The practice of gathering data and other valuable information from social media sites and blogs and using the research to make a business decision is known as social media analytics. Supporting customer service and marketing by mining customer sentiment is the most commonly used form of social media analytics.
The first step you will take concerning social media analytics is determining the business goals you are trying to benefit with the data you are going to collect and analyze. Reducing the costs involved with customer service, collecting feedback on services and products, improving the opinion of the general public on a certain division within the business or a product, and increasing revenues are all typical objectives when using social media analytics.
Once you have spent some time identifying the business goals, indicators of performance significantly evaluating the data should be determined. A good example is by counting the number of followers for a Twitter account and how many times a company’s name has been mentioned or the number of retweets in order to measure customer engagement. There are several types and forms of tools available for studying and analyzing data that is unstructured found in both Facebook posts and tweets. In addition to analyzing text, several enterprise-level social media tools are able to harvest and then store the data.
Here are a few things you may want to keep in mind when it comes to social media analytics:
- When it comes to creating a presence online through social media, the size of your audience is very important. This isn’t something you only focus on once, it’s a matter that will need continuous effort and attention. Unless you are using paid advertising or other tools, your audience will usually grow slowly over time. If you have a process you are using to convert the audience, investing financially in the growth of your audience can be productive.
- Your audience growth should be addressed on a weekly basis and compared to the audience of your top competitors. You may also want to spend some time studying the individuals who are unfollowing you and see if there is a common factor that needs to be addressed.
- It is important to take the time to both reach out and engage with your audience. Reaching out without engaging can still be of benefit to your business. This is because there are going to be several people who take the time to read your content, some may even look forward to seeing it. However, this doesn’t exactly mean they are going to take the time to respond to it. This doesn’t exactly mean that they will not buy from you or do not have an interest. Don’t make too much out of the matter. It usually simply means that they pay attention to social media, but do not spend the time interacting with it.
- Taking the time to engage is still an important factor because some members of your audience will take the time to make their presence known. If you are putting out content on a regular basis and not receiving any kind of reaction, you either are creating the wrong content, or you have the wrong audience. There will typically be three different kinds of people who make up your audience. Lurkers are the people who spend time reading the content that you share, but never give any kind of reaction. The lurking type will normally make up the majority of your audience. Some members are known as influencers. These members of your audience are able to access an even larger audience and have the ability to influence that audience towards your businesses products or services. The people in your audience who spend time interacting and being a part of every post are known as engagers. After enough time and interaction, you should be able to start identifying these followers by name and be familiar with some of their characteristics and what they do and don’t like.
- These are also the members of your audience that you can rely on the most for both negative and positive feedback and what you can do to catch the attention of more viewers. When talking with these engaging members of your audience, never allow the conversation to lead in a negative direction. Even if you do not agree with what is being said, at least be appreciative of the fact that members of your audience are taking the time to be involved.
- The content you share on social media should have the main intent of creating traffic for your business’s website. You will want to spend time on a regular basis measuring any impact that is created in your site traffic do to social media content. You will want to monitor how many leads and sales have been completed due to the result of a social media post.
Social media analytics can and should be used for much more than has been discussed here. One of the most important habits to create is whatever your purpose for gathering and studying data, make sure that it is done on a regular basis. Contact us today to see what social media marketing can do for your business We’d love to discuss with you how we can assist you with your company’s social media efforts without you having to take the focus off of growing your brand.