Businesses have specific goals for taking advantage of social media information. Some use it in-house for their own needs, and others offer their analyses as a service.
It’s important to first understand how social media analytics can help gauge the power and reach of our customer’s social media platform. In a nutshell, these metrics help measure the performance of social media channels. Using this information, you can analyze the content to optimize a strategy to drive your business forward. One example of a social media analytics metric is click-through rate, which is the percentage of people that click your link from a social media post to your actual website.
IBM is one business that has taken to social media metrics very rapidly, and they have blogs and tools used to leverage social media. As one of their business models, they offer business-to-business solutions. Currently IBM offers “social merchandising” for retail and consumer products using Twitter data, but they are working to provide market insights for these areas, as well as for media and entertainment.
Leveraging the Numbers to Increase Your Market Presence
Here’s where it gets a bit confusing. There’s a difference between simple engagement via your social media platform and analytics. It’s pretty easy to look at how many inquiries you receive and how you responded to each one. That would be engagement. When you look at analytics, you can also determine where these inquiries came from, how quickly they responded to your social media post, their habits when engaging through social media. It’s a broad snapshot that you can use to help tailor your message to the needs of your audience.
Social media analytics helps companies address these experiences and use them to:
- Spot trends related to offerings and brands
- Understand conversations; what is being said and how it is being received
- Derive customer sentiment towards products and services
- Gauge response to social media and other communications
- Identify high-value features for a product or service
- Uncover what competitors are saying and its effectiveness.
Brandwatch
Key benefits: Track and analyze data from more than 95 million sources, including blogs, forums, and review sites, as well as social networks
Free or paid: Paid tool
Skill level: Beginner to intermediate
Best for: PR and communications teams, social media marketers who focus on engagement and brand monitoring
Brandwatch is a powerful tool with five easy-to-use social media analytics report templates:
- Summary: A high-level view of social conversations about your brand, competitors, or keywords.
- Trends: A report on the conversations and accounts influencing a specific topic or hashtag, including mentions per hour or minute.
- Reputation: A checkup on sentiment trends you might need to monitor or address.
- Influencers: A report to help you identify influencer marketing opportunities relevant to your brand and analyze their activity.
- Competitor comparison: Benchmarking social media data for conversation volume, sentiment, and share of voice.
Google Analytics
Key benefit: See how much traffic and leads flow to your website from your social media channels
Paid or free: Free tool
Skill level: All skill levels
Best for: all social media professionals should be familiar with Google Analytics, but especially those who work for a web-based business.
Channelview Insights
Key benefits: Analyze the YouTube performance of multiple channels
Free or paid: Paid tool (free for Hootsuite Enterprise users)
Skill level: all skill levels
Best for: YouTube marketers and creators, social media managers who run a YouTube channel alongside other social channels
The Channelview Insights App adds YouTube analytics to the Hootsuite dashboard.
With this integration, you can analyze your YouTube video and channel performance alongside all your other social media channels. You can also schedule automatic, regular reports.
Easily see the following metrics in one place:
- Views, engagement, subscription activity.
- Video traffic sources.
- Audience insights for demographics, geography, acquisition and more.