What is Social Media Analytics?
Social media analytics is the name of a subset of data analytics that deals exclusively with social media. In 2021, there are approximately 4.5 billion people using social media, over half of the world’s population. By studying the actions, clicks, and responses of those on social media, it’s possible for businesses and other organizations with an online presence to use this data to gauge interest, spot trends, and offer better products to their consumers.
How is Data Analytics used in Social Media?
Many social media channels are currently being optimized by organizations, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, and Facebook, among others. The social media analytics process involves monitoring, gathering, and analyzing data from these social networks. By studying the strategies your organization or business is currently using on these social media outlets, it’s possible to tell which efforts are paying off and which are not. This provides businesses with a way to better optimize their time, resources, and money and can lead to more informed business decisions.
The benefits for individuals and organizations who use social media analytics are numerous. Reviewing social media elements like Amazon product reviews, tweets, and Facebook posts not only improves the way existing products are managed but also informs how future products will be developed. By incorporating behavioral analysis tools and techniques across social media channels, companies can provide a better customer experience and improve customers’ brand loyalty. In addition, those with training can apply sentiment analysis and natural language processing to keep track of brand expectations, promote brand health, and incorporate new attributes of a given brand. By performing competitive analysis, a business can have a snapshot of competition, as well as how consumers are reacting to their marketing efforts.
Types of Social Media Analytics Measurements
The following is a brief list of some of the most-used measures by Social Media Analysts to collect data from social media platforms:
- Engagement measures the number of times an individual has engaged with a post. It is one of the most helpful social media metrics.
- Monitoring the followers a page has provides information about who is seeing posts.
- Reviewing post clicks is a way of ascertaining how often someone clicked on an entire post.
- Page likes offer a means of studying how many people like a given page and see posts.
- Impressions can be collected, pertaining to the number of people who viewed a post.
- When page views are reviewed, it’s possible to see how many times a profile page was seen.
- One of the most important forms of social media analytics involves studying post reach, which is the number of people who had any posts from a given page on their own screens.
- Actions on page provide an overview of the number of times users clicked specifically on the contact information on a website, or its call-to-action button.
- Page previews shed insights into how often people have hovered over a link or ad, allowing customers to learn more about those businesses who advertise in their news feed.
Those who perform social media analytics use a combination of most, if not all of these tools, on various social media platforms to successfully promote their brand, gain followers, and ultimately generate revenue.
8 Best Tools for Social Media Analytics
Many tools are currently available to help users manage their performance on social media, as well as to evaluate their campaigns so that they can devise more pointed ways to connect with customers. The following are eight social media analytics tools that are among the most popular among Data Analysts:
- ShortStack helps users create and run contests on social media. It typically requires a lot of work to launch a successful social media contest. ShortStack can streamline this process. It aids users with a variety of contest-related tasks, like designing hashtag giveaways, analyzing engagement from giveaways, choosing a winner, and creating standalone mini websites and landing pages.
- HubSpot provides a variety of analytics tools that allow users to link revenue growth to performance on social media. It provides a means to compare how various social channels are performing, as well as the success of a given campaign. Its analytic tools include a robust selection of visuals and graphs designed to depict numbers based on specific platform features, such as impressions and audience.
- Snaplytics is used exclusively for Instagram Stories and Snapchat analytics. It reviews metrics like open and completion rate so that brands can evaluate the peaks and drops in story engagement and views.
- BuzzSumo helps users analyze the social engagement of any content. It can track the number of shares a Twitter post had, as well as the performance of various types of content that are competing for pertinent industry keywords, which provides a powerful means of evaluating how a given marketing campaign is performing compared to the competition.
- Sprout Social allows users to examine how they are performing on one network, as well as to compare multiple network results. It can tally clicks of Twitter links, track Facebook page impressions, and assess LinkedIn engagement. Sprout Social also offers an Advanced Listening tool that provides pertinent information about campaign performance, consumer sentiment, and audience demographics. Once the data is collected, it can be easily organized and shared with high-quality reports.
- Google Analytics has a variety of applications for social media analytics, such as measuring social return on investment, as well as tracking social media campaigns. It also provides users with a means for creating reports geared specifically toward social media tracking.
- Curalate is a powerful tool for brands that are interested in the social selling market. This hybrid analytics and storefront tool is geared toward those hoping to get the most out of Instagram sales. Curalate provides businesses with a means to gauge which of the products receive the most clicks and sales. It also keeps track of product mentions and tags, which helps monitor user-generated content campaigns.
- Keyhole is a tool designed to monitor hashtags. This real-time performance analytics tool keeps track of Instagram and Twitter hashtags specific to a campaign or industry. This enables brands to promote their products at high-traffic times and to receive insights into which tags are the most popular.
Get Started Learning Data Analytics with Hands-On Classes
Are you interested in learning more about data analytics? If so, Noble Desktop’s data analytics classes are a great starting point. Courses are currently available in topics such as Excel, Python, and data analytics, among others skills necessary for analyzing data. For students who are particularly interested in the intersection between data analytics and social media, Noble’s Social Media Marketing Certificate provides 30 hours of hands-on instruction about cutting-edge marketing strategies.
Those who are committed to learning in an intensive educational environment may also consider enrolling in a data analytics or data science bootcamp. These rigorous courses are taught by industry experts and provide timely instruction on how to handle large sets of data. Over 90 bootcamp options are available for beginners, intermediate, and advanced students looking to master skills and topics like data analytics, data visualization, data science, and Python, among others. Noble’s Google Analytics Bootcamp provides users with twelve hours of instruction specifically on how to use Google Analytics to make better business decisions.
For those searching for a data analytics class nearby, Noble’s data analytics Classes Near Me tool provides an easy way to locate and browse the 400 or so data analytics classes currently offered in the in-person and live online formats. Course lengths vary from three hours to 36 weeks and cost $119-$27,500.