The detailed guide to understand your social analyzes

When it comes to digital marketing, every company that knows social networks knows the importance of creating, publishing and sharing relevant content.

But the question is, is it enough? Or should your brand go one step further?

The answer is yes. To develop a successful social mediamarketing strategy, you must constantly work to optimize your content.

You need to know how your social content is performing on a regular basis to ensure that it offers constant value to your target audience.

Now, you simply cannot improve the performance of your content unless you keep track of what works and what does not. That's where the metrics of social networks come in.

By reading the correct metrics, you not only get a better "social" view, but you are also less likely to make common mistakes of novices.

Choosing the right metrics to measure is what will ultimately help you to direct your social media strategy in the right direction.

And there are basically two steps to do it:

The first step is to know your objectives and goals of social networks upside down. The more clarity you have about what you want to achieve with social networks, the better you can concentrate on your metrics.

The second step is to use an adequate set of tools and have the right knowledge, otherwise you cannot prove the return on investment.

To apply the two basic steps above efficiently, you must thoroughly understand your social analysis, which basically involves:

Collection of data from your campaigns and various social network accounts.

Use of the collected data to track and improve the overall performance of your social media marketing.

Reviewing your social analyzes on a regular basis and reading them efficiently will allow you to see what is really generating results. Then you can detect future trends that could be beneficial for the campaign.

How to define exactly social analytics?

In simple words, the term "social analysis" refers to the act of collecting and then directly interpreting the data related to social networks so you can:

Get a better view of current market conditions and conduct an adequate market research

Understand where the target consumer is and get their unique knowledge

Learn more about the preferences of your ideal audience

Gather various types of comments that can be used to reach better and more refined business decisions

According to Gofer F. Khan, author of the book "Seven layers of social networks", social analytics is defined as...

"The art and science of extracting valuable and hidden information from vast amounts of semi-structured and unstructured social media data to enable informed and insightful decision making."

The importance of social analytics for companies

The use of social analytics is critical in today's times for brands that want to leave a mark. Not listening to social media conversations can be expensive because it can lead to costly mistakes. But due to the overwhelming nature of the large amount of data available that is exactly what is happening with many companies that take advantage of social networks.

By using the right tools not only to capture, but also to interpret conversations in the field of social networks, brands can give a real sense to their data. In fact, they can extract valuable information if they focus on the signals and avoid the noise that surrounds the world of social networks.

Social analytics, in general terms, social analytics not only helps companies (of any size or type) to collect the right kind of data. But they also make it easier for companies to measure the level of impact their marketing efforts have on their followers / followers. That is necessary at all times.

Social analysis: 6 key metrics companies can track

Companies can use social analytics in several ways (some of which we will discuss in this publication). But the way they are used differs from one company to another. Because what your brand wants to track and measure may not be the same as mine. Social network analytics

Let's quickly review the key metrics that you have access to when you use social analysis:

Commitment: informs you about the level of commitment received by your publication on social networks in terms of likes, actions, etc.

Mentions: It gives you information about the frequency with which your brand or a particular word or phrase has been mentioned on several social networking platforms.

Visual Mentions: allows you to know how many times your brand logo appears on the images published on a particular social network.

Feeling: sheds light on the type of feeling that users of social networks have towards their industry, brand and even their competitors.

Virility: basically shows how "viral" your publication is on social networks or how fast it is shared on a network.

Share of Voice: separates and tells you the percentage of mentions related to your brand (within your industry) compared to the percentage of mentions of your competitor.

Understanding the 4 types of social analysis

If you are active in social networks, you should know that there is a lot of valuable data that can help your company (or any company) to understand not only your consumers, but also your competitors.

However, to obtain an actual value of these data, it is necessary to separate the grain axis with the help of social analysis. By effectively using social analytics, you can take your unstructured but valuable data and turn it into real, actionable information that can help you make better and more calculated business decisions.

Taking into account the objectives of your business, you can use the following types of social analysis to see the best results.

1) Descriptive analysis [retrospective]

Descriptive analytics is reactive in nature, since it tends to focus on the "what" part: events in the past and in the present. And it happens to be the most common or basic form of social analysis.

By taking advantage of the descriptive analysis, your brand can add data from social networks in ways that can be digested, such as:

·         Reports

·         Visualizations

·         Groupings

By doing so, it helps you identify a central business problem or even discover an untapped opportunity. The comments that people leave in their Facebook or Instagram post, for example, are included in descriptive analysis. When you analyze comments from social networks, you can get closer to understanding the feelings of users.

2) Diagnostic analysis [Insight]

Diagnostic analyzes are also reactive in nature, as they focus on the "why" part and help you get to the core of a successful social media campaign or a failed one.

When compared to the descriptive analysis, which simply gives you an overview of the performance of your campaign, the diagnostic analysis offers you more. It can be filtered through the general data and give you key points about what made your previous campaigns work.

In other words, you get detailed information about why a certain campaign was done in a certain way; Information that you can then use to improve your future campaigns.

3) Predictive analysis [forecast]

Predictive analysis is proactive, where it deepens when analyzing large amounts of data from social networks accumulated over a period of time. The purpose here is to predict a future event that can benefit or even save a social media campaign.

So yes, as the name suggests, predictive analysis deals with the future or what is to come. It involves questioning both "what" and "why". If an event occurs, it tells you what it would be and why it will happen.

For example, let's say you are looking to generate more leads or sales (which is a future event), analyze the data of your social networks in search of any intention of users who can lead to this event. In this case, the words that I would be monitoring would be buying, buying, wanting, needing, etc.

The idea is to increase the chances of a favorable event occurring by reading its possibility much earlier. Therefore, if a user of social networks expresses interest in their product or service, predictive analysis provides information on whether he or she will press the purchase button or not, and what would influence their decision.

4) Prescriptive analytics [prospective]

Prescriptive analysis, which is proactive in nature, goes beyond predictive analysis. Because it not only informs you of a future event, but it also gives you clarity about how you should approach the scenario to obtain the best possible results. Social networks are made up of all types of users. Therefore, it is important that you deal with different types of groups in a way that is appropriate for them.

Regardless of the type of social network user group you are dealing with, no matter how diverse, the use of prescriptive analysis lets you know what you can do to have the greatest reach.

For example, if you have several social network user groups that have clearly shown interest in certain products / services you offer, you will have to fully optimize your approach to them. This allows your offer to meet the needs of all groups and see better results.

8 ways in which social analyzes help companies grow

As a company, without adequately understanding your data, getting ahead of your competitors in social networks is not only difficult but also risky. Why?

Because data is what makes your campaigns work. You cannot analyze your audience and make sense of your results unless you have access to the data. And the data are only useful when they are fully understood with the help of social analytics.

When you work to measure the overall success of your social media content, you can get much more from your marketing efforts, regardless of the social network in which you are located.

Here are eight practical and solid ways that social analysis can help you take your business growth to the next level.

# 1: Help you better serve your audience

To achieve success with marketing on social networks, it is important to know what your audience wants to be able to serve you in the best possible way.

There are many ways to understand your audience. But have you considered using social analysis to do it? By analyzing your social data, you will know in which direction to direct your marketing efforts without making big mistakes.

For example, there is a lot of debate about what time is best to share content from social networks. Different experts in social networks have different answers. However, when you take advantage of social analytics and analyze your existing content publications, you will know exactly what times have worked best for you in the past. That is when you will have a personalized response.

Similarly, you can analyze your "social data" to understand the behavior of your audience and see how you can improve your experience by giving them what they want. Remember, the better you understand your target audience and their requirements, the better you can serve them.

# 2: They tell you in which social networks you should focus for better results

Let's face it, each social network is unique, with a unique audience. Therefore, it is an illusion to think that you can make all social networks work for you.

Some social networks, such as Facebook, have a large number of users, compared to smaller (but popular) social networks such as LinkedIn or P interest. However, depending on your social media goals, you may find more success in a smaller network, because that is where your audience hangs.

So, how do you know which social network will give you the best of the best results? That's right: by using social analysis to discover which network is driving the most participation, traffic (and perhaps even sales) for your business

Once you know which social network to focus on, you can assign your time / budget without losing your resources in something that clearly does not work.

# 3: Help you share more relevant content

One of the side effects of tracking activity in your social network is that you will get a better understanding of what content works for your audience. By analyzing your social analysis, it will be more difficult for you to find and share content based on results.

For example, finding success in Twitter marketing involves sharing content that resonates with your audience. With the help of social analysis, you will know what content works best. If your followers respond strongly by sharing their image-based tweets, then you should concentrate on adding relevant images to all your tweets.

# 4: They help you to know that you are a better competition

Regardless of the niche in which you are operating, you are bound to have competitors that actively take advantage of social networks. Each of the strategies they use and the type of content they create will lead to unique data that they can analyze.

Competition in social networks with these data, you can refine your own strategy and avoid any mistakes that you have made. The final result would be a greater return on investment in the long term.

# 5: They allow you to formulate a better social media publishing strategy

No brand has a perfect social media strategy. But you can certainly have a better one than your competitors by taking advantage of the right social metrics.

The strategy of publishing social networks initially, probably your strategy will not give you outstanding results. But as you analyze your social analyzes, you'll know what mistakes to avoid when creating and publishing content. Over time, you can optimize your strategy and continue to improve your results.

# 6: They help you identify micro-influencers

Now, when we say influencers, we are certainly not referring to the influential big shot macro. We refer to the influential micro or niche that are not so famous, but are perfect for your social networking goals.

These micro-influencers may be following you and already sharing / participating with your social media content. By studying your social analyzes, you can discover who is actively commenting on your posts and sharing them. Once you identify these influencers and know what common characteristics they share, you can directly involve them and also create more content that appeals to them.

# 7: make it easy to save time

According to Round Peg's annual Internet Marketing Study for Small Businesses, a huge 44% of business owners spend less than 30 minutes per day on social media marketing.

When doing social media marketing, saving time is important. And that's exactly what happens as you focus on tracking your results and using various tools that help you get better results, faster.

Also, when you understand what type of content leads to the most engagement and clicks, you will spend more time in the right direction.

# 8: Help improve your ROI

Investing in the right social analysis tools and using them does not cost much, both in terms of time and money. However, as you continue to use the right tools for a long period of time, you will save much more in other areas where you may have invested blindly. Maximize the ROI of social networks In addition to that, you have a better chance of making your company earn more profits as you track potential customers / sales that it generates through social networks. All of which leads to a much higher return on investment.

4 simple tips to make the most of your social analysis

Monitoring and measuring the performance of your social networks is what ultimately leads to optimal results. And thanks to social analytics, doing this is no longer considered spatial science. But still, you must be smart with your approach, or else you will end up spending a lot of time with few results to show.

Here is how you can get the most out of your social analysis by focusing on the things that matter and investing your time wisely.

Tip # 1: Establish a proper baseline

If you really want to make the most of your social media data, it is important to establish the appropriate baselines before you begin to analyze them.

Go through the data in your social analysis within a few months to a year. Your goal here is not to go into the details. It is more about finding out the average performance of all the social network channels in which it is located. Social networks like Facebook already allow you to save all your analytical data in an easy-to-read spreadsheet format.

The idea is to write down all the averages of all the KPIs that are critical for your business. Whether it's scope, clicks or commitments, get it on paper so you're ready to move forward with confidence.

Tip # 2: Use Google Analytics to find the main channels

There is no doubt that Google Analytics is a gold mine when it comes to mining data. So, why not use it to improve your social media marketing?

If you check the "social references" section of Google Analytics, you will find a list of all the social channels that send traffic to your website. You will know at a glance which channel is the one that sends the most visitors. Google Analytics Another good thing about Google Analytics is that it allows you to deepen the examination of critical data, such as page views and time spent on the site. Which means that you can also know the quality of the traffic sent by each social channel.

When you know the main social channels that send you high conversion traffic, you can spend more time and effort.

Tip # 3: Fine-tune your goals

Creating practical marketing objectives in social networks is an integral part of a successful strategy. Without the right objectives, it will be difficult for you to win the social media game.

Your goals can be measured in...

• ·         Visitors
• ·         Commitment
• ·         Conversion rate
• ·         Follower growth

Basically, your social media goals should relate to your main business objectives. An effective way to do this is to focus on creating "INTELLIGENT" objectives, which are basically...

• ·         Specific
• ·         Measurable
• ·         Reachable
• ·         Relevant
• ·         Based on time

It is good to have flexible goals that change over time. However, it is important that you monitor your goals and update them every quarter. This will allow you to compare your progress with the achievements of the previous quarter.

Tip # 4: Find your best moment

Keep in mind that in the world of social networks, what works for someone may not work for you and vice versa. That is why it is important to experiment with the time of your publications on social networks.

Time is a factor that does not seem to have a great influence on the results, but eventually it does. Sometimes, publishing at the right time consistently can result in great growth in a short period of time. But once again, this requires a good level of testing.

There are many tools you can use to find when your followers are very active. Taking advantage of this time does not guarantee results, but it will increase your chances.

When Buffer analyzed 4.8 million tweets, they discovered that tweets posted from 2 AM to 3 AM attracted the most clicks. Their findings may differ and be surprising, but they will be worth it.

Social media time Make the most of your social analysis

Now is the time to take this guide and put it to good use. We know that we only provide you with a lot of information, so take a minute to understand it before you start implementing it.

If you got it, then that means you understand how long it can take to analyze your social analytics. We also know it. That's why we include it in our marketing services in social networks. When you work with us, we not only create and program your content, but we also monitor and optimize your social pages according to the social analyzes we follow with our software.

Does it sound like your cup of tea? Cool! We would love to help your business grow. Contact us here to speak with one of our experts and learn how to start with a solid social media plan today.