More business owners are using social media as a platform to generate awareness and promote their products.
This is important to campaign success, but so is knowing what metrics to focus on and learn from in the social sphere.
Social media data, if used the right way, can help your business succeed. This concept isn’t siloed to social media marketing; insight from the stats you garner on your social channels can apply to other aspects of your business, as well.
In this article, you’ll learn the importance of social media data and how to use it to your advantage. Let’s dive in.
Why Should You Care About Social Media Analytics?
74% of consumers rely on social media to inform their purchasing decisions. That makes social media a powerful tool to have when growing a business.
But it’s not just the very nature of social media that makes it such a potent tool. Social media keeps a record of everything a user does on its platform. So, you can get social data metrics like response rate, response time, click-through rate, reach, impressions, and engagement.
Expert marketers use these metrics to make informed decisions about different aspects of their business.
For instance, they can look at the likes and shares of a piece of social media content to determine whether or not to create those types of content again in the future. Or they can look at the number of clicks on a particular post with a CTA to determine if that piece of content should actually be used to drive that action in the first place.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram come with built-in tools to measure social content performance. With these tools, you can gather social media data that gives you analysis into questions like these:
- What happened?
- Why did it happen?
- What are the chances of it happening again?
- What actions should I take?
Answers to these questions give you insight into your social media performance and where to bolster your strategy.
Social media data, however, is not just there to help you measure the success of your social media strategy. Data provided by social media listening tools, for instance, can also be used to improve the ways you interact with your customers after a purchase and gives you other insights you can use to craft strategies to ensure your business’ growth.
Ways Social Media Data Can Help
Now that you know social media data shouldn’t be ignored, let’s look at how you can leverage this for your business. Here are five things social media data can help you do as a business:
1. Craft Content That Engages Your Audience
We’ve mentioned this several times before: social media data can help you craft content that performs. We all know how powerful content is. Whether it’s a new product announcement or a piece of user-generated content (UGC), analytics help you see what type of content and what medium resonates best with your audience.
So, how do you craft content that works on social media, in particular? Let’s take Instagram, for example. For a static post, you’ll likely want to focus on engagement rates. For a story with a swipe-up link, you’ll want to look at how many link clicks your story generated. Experiment with different types of messaging and content types to see what caters best to your followers.
UGC, content created organically by your customer community, is usually a very successful choice to share on your brand’s social profiles. This is because it gives your followers a glimpse of what your product looks like in the wild via the experiences of real people, and it shows that your company appreciates its fans. 87% of brands use UGC for authentic (and free) content. Pllus, it’s 35% more memorable and 50% more trusted than traditional branded content on social media.
Delta shares UGC collected and curated through Pixlee’s CRM platform, providing inspiration and community focus to its followers on Instagram.
A benefit of using a UGC platform to collect, curate, permission, and publish your customers’ content is that you also have access to the most important metrics to continually improve your content strategy. For example, Pixlee shows brands how UGC impacts their website repeat visit rate and conversion rate, while also calling out the top pieces of content in terms of engagement.
Social media data can help you craft an effective social media content strategy. So, you’re not just shooting in the dark when you’re posting content. You know your post will eventually generate results and increase your brand’s visibility through social media call to actions.
2. Create More Accurate Buyer Personas
Major social media platforms all have analytical tools that provide you with more than enough data on your followers’ demographics, buyer interests, and habits.
You should leverage this data to create an accurate buyer persona when targeting customer segments. Aim to understand your customer’s needs, habits, and sentiments to incorporate them in your social media strategies effectively. Instagram’s analytics center provides valuable data like age range and gender that can help you tailor your social strategy to your most engaged followers and potential customers.
When you create a detailed buyer persona, you’ll be in a better position to offer services and products that cater to their needs. You can easily craft messages that can get them to act. Those messages don’t necessarily have to be posted on social media. They can be your messages to email subscribers or even your messages on your website.
3. Design a Powerful Influencer Marketing Campaign
76% of marketers consider influencer engagement effective in garnering customer loyalty, and it’s the fastest-growing channel for customer acquisition. Social media analytics play an important role in discovering the best influencer for your brand’s campaign, and determining what’s working in your partnership and what’s not.
During the influencer discovery process, you’ll want to look at various influencers’ engagement rates, follower counts, and other social metrics related to your campaign. You can ask the influencer for this data, or you can use an Influencer Marketing platform like Pixlee’s to instantly compare stats from different influencers in one place.
Once you’re ready to run a live campaign with an influencer on social media, it’s beneficial to monitor social media analytics around the campaign before, during, and after launch. Compare data on your brand’s social channels to your influencer’s — what does their target audience look like compared to yours? Engagement rate? Then track these metrics throughout your campaign. Pixlee also allows you to measure these metrics in-platform; this makes running multiple influencer campaigns at once easier to manage.
4. Improve Customer Service
You can use social media data to improve the way you interact with your customers. The data you find, after all, can be used to create a more personalized and meaningful experience for them.
Use social sentiment data to determine potential holes in your customer service strategy. Even surveying customers through an Instagram poll on what type of sale they’d engage with or their favorite way to give product feedback can go a long way in providing the right channels for customers to give customer service feedback.
Reply courteously and individually to customer concerns like Article does on social media.
Practice social listening by monitoring mentions of your brand, specific hashtags, or industry words with a hashtag analytics tracker. This approach lets you know what people are saying about your brand or more general industry, so you can stay knowledgeable about community sentiment and respond to posts both negative and positive to show off your customer service. Pixlee also offers social monitoring tools like this in-platform.
Make sure you respond promptly because that shows your brand is professional. It also increases brand loyalty as your customers know that you care about what they think.
5. Stay Updated on Broader Customer-Engagement Trends
Social media data can help you determine the latest trends so you can ride on those trends to get better exposure. Social listening and hashtag tracking is also applicable here; use social media data to see what topics your audience are most interested in at the moment and figure out how your brand can use its channels to tie in your products, services, or just get your name out there.
HYLETE took advantage of a viral Instagram challenge through its hashtag #FlexibilityChallenge, featuring a customer in HYLETE gear participating in the social media contest.
Monitoring hashtags, influencers in your niche, and your customers’ activity is crucial to success in social media marketing. To this end, it may be beneficial to create your brand’s own unique hashtag and encourage customers to post brand-related content using the tag. This is a great way to collect more UGC and spread brand awareness. It also gives you an easy way to track social traffic related to your brand.
Social media provides a wealth of real-time data; siloing that data just to social will disadvantage your other programs. Social media can give you data you can use to make better business decisions by understanding what your audience responds best to.
In other words, if you use social media data the right way, you can help your business grow exponentially. Start gathering that data and crafting business strategies based on that. You’ll definitely see great results.