Social media gives businesses an opportunity to connect with customers and prospects. More and more businesses across a large number of industries are now understanding the importance of social media and are using it as a platform to promote their key messages and products. Social media pages and profiles are very much an extension of a website; for many consumers, it is their first touchpoint with a business, its products and other useful information such as events and services. It is therefore important to understand, when you are pushing out your messages, what content is working for your campaign? This is where looking at analytics will help provide useful data to analyse.
Types of Analytical Data
There are many different tools you can use to analyse your data across your social channels. Each individual social media platform has its own analytics. You can sign up to platforms such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite and Talkwalker; they will pull the statistics from each platform into an easy dashboard for you to view and analyse your data. This data can be viewed over a chosen period of time, be it year on year or month on month or key trading periods.
What should I be measuring?
Time period – Often data is analysed by comparing month on month, especially where campaigns and creative changes, you will see a difference in the results. It is also important to be comparing your results year on year; your results will more likely be in-line with similar campaigns you ran in the same month for the previous year. For example, if you attend a conference in Feb 2019 and attend the same event in Feb 2020, you can compare the months to see if your posts have performed better against the same time period. You can analyse why they did, was the content better or more engaging, if you posted more content, or if you had more followers that engaged with your posts.
Metrics – The metrics will depend on your ideal end objective. Here are some examples of what you should be looking at based on an end objective:
- Engagement – Likes, Shares, Comments, Followers
- Brand Awareness – Impressions, Reach, Total Engagements, Followers
- Leads – Form submissions, Total Engagements
Competitors – There are many tools that can also allow you to benchmark against competitors within similar categories. This enables you to highlight certain areas which need addressing in order to raise your profile above your competitors. Analysing against competitors will also highlight any opportunities you are missing out on. Use some of the following tools to analyse where you benchmark against your competitors: Brand Watch, Phalnx and Keyhole.
Google Analytics
As well as using social media analytics, you should also look at using Google Analytics to see what traffic is driven to your website through social channels and the quality of it. Make sure that goals are set up in Google Analytics to help you measure what activity is driving you leads and sales.
A goal represents a completed activity, also known as a conversion, that contributes to the success of your online marketing. Examples of goals include making a purchase (for an ecommerce site), completing a game level (for a mobile gaming app), or submitting a contact information form (for a marketing or lead generation site).
What makes a good campaign?
Understanding what makes a campaign successful is all about tracking your results, analysing them and benchmarking your current strategy. Setting up tracking in Google Analytics along with your paid social campaigns and running regular reports on your activity will help with this.
For more information on digital marketing and how we can help you, please email tara@oraclepr.co.uk.