Analytics is extremely important for any company that wants to get the most out of its marketing efforts. Social media marketing is no exception. It is impossible to create an effective social media marketing strategy without utilizing big data analytics effectively.
You need to learn how to use big data and social analytics with your marketing strategy. This will help you get a much higher ROI from your campaigns.
Why is Data Analytics the Basis for a Solid Social Media Strategy?
Every company needs a social media marketing strategy. Traditional marketing still has its place, but social media is a fantastic tool that can help build brand awareness and loyalty, increase traffic to your website and online shopfront, and generate conversation around relevant topics.
Unfortunately, social media marketing is only effective if implemented properly. You can’t execute your social media strategy well unless you have a data-driven approach behind it.
How can you integrate analytics into your social media marketing strategy? You can start by finding the right social media marketer or marketing agency to help you build your strategy. Hiring an expert or expert services to come on board and assess your needs is the first step to a bright online presence that draws in potential customers. No business can afford to be without it.
The right expert will know how to utilize big data effectively to help you get the most value from your marketing strategy.
Use Social Analytics Data to Choose the Best Platforms
Social media marketing has a few key stages, the first of which is choosing which platforms to focus on. It is a very rare occurrence that a company needs to have a presence on every one of the most popular social media platforms.
The problem is that it is not immediately clear which platforms are best for a company to use. They may be able to make good guesses based on industry data or anecdotes from competitors.
This is one of the most important benefits of using marketing data and social analytics. You can see the performance of different marketing platforms and decide which are worth investing in by evaluating marketing data.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult to figure out which platforms to focus on even when you have all of your social analytics data at your fingertips. A social media agency will work with you to identify your customer base and, from there, which platforms they are most likely to use and engage with. The main platforms are Facebook, of course, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Different demographics use each of these platforms, and for different purposes. It is part of the social media services you engage to decipher who uses what and for what reason, and then how to represent your business appropriately. They can also use your website engagement data to figure out which platforms seem ideal.
Of course, every business must have a Facebook page. Facebook is the most long-standing of the social media platforms and is the go-to for most of the world. There are more than 2.7 billion active users on the platform, and at least some of them are looking for your business!
Thinking about your business’s products or services is also a good idea when it comes to deciding which social media platform to focus on. A visual product, like photography services or make-up, must have an Instagram account. Customers will be drawn in by aesthetic beauty. However, a restaurant or bar might find they have a surprising draw on Twitter, if their business culture is conducive to pithy or timely commentary.
Your social media marketing agency will be able to make suggestions based on experience, insider knowledge, your own company’s ethos and history and your marketing data. Your social analytics data will help them make some very informed insights to get the most bang for your buck.
Planning content and putting it out there with data analytics
As we have stated in the past, analytics is important for content marketing. This includes creating and syndicating content on social media networks.
Most highly successful social media marketing strategies incorporate a little spontaneity and a lot of planning. Your social media marketing manager or freelancer must put in the time and effort to schedule posts to go live at pre-determined times, according to when your customers are most likely to see them.
Marketing analytics is important for all of this. You can use your marketing analytics to figure out what content is most likely to gain traction and which times engagement will be best.
This means planning content in advance, including images and videos, if appropriate, and blog posts to link to. Content is different on each of the platforms and will do best if it is tailored for that particular social media platform’s own quirks. For example, a link to your website blog will do poorly on LinkedIn: the platform prefers to keep users on the site, instead of allowing them to click away. Your social media marketing agency has the skills and experience to make the best of each of your chosen platforms. They also know how to leverage marketing data to get the highest ROI from your content marketing efforts.
There is also a time and a place for off-the-cuff, or spontaneous posts. These could be in reference to world events or news articles, they could be a reply to a customer query, or there could be a wealth of other reasons. Having a swift in-house approval scheme for social media marketing is essential as time is of the essence when it comes to these spontaneous posts.
Analyzing and reporting
This is almost the most important part of social media marketing: the analytics. Having a social media marketing whizz on hand to interpret reports and analytics from each of these social media platforms is absolutely essential. This is the information that tells you how well each of your posts does, who it reaches and where, and helps to illustrate how you could do better in the future.
Apart from the analytics tools available on each of these platforms, there are also separate tools such as Buffer. These could be helpful in consolidating information into one place, and your social media marketing agency may have a preference on the one they use.
This is also the place to find out if your paid social posts are outperforming non-paid ones. Getting social influencers on board might be a great strategy for your brand, or it may end up not being as effective as your organic posts. Analytics and reporting are where you find out the truth.
Social Analytics is Very Important for Creating a Solid Marketing Strategy
Social media marketing is the creation of content and posting it across the most suitable social media platforms, but it is also so much more than that. It is scheduling and being able to approve posts quickly, and it is the analytical stage where you find out how well each post has done. Social analytics is very important here.
Hire a fantastic social media marketing agency and see what they can do for your strategy.