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Social media marketing campaigns are complex beasts. From the initial ideation process, through material creation, and all the way to pushing the campaign live, there are countless pitfalls to be wary of. It takes a village to get one off the ground and running smoothly; any expertise you have in-house is invaluable. Once you’ve got the social media campaign running, however, what’s next? It’s time to optimize. No campaign is going to be operating at peak efficiency from the get-go. It takes time to get the balance of messaging and engagement right for your industry. This is where a powerful tool comes into play – social media analytics.
What are Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics are the process of collecting and analyzing data from social media platforms to better understand the performance of your efforts. Analytics tools can use a range of sources to crunch through vast amounts of information to find insights for optimizing current and future brand marketing projects.
There is a wide range of potential data points to draw from, with some being unique to specific platforms. However, most will offer the following:
- Impressions – the number of people who had a post fully visible on their screen
- Reach – the estimated total reach of users from all sources
- Likes – the amount of positive engagement received on a post
- Comments – the number of unique comments posted
- Shares – the shares on your post
- Clicks – the clicks on an included hyperlink on your post
- Sales – the number of sales received from users who navigated from a social platform
Some sites will include additional metrics, such as YouTube offering watch time, subscriber counts, and reactions, and will offer data tracking within their respective platforms. Many also include API keys that allow you to query and request data to be sent to third-party sources for advanced analytics and data manipulation.
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Why Optimize Conversion Rates?
While there are many goals to shoot for when managing a social media campaign, the ultimate sign of success is a conversion. Conversions are important milestones in a user’s engagement with your brand that move them deeper into your ecosystem and bring them closer to a purchase. We optimize for conversion rate to ensure this happens more frequently and consistently, leading to more sales and marketing success.
Conversions include email sign-ups, whitepaper downloads, subscriptions, and purchases through your sites. This will depend on the goal of the campaign and conversions will differ greatly by the goal you are tracking and the industry.
How Can Social Media Analytics Help Optimize Conversion Rate?
Social media analytics help benefit your marketing campaigns and their bottom-line performance. An improved number of conversions per post is essential for a successful campaign. This will lead to high revenue and success for your brand.
Improved Understanding of Your Target Audience
A successful social media campaign needs to engage with an audience that wants the same things as your brand offers. It is not easy to be an effective influencer to your audience, less so when you are operating across multiple social platforms and through multiple forms of content.
Analytics helps you bridge the divide between your brand and your audience, leading to stronger content and a lasting relationship with your most valuable asset.
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Identify Campaign Performance To Improve Content
If you don’t have insights into the performance of your social media efforts, how can you hope to operate long term? Social media analytics give you critical visibility over campaign performance and is your window into optimizing future content output.
Robust artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning algorithms can parse huge swathes of data to gather insights. This will help you make better content for your audience consistently.
Simplifies Decision Making
It is much simpler and safer to make decisions that are backed by hard data than trying to without. The quicker you can make business-critical decisions, the more agile your social media team will be. This leads to better responses to changing trends and appetites across each social platform you work in.
How To Optimize Your Social Media Analytics for Higher Conversion Rates
It is time to start optimizing your social media campaigns. The tips we’ve included are designed to be relevant to influencers and businesses of all sizes. They are focused chiefly on boosting your conversion rates across platforms.
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Design Your Data Management Strategy to Suit Your Needs
The most effective social media campaigns are driven by a robust data management solution. When implemented correctly you’ll have an automated data collection platform that powers your entire analytics approach.
Designing a data warehouse that fits the requirements of your brand is inherently challenging, however, and requires expertise and infrastructure to achieve. We recommend following the TOGAF architecture framework as your basis to set your business up for success and scale the silos to meet the demands of your data collection efforts.
All your analysis and insights will be achieved through your data management platform, making this a critical step in optimizing your social media analytics approach.
Determine the Metrics That Are Important to You
There are countless metrics to track across your social media platforms. Though it is unlikely you’ll need each metric for every campaign you run. Instead of bloating your data sets with unnecessary fluff, focus on the key ingredients to your success and ensure a granular collection of those, first and foremost.
These are the metrics you’ll use as your basis for analysis. Think critically about what you hope to learn with each data point. Do this for each platform you plan to work with to get the best results and segment your data for each platform to avoid cross-contamination. The strategies that work for Instagram may not be the same as those that work for your Facebook audience.
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Use Automated Dashboards to Visualize Data
With the data collection in place, you need a way to interpret the vast amounts of data you’ll have at your disposal. Dashboards offer a quick and digestible way of monitoring your data over time, where changes and trends can be established to help inform your optimization efforts.
Much in the same vein as your metrics to track, you’ll want to identify the data you need at a glance before building the dashboards themselves and you’ll want your data silos in place to draw the data from. This approach closely follows trusted enterprise architecture maturity models, which have proven to improve operative effectiveness throughout a business.
Apply Insights to Your Campaigns
With the data in place and readily available, it is time to start applying those insights to your campaign. Explore the data to find where improvements can be made and put them into action.
Which types of content are getting the most engagement on each platform? Are there any anomalies in social media performance? How has your social media platform performance trended over time? What kind of audience has formed around your brand and what matters to them most? These are just a few of the questions you can ask while searching for insights.
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Leverage Personalization to Supercharge Your Output
Personalization has become a powerful asset in content marketing and even more so for social engagement. Users have come to expect highly personalized experiences when engaging with brands and you will require a robust customer data platform – learn what is a CDP here – to operate effectively.
Personalization is proven to boost conversion rates, grow brand loyalty, and foster consistent positive interactions with your audience. It’s the personal touch on a grand scale, all powered by automation.
The Next Steps
Social media analytics help drive in-depth insights and understanding of your audience, their values, and what makes them engage best with your brand. It’s not enough to use your intuition or rest on what seems to have worked in the past, you need to take an active role in reviewing and optimizing your social media strategy to get the best results.
Your conversion rate is the bottom line of success for your brand – without conversions, you’ll be stagnant. Use the power of your data to boost conversion rates and continue to grow your business long-term.
