Most modern-day brands and organisations have long realised that social media is an incredibly important part of their ongoing success. It creates a connection between a brand and their audience, and is an amazingly effective and efficient way to market online.
While social media is widely acknowledged as important, the intricacies of having a successful presence on social media feeds can be a slightly more complicated art. There are no real set of rules to live by when it comes to your brand’s presence.
So, how do you know whether your efforts are on the right track? The answer lies in social media analytics.
Data and analytics can guide your integration efforts. Smart use of analytics will allow you to track your progress, work out what is working and what isn’t, and may even save you time. Let’s have a look at how analytics could help your social media feeds.
Tracking Your Progress
Marketing is all about return on investment (ROI). You want to ensure that you’ve got value back for the money that you’ve laid down. For standard forms of marketing – print, radio, TV, billboard – this can be extremely difficult to measure, relying on estimates and a great deal of subjectivity. Even for many online advertising mediums such as banner ads or PPC, the information isn’t that much more insightful.
Using comprehensive analytics, you can not only gauge how many impressions you made (as you can with many forms of online advertising), but you can see exactly who those impressions were. You can use data to see how your impact is growing over time, proving beyond doubt exactly the ROI that your social media schedule is offering your brand.
Gauging What Works
Content is the bait that brands usually use to lure social media followers in. By producing a steady stream of content, you can expect a steady stream of followers coming in, right? Build it and they will come.
As a generic sentiment, that may be right. But if you use data and analytics to gauge exactly what content works and what content doesn’t, you’ll make your content strategy far more efficient and effective. Once you have a dataset to work with, you can start to check which social media channels work best for you at certain times of the day, which channels do best with certain types of content, and which provide the most amount of visits to your website. From these numbers you can develop a complete strategy that creates maximum impact for minimum effort.
Driving Efficiency
It can be tempting to treat your brand’s social media feeds like you treat your ceiling when you’re testing whether the spaghetti is cooked. You just throw stuff up until something sticks. The thought process behind ‘the more I post, the more likely something is to go viral’ is an understandable one, but this sort of brute force attack can be a very labour-intensive way to operate. Once again, social media data and analytics are here to help.
By analysing the most impactful posts, you can quickly determine what makes something worth sharing. You can also use the data to see which platforms need your immediate attention, and which don’t. For example, you might see Facebook and Twitter having a huge impact one month, but nothing coming from Instagram. You can then focus on evening up the balance, getting all of your social media feeds working at their optimal level.
Using social media analytics to guide the allocation of your time will ensure that you are working as efficiently as possible on your social media presence.
Knowledge is power. The more social media information and data you have access to, the more likely you are to see a boost on your social media feeds. Like all marketing efforts, social media is a numbers game. By gaining access to the numbers, you’ve got all the tools you need to succeed.
