Social Media Analytics for Better Business Decisions

Every minute thousands of users log onto various Social Medial platforms to create plethora of data. Businesses a decade ago would not have considered his kind of content being of any major use for their sales or brand building. But now there is a potential customer in every social media user and analysing the customer data they produce will help the businesses filer them.

If I were to explain social media analysis in simple terms, we can call it ‘social listening’ where you listen to what people are talking about your brand, your product, your industry and your location. A common term social media experts usually use in this context is ‘social mentions’ which is nothing but the conversations and interactions that occur on social media regarding a particular keyword.

Businesses spend good amount money and efforts to produce profound content of different types. Each of these is aimed to build a brand or enhance sales directly and indirectly in a specific manner. But if they are left unmonitored or untracked, a business or an Social Media Marketing expert will never be able to learn from them. If your social media strategy begins with good content, it should always conclude with comprehensive analysis.

Depending on your brand, the audience you are catering to and the social media channels you are most active on, analysis will vary. Although some leading social channels provide free analysis of your activities, it may not be sufficient. Every business which desires to get good ROI from their SMM campaigns should invest in top quality SMA tools and if need be, have a data scientist to analyse the numbers.

What comes out of this effort will be a compact and comprehensive insight that is of great value to you. Incorporating this data into the system can become the base for many of your planning, introspection and decision making regarding social media marketing.

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Manifold benefits of Social media Analysis:

1. When you put top class SMA tools to work, the data that you receive will be fresh. For every interaction you have or every campaign you run, you get quality feedback as and when it happens. His can be very helpful in bringing about enhancements as the campaign progresses.

2. It is humanly very tiring to keep track of every notification that you receive and monitor every social mention that of some interest to you. But when the tools are employed, you get a detailed picture. The numbers help you to visualise how you as a brand are performing on the social landscape.

3. Social media is all about your fans, followers and audience. The customer data they produce is organic, original and of high value to you. Following their conversations closely will help you to understand what people are saying about your product or offer or campaign, their likes and dislikes and the suggestions they have for you.

4. Once you invest heavily in a campaign, you need factual evidence to bring about any changes or enhancements. The SMA tools provide you that data which can back your decisions. When the analysis is taken further, you can even prove that the changes you brought about have resulted in better brand performance.

5. Monitoring social mentions and social listening will always keep you one step ahead of your conversation. When there are several others making a mark in a particular industry, you need to create a unique image for yourself if you want to have a huge fan base.

6. What better way to know how successful a particular campaign has been than to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Tracking a set of mentions will figuratively show you how people are praising you, appreciating you, recommending you to their circles and creating new fan base for you. When these praise spikes appear, be quick and generous in expressing your gratitude.

7. If these one thing about social media that marketers need to watch out for, it is negative remarks. With real time analysis, respond to these negative sparks immediately and get on the solution path. Find out why that particular fan or group is upset and rectifying the concern, turn them into happy fans.

8. Not all businesses but ecommerce and service oriented businesses need to interact more and more with their fans if they are to convert them into sales. Social media analysis will help you figure out the right time and days when people are most active and give you a definite window where you can be available for them.

9. One of the greatest advantages of using SMA tools is that you can design future plans that are highly target oriented. Everything from your content, visual media and activities can be tweaked according to the insight you receive which is again derived from the people for whom you are creating the campaigns. SO when you provide what your audience are appreciating with a personal touch of your brand, the success rate will be very high.

10. With the comprehensive analytics you are giving your employees some core data to work on. When human creative thinking is applied to machine learning, they can come up with spectacular ideas. Your data analysts will have their jobs enhanced as they become brain behind understanding the numbers and implementing them into strategy to derive noteworthy success.