Social media is crowded. It’s competitive!
You can gather all kinds of information from your social media pages.
There are close to 7.2 billion people on the planet. Nearly 2.1 billion are active on social media. 3.65 billion people are able to access the internet via mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, and of that number, over 3 billion are active internet users.
Social media has undoubtedly changed the way we use marketing to promote our businesses and ourselves. Often referred to as social listening, social media analytics are a way to monitor the effectiveness of your own social outreach and the sentiments of what people are saying about your brand. Do they LIKE your brand or do they LOVE your brand?
Social media gives businesses a unique opportunity to connect with customers and prospects. There are so many social networks that offer a variety of tools for providing customer service, explaining how your products work, and much more. It’s important to realize that simply having a social media presence is no guarantee of success. If you don’t analyze the effectiveness of your marketing you never know if it is increasing business or destroying your business.
Top 10 Reasons to Monitor Your Social Media
- To reach more customers
- Discover the people who are influencers (the movers and shakers)
- Spot the trends today and the opportunities for tomorrow
- Monitor the competition (monitor the chatter--what don’t they like?)
- Manage any crisis (you can react before the you-know-what hits the fan)
- Be in the know (what keywords are trending)
- Answer questions (know what questions are being asked and be prepared with the answers)
- Solve customer problems before they have shared it with the entire world on a blog
- Share all of the compliments (leverage the good)
- Respond to any complaints (respond quickly and address that gripe before it snowballs into a bigger story)
By monitoring your social media, you should be able to do the following, which can be critical to both the bottom line and larger goals:
- Analyze followers. Finding out, for example, who your followers are following helps you understand them better. This is an especially useful thing to do on Twitter. It also provides you with lists of more potential contacts. This can be helpful on other social networks, including Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn. You can use the information you learn about your followers to make your business more customer-friendly.
- Analyze the reach and results of your posts. It’s essential to be aware of the impact that all of your posts are having. Which posts are being shared or liked most frequently? Which posts are leading readers to your landing page or website? On Twitter, you want to know which posts are being favorited and retweeted. The same is true with photos on Instagram, Facebook posts, videos and other content.
- Identify influencers. Influencers don’t necessarily have to be famous. They can be people hidden in your list of contacts who create a lot of activity around your content. You want to know who is most active in sharing, liking or commenting on your posts. Identification of influencers can help you to engage them better.
- Compare platforms. There are more social media platforms every year. In addition to Facebook and Twitter, there’s LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat, to name just a few. You can’t have a strong presence on every single site. Social Media Analytics can help you identify which platforms work best for you. That way you can maximize your efforts on these sites and either drop the others or scale back your efforts with them.
- Save time. When you are careful about tracking your results and using the most efficient analytics tools, you save time. As you pay attention to what kind of content works best for you, it’s possible to stop wasting time on less effective content.
- Improve your ROI. Tracking customer activity can help you save money and make your business more profitable.
You can’t keep track of everything, so you have to decide what data matters most to you. Some things are obvious while others are easily overlooked. The type of data you need also depends on your goals.
So...How do you do this? Check back soon to learn more.
