Maximising Social Media Presence with Data Analytics

Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites are central to how brands, executives and individuals engage customers, build loyalty, and market their offerings. With users worldwide spending an average of one hour and 58 minutes on social networks each day, the opportunity to join the online conversation is huge.

But where do you start? Which channels should you be leveraging? How much should you be engaging? What should you be sharing? These are all important questions which need to be answered before getting started.

One of the key challenges in the social media world is having access to a broad range of options. For example, there are an increasing number of channels, all with very different audiences and usage levels available today. Whilst the difficulty is not getting started, it is instead about identifying the right channels, platforms and direction for sharing messages more broadly amongst external stakeholders.

So what’s the solution? Simple answer: data analytics.

The past year has reinforced the role of data as an essential and disruptive driver of business decision making. Social media is no exception to this. By analysing the data sources at our fingertips, brands, executives and individuals alike can understand if they’re meeting goals and engaging relevant communities. From boosting the performance of every post, segmenting data by demographics and geography, and targeting the most loyal advocates, data helps keep the buzz going.

Once the data has been identified, the next step is to decide what to analyse within the data sets. But, before you can start to really dig into the data it’s important to define the goals you’re looking to achieve. By identifying what goals you are trying to meet, you can decipher what questions are most relevant to ask of your data. Doing this from the beginning will help with focusing and targeting, so you know which new questions are relevant to ask or when it makes sense to change your goals.

Lastly, in order to truly maximise and grow social profiles, you need to pinpoint the relevant metrics. Just like data sources, there are tonnes of metrics available to answer these questions in the social media world.

Here are five ways in which metrics can be used to boost social media presence:

1. Benchmark – The first category of metrics is your basic benchmarks. Anything that helps you get a sense of the pulse on your social media presence falls into this category, such as likes, followers and mentions.

2. Audience – The second category includes any metric that helps you understand your audience. These could be impressions, reach, demographics or the location of your audience and when they’re tuning in.

3. Engagements – Once you’ve reached your audience, the third category looks at understanding how they’re connecting with you through engagements like classic likes, comments and shares.

4. Conversions – The fourth category is the ‘so-what’ factor. What’s the actual business impact of what you’re posting on social media? Conversions include any metric that helps you track that, which can be clicks or leads.

5. Opportunities – And finally, the fifth category is about the opportunities you’ve drawn from the metrics. The key here is to understand the broader conversation on the profile. Tracking these metrics can help with finding opportunities for growth and expansion. These include user-generated links, hashtags, and general brand monitoring.

source – http://bit.ly/2qcoyrm