There is no doubt social media marketing now plays a pivotal role in the overall success of any business. Understandably, social media analytics tools have also become a key source of strategic marketing data.

Considering the sheer amount of consumer data posted on social media daily, social listening tools have also become an integral component in competitive research, audience analysis, and product research.

At the core of social media analytics is the gathering and analyzing of audience data and marketing upon which business decisions will be based. It is also one of the best ways to access insights that can optimize both the product strategy and marketing efforts.

Social Media Analytics in a Nutshell

Just like eCommerce chatbots, the importance of social media analytics cannot be overstated. However, despite the peerless benefits of social media analytics, it is still heavily underutilized. Unfortunately, without measuring and analyzing your social media marketing’s performance, you won’t be able to improve your results.

For your social media marketing efforts to succeed, you will need a data-driven roadmap so you will know what to do and where to go. In essence, it’s what every social media analytics solution is designed to do. Ideally, a good analytics tool should be easy-to-use and intuitive, making marketing activities scalable and sustainable.

Apart from daily monitoring, tracking, and analyzing of data trends and metrics, the right analytics solution will also provide an overview of your social media performance. This is important so you can see where strategic opportunities exist, where you can nullify threats, and what adjustments you need to make.

The Importance of Social Media Analytics

Below are some of the most critical and universal use-cases of social media analytics solutions. These use cases also highlight the importance of social media analytics for brands. It’s safe to assume a good analytics platform will be designed and built with these use cases in mind.

Measure marketing impact and return on investment (ROI)

One great thing about analytics is that it provides instant feedback about how your brand is performing across various social media channels. From there, you can quickly assess if your current strategy is effective or not. Since you will have access to the performance KPIs, you will have better control of your social media campaigns.

If the current strategy is not working, the data analysis provided by your analytics can point you in the right direction. This means you can make the necessary tweaks before the performance of your campaign dips. You can also quickly fix any issues before your campaign goes south fast.

Make better business decisions

Robust social media analytics can provide insights and data to help marketing teams identify what’s working and what’s not in terms of their social media strategy. What’s even more impressive is social analytics can also provide the needed insights that can help you make strategic decisions outside of marketing.

This is especially true as the amount of data posted on social media has increased steadily, and the ability to extract relevant data has also improved. When it comes to your social media strategy, basing it on data is the best way to go. This will help you identify strategies that will have the most impact.

Compare your performance against your competitors

It’s futile to celebrate a seemingly good performance if you have no idea how it fares against the average industry performance. Context is vital. That said, the only way you can measure real success would be to compare your performance against that of your competitors.

Benchmarking can also provide essential insights and allow you to see how you stack up against your rivals. It can also help you see how your current campaign looks against the current industry average.

Track the efficiency of the marketing team

One key to running a robust marketing crew would be to streamline workflows. To achieve said objective, you need to know your marketing team’s velocity and efficiency so you can lead them in the right direction. As a general rule of thumb, it would be ideal to keep working at high velocity and ensure there are no bottlenecks.

This is especially true in specific areas such as online customer service and community management, where a great tool can help you measure vital community management KPIs such as audience sentiment and response time.

Micromanagement is now considered a thing of the past. With a good analytics solution, you can easily see granular and top-line data, trends that need to be looked into, and an overview of the current marketing operations.

Final Thoughts

Undeniably, social media analytics is crucial to your social media marketing efforts. Your marketing efforts are futile if you don’t have the slightest idea whether you are doing well or not. The message is simple: measure, track, and analyze. More importantly, make sure you invest in a social media analytics tool that can do all three and then some.

Sarah Munn