Social Media Analytics: An Overview

Social media is known to all. A media platform that allows you to share multimedia and connect with each other, social media has transformed the use of the internet drastically. Simply put, we have become social butterflies with the rise of social media and it is to this effect that social media has become an integral part of our lives. 

 

This can be easily explained with the help of an example. Imagine you are talking to a stranger on a flight and you want to connect with them. It is without a doubt that you will ask for their social media credentials instead of their phone number. This is because you and your ‘new friend’ will be able to see the lives you lead and your daily activities. 

 

The importance of social media has escalated in such a way in our lives that today we feel isolated if we are not a part of the trending social media platforms like Whatsapp, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. 

 

That said, the rise of social media today is inevitable as people have chosen to share their emotions, mood, and ideas on such platforms instead of sharing them with their close ones physically. 

 

What’s more, the arrival of an unprecedented pandemic due to the Covid-19 virus pushed the masses worldwide into their homes. This left them with no choice other than to stick to their mobile phones or laptops and connect with their friends on social media sites. 

 

For over a year, people were communicating and connecting, even surviving with the help of social media platforms. 

 

Moreover, the popularity of social media has grown so much so that millennials have made a career out of social media influencing wherein they portray their daily lives, create influential content, and garner popularity with the help of widespread reach of their social media accounts. 

 

This has turned out to be a full-time opportunity as digital marketing has bloomed as one of the many suitable options for companies and brands to advertise and promote their products. 

 

In a way, the emergence of social media and its increasing use has led to the creation of another parallel world where people are connected the way they used to be in earlier times. The only difference is that everything on social media is virtual. 

 

This has gradually led to companies collecting data on social media users to form the basis of their advertising campaigns and marketing strategies while segmenting their market. 

 

As opposed to the traditional times wherein offline advertising was the key to promoting a product, today companies are choosing to move online by creating a social market presence to establish a brand image. 

 

While this has emerged only to widen the company operations, many other fields like social media analytics have risen out of the blue to help companies and other players in the regulation of the internet to study the use of social media and benefit from it. Let us find out the true definition of social media analytics in the upcoming segment.

 

Also Read | Marketing Analytics Tools

 

What is Social Media Analytics?

 

When companies moved online to create a presence on social media for their respective brands, social media analytics emerged as an essential field to unfold insights in social media to improve the business potential and learn from the performance analytics. 

 

All in all, “social media analytics is the ability to gather and find meaning in data gathered from social channels to support business decisions.” 
 

Let us understand this with an example. Suppose you and your friends are present on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. As you communicate with each other, you simultaneously go through other content like sponsored ads or company posts that give you an insight into the company’s product range. 

 

As you like a product, you hit a like on that specific product. Furthermore, if you want to know more about a product, you will search on the internet about the same. 

 

This calls for a concept of analyzing social media trends and a need of social media analytics to help businesses introspect as to what is performing for them and what is not. 

 

However, it is important to understand that social media analytics is more than just likes, comments, and views. It goes much beyond that. Social media analytics also takes into account the reach of a particular account or a post in order to understand the type of audience and the age group that the account is able to reach. 

 

This helps in reflecting on the performance of a particular social media account and optimizing its performance to yield better results in the future. 

 

Suppose, a jewelry brand aims to reach a huge amount of followers on Instagram. For this, the brand will have to create a social media account, post engaging content on their account, and reach out to as many target audiences as possible. This is where the role of social media marketing experts and analysts comes into play. 

 

As social media experts, these professionals are responsible for driving the engagement of a social media account in the right direction and bringing more actors into play such as social media engagement metrics. The same goes for the field of digital marketing as well. 

 

Social Media Metrics

 

Here is a list of social media metrics to study social media analytics you need to track to optimize your performance:

 

1. Impressions - When it comes to SMA, the most important metric to look for is impression. Impressions refer to the number of times a particular content is shown to users across social media platforms. It is a significant metric as a single user can lead to 1000s of impressions. 

 

2. Audience Growth Rate - The next metric is the audience growth rate which measures the speed at which your followers grow. The audience growth rate essentially indicates the kind of performance your account is giving to its followers which certainly leads to more or fewer followers. 

 

This is one of the most important metrics to track as it also demarcates the engagement of your account. 

 

3. Reach - Reach, as commonly discussed and known, refers to the number of users who are viewing your content. 

 

The reach of a particular social media account is very important as it indicates how often your account is reaching out to the audiences, whether they are a part of the target audience or not. 

 

4. Click-Through Rate - Imagine a user viewing your content and wanting to find more about it. The moment the user clicks on a website or a link, it converts into a click-through. 

 

The click-through rate seo, another SMA metric, defines the percentage of times users click on the links or your website to know more about your product/brand. 

 

This rate is calculated by dividing the number of clicks on your link by the number of impressions.
 

5. Bounce Rate - Yet another SMA metric that all social media marketers must take care of is the bounce rate. The bounce rate refers to the proportion of users who view your page and exit without clicking on any other icons or pages. 

 

A high bounce rate is a direct indicator of the percentage of users who choose to not engage in your page as they lose interest. 

 

Also Read | Internet Marketing Strategies

 

 

Benefits of Social Media Analytics

 

The importance of social media analytics is immense in the millennial era. As social media platforms are becoming more and more accessible to the masses worldwide, the benefits of social media analytics are worth discussing. 

 

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Benefits of Social Media Analytics

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1. Positive Digital Footprint

 

One of the biggest benefits of social media analytics is the positive digital footprint that it induces among brands to boost their social media presence across worldwide users. 

 

As brands employ numerous social media strategies, SMA tools only help them to create a positive digital footprint in order to establish brand recognition and attract more users on a day-to-day basis. 

 

With social media analytics, brands can successfully strategize their metrics and look forward to more competitive performance in the future ahead. 

 

2. Performance Optimization

 

Another benefit of SMA is that it allows you to uncover your weak areas and work on them. In addition, it potentially enables you to optimize your social media performance with the latest trends and user interests so that you are at the top of your game. 

 

That said, many social media analytics tools let you spot your strengths and weaknesses while creating future content. This involves studying SMA metrics carefully and measuring the individual performances of stories, personal contact, stories, or even reels in the case of Instagram. 

 

3. Target Marketing Goals

 

The third benefit of social media analytics is that it lets you hit the right target by optimizing your performance. 

 

As soon as it lets you study your weaknesses and strengths, SMA makes it easy for you to develop new strategies and tweak them to your own benefit so that you succeed in gaining traction across your social media account. 

 

This calls for first laying out your target marketing goals, identifying their interests, and strategizing your account to gain their trust. This is how businesses can easily analyze their social media performance and gain a lot from it. 

 

This is how social media analytics widely benefit social media businesses to widen their reach, increase their audience growth rate, and reduce the bounce rate of their account. 

 

More than anything, they let you inside the detailed performance with respect to your own social media account. This is a very big benefit for any social media account looking to expand and broaden its reach worldwide. 

 

Even though there are many benefits of SMA, these 3 are majorly applicable for all social media accounts irrespective of their niche or target audiences. 

 

Also Read | How Hashtags Work on Social Media Platforms

 

Future of Social Media 

 

The future of social media and henceforth, that of social media analytics is about to rise and expand in the coming years. 

 

As more and more people are becoming a part of such platforms, user data is becoming the key for businesses to unlock their goals and benefit from the social media users and their precious ‘likes, comments, and shares’. 

 

While social media analytics will continue to percolate deep down the world of social media to procure essential performance metrics, it will simultaneously create a more supervised virtual world that is full of surveillance and business tactics.