One of social media’s greatest advantages for marketers is the ability to gather data in real-time. Social media data can help you gauge the initial success of a campaign within just a couple of hours of your launch. Over time, it provides more detailed insights about your business and your industry, so you can make the most of the time and resources you invest in social marketing.
Social media data mining also gives you key insights into your audience. You can learn what kind of content they like, when they want to see it, and where they spend their time online.
What's on Social Media data
Social media data is any type of data that can be gathered through social media. In general, the term refers to social media metrics and demographics collected through analytics tools on social platforms.
Social media data can also refer to data collected from content people post publicly on social media. This type of social media data for marketing can be collected through social listening tools.
Importance of Data
Like any business strategy, social media marketing is most effective when your goals and plans are based on real data.
Social media data analytics provide information that helps you understand what’s working. Even more important, you’ll see what’s not working, so you can make the right business decisions and refine your strategy as you move forward.
Social media data collection can help you customize your social media marketing strategy for each social network. Even more specifically, you can customize your strategy by location or demographics.
You can also use social media to conduct A/B testing. This helps you refine your marketing message element by element so you can increase your ROI.
Finally, social media data helps you prove the value of your social media efforts. With a proper data collection in place, you can tie social media to real business results like sales, subscriptions, and brand awareness.
Which social media data you want to track will depend on your business goals.
If you want to use social media to build brand awareness, you might be most interested in tracking engagement. If your goal is to create sales, you’ll likely want to track conversions.
Here is some of the most important raw data you can collect through social media:
The first step to developing an effective social media data analysis plan is to establish SMART goals. Next is to decide which data points you will track to measure progress towards your goals.
Here’s a rundown of how your goals, your social media data, and analytics all come together to form your social media strategy. Most social platforms have built-in analytics. These provide basic data about your account performance and audience demographics.
But to get the most out of your social media data, it’s important to get a unified view. Here’s how to make that happen.
A social media analytics tool like Hootsuite Analytics gives you a full view of your social media data across platforms. This provides important context for your data, as you can see how your audience responds on different channels and refine your platform-specific strategy.
For larger social media marketing teams with more in-depth data analysis needs, Hootsuite Impact directly tracks social media data to business goals and provides helpful competitive benchmarks.
Record your findings
Social media data collection efforts can be overwhelming if you don’t have a system for recording all the information.
We’ve created a free social media data analysis template to track your data in an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheet. It allows you to record your social media data for multiple platforms and compare the results to your target goals.
Share the results in a social media report
To use your social media data for marketing planning and analysis, you need to compile the data into an easy-to-digest format that key stakeholders can understand.
Analytics programs like Hootsuite Analytics will create custom reports for you. Prefer to create your social media report manually? We’ve got a free social report template you can use to create a professional presentation of your social media data.
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