1. Why is social media analytic important for your company or organization?
Social media has become a huge part of advertising and marketing for businesses of all sizes. Analyzing and measuring the results of a company's social media efforts are new to most businesses. Not to mention, many organization do not know how or where to start with the process of social media analytics.
Social media analytics, also known as social media listening or online listening, is the process of measuring, analyzing, and interpreting interactions and associations between people, topics and ideas in the cyber space. In essence, it usually starts with gathering data from social media websites and is followed by the mining of that data to improve business decisions and customer experience (Assareh, 2015). Organizations should be consistently conducting social media analytics among the organizations Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and Website. It is important for organization to measure its social media mediums to discover what works for the organization, track progression and manage time effectively. Why are these 3 keys important:
Know what works and what doesn’t – One of the most important functions of social media analytics is that they show you what you are doing right. Content is important and so is your engagement. Stats and data show you what content is generating what kind of engagement. It’s all there in the numbers and it helps you to verify and quantify your efforts (Rupp,2015).
Track your progress – When you use social media analytics, it also gives you the opportunity to track your progress more in-depth. In addition to knowing what works and what doesn’t, it gives you the opportunity to see how your engagement, impressions, and other stats are changing over time. This allows you to formulate an ROI of your efforts in different areas. How are your ads working for you? How does your content stack up for engagement? Are your conversions increasing(Rupp,2015)?
Manage your time more effectively – As business owners and operators, you have many important things to do. You need to run your business, not worry about micromanaging the social media. This is why using data from analytics, you can manage your time effectively working on the things that give you results and cutting out the things that are not worth the time. Social media marketing does not have to be hit-and-miss. You will waste a lot of valuable time just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Instead, go into it with a plan, track your results and tweak accordingly (Rupp,2015).
If done properly and accurately, social media analytics has the ability to enhance the brand, increase sales, cut marketing cost and to determine how to appeal to consumers demand. When companies indulge in social media analytics, companies can do the following:
- Optimize advertisements
- Find potential business
- Build relationships with new people
- examine social platform stats and interaction performance level
- Assess why other pages perform stronger than others
- Review competitors' pages to get additional ideas
- Drive more visibility to consumers
- See what content is shared most related to the company and more (Cherry, 2015).
2. Do you feel that it is important to track your competitor's social media activity? Why or why not?
Companies should track their competitor's social media activity for a number of reasons.
Tracking an organizations competitors social media activity aides the company on what type of content they should be producing based on popularity, authors/topics on blogs who get the most shared content. Organizations can use Social Crawlytics to identify competitors most shared content. It is a free tool that analyzes how popular or unpopular content is on a website (Cherry, 2015). Keeping a close eye on the competition helps to improve the content delivered to the target audience.
3. Explain how each of the above mentioned characteristics can be measured and utilized to make business decisions and ultimately build a strong social media presence for your company or organization.
According to "An In-Depth Guide on Calculating the ROI of a Social Media Campaign", The following three characteristics mentioned above can be determined for almost every network and can help identify area in need of improvement. By tracking Page Views Generated via Google Analytics companies can see an individual breakdown of regions, cities/states and other items to better identify site visitors. Once this information has been identified it can be used to determine which areas to target or even which pages of the company's website is most popular among visitors. Tools such as TweetLevel and Twitalyzer, calculates one's influence - number of followers, unique mentions, retweets and frequency of tweets and retweets. With this information companies are able to select brand ambassadors depending on the type of organization it is or estimate how far a desired message can travel. Lastly, google alerts, social mention and google analytics can be used to measure social media sentiment. In doing so, companies can identify what trends are in the market among their target audience to drive or develop a marketing campaign.
References:
Assareh, A. (2015). Social Media Analytics: The New Most Important Player in Business Intelligence. Retrieved from http://www.collaborative.com/blog/social-media-analytics-new-important-player-business-intelligence/
Cherry, I. (2013). 3 Analytic Tools to Improve Your Social Media Performance. Retrieved from
Rupp. C. (2015) Why Social Media Analytics Are Important To Your Business. Retrieved from http://blog.redsharkdigital.com/why-social-media-analytics-are-important-to-your-business
Brije,
ReplyDeleteI agree with you when you say that it is important to track your competitor's social media activity. Perhaps the most crucial reason is that it allows an organization to see its competitor's most shared, popular content. From here, the organization can determine what content/topics it should feature next. As you mention, this ultimately improves the content delivered to the target audience. Great post!
Tori,
DeleteNot only that but most importantly is that an organization can engage with their audience. Organizations can listen to the problems and ideas for brand improvement. From there, consumers will begin to feel valuable in result it helps build consumer loyalty.
I agree with your three reasons for why a company should measure their social media analytics: understanding what works within the organization and social media strategy, quantitatively tracking progress, and managing time efficiently.
ReplyDeleteWhile understanding what works and what does not will certainly save a company time in terms of not trying tactics that do not lead to increased ROI, there is a lot of time and money spent actually monitoring the different social networks. To start, the company would need to do some research to determine which metrics are needed and ultimately, which technologies are associated with collecting this information. Even using the different technologies that can help in collecting the data from the platforms take some time to get used to and may have costs associated with it. From there, an organization will probably need to hire social media analysts or get training for some pre-existing employees. Once the technology and employees are in place, the monitoring can begin and can take some time before results are seen. Although the uptake costs to analyzing social media may be great, it will ultimately lead to the efficiencies and insights that will bring greater success to a company.
Allison, I agree. Thank you for your feedback!
DeleteLove your description of “know what works and what doesn’t.” For many of my clients, evaluating the engagement analytics on Facebook is exactly what helps us understand what to keep, or to update, in terms of content. Obviously, if people are not interacting with what we post – it defeats the purpose. By tracking reach, engagement and patterns – we can help to customize our content to what our followers are looking for – which benefits the companies we serve.
ReplyDeleteYou also make a great point that with analytics – one is able to become more effective. Developing social media content is time consuming. It takes creativity, a lot of research and the need to stay up-to-date on trends. It is frustrating if one takes the time to develop a monthly schedule and then it doesn’t perform well. Analytics is what helps to better target and understand what will be successful – meaning less wasted time or effort.
Social media management if done correctly helps a great deal when it is measured for social media analytic purposes. With so many free tools for companies to track "what works & what doesn't" all companies should be participating.
DeleteThanks for your response!
Brije,
ReplyDeleteNice job! I agree with your point on tracking your own posts to know what works and what does not. Not knowing what your audience likes is the equivalent of running in the dark. It is essential to see what types of posts, topics, or features your target audience likes. Do you run any social media business pages and have you ever used such information for yourself?
Daniel,
ReplyDeleteI do run my bosses social media accounts & blog. However, we have never used such information to better position her brand Yet, we are working on rebranding and some of theses tactics we will employee.