Your engagement rate is the percentage of people engaged with your posts compared to the number of people you reached. Your engagement rate increases each time someone likes, shares, comments, retweets or reposts your post. Having a low number means that, even if you have an adequate number of fans or followers, they are no longer interested in your content, and your page will soon stop growing. As a result, your sales and conversions are adversely affected. Essentially, if you want to make money from social media or get people to visit your website, you need to keep them interested.
Reach
The number of people who see your post while scrolling through social networks is called your “reach”, and it relates to the number of people engaged with that post. When you receive a like or comment on your post, it will be seen by a certain percentage of people who have a connection to the person who took this action. To increase this number, you need to have good quality and exciting content on your page or account.
Other factors that affect your reach include the time of day you decide to publish your content. You should continuously monitor your numbers and post when it’s most appropriate – this will largely depend on your target demographic. Just like engagement, visual content can significantly boost your reach.
Traffic
Some of the abovementioned metrics are sometimes called “vanity metrics” because they allegedly don’t contribute to your sales and your income but are there just to boost your ego. This is not entirely true, although it’s debatable.
If you sell products online, the amount of traffic you generate from your social media accounts directly impacts your revenue. You can track the origin of your website visits, as well as how many people come from which social networks end up buying your products or at least subscribe to your newsletter.
To increase your conversions, make sure you use accurate, relevant and well-written copy and images associated with the link. Furthermore, you must provide value to anyone visiting your website – one of the best ways to do that is to offer quality content and promise that they’ll get more if they return. And, of course, keep your promises.
The Bottom Line
The only way to find out which social networks work best for your business is to experiment and measure how much engagement, traffic and sales you receive. Additionally, you can use the data to prioritise the amount of time you spend managing each social network. Time should be spent on the top-performing networks rather than on those that produce minor results.
