Vladimir Covic

5 Social Media Analytics Tips for Data-Savvy Marketers With so much data to look at, modern marketers today need a good way to gather, analyze and understand everything that goes on around them, from user behaviour to what the competition is doing to how their own efforts are paying off. And nowhere is this more evident than when it comes to the online world and social media. As soon as companies realized that they could use Facebook, Twitter or other channels to get closer to their customers, social media marketing has become one of the top priorities for them. Naturally, some companies just do it better than others, but not because they get lucky or anything, but because they’ve learned early on how to use social media analytics to their best ability. This helps them understand what works well so that they can double the effort there, or what doesn’t work, so they can stop doing it. Ask any company and almost every one of them will tell you how social media is important to them (90%). Ask them if they actually analyze their social media activities and the number drops to 68%. By the time you ask about measuring their social media activities, more than half has already left the room or is sitting silently and only 41% raises their hands, according to a 2016 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Social Media Examiner. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all formula when using social media marketing, but for a data-savvy marketer and her company, the following five tips could prove to be very useful: 1. Set a Clear Goal for Your Social Media Once established, social media goals will represent a clear path towards which you want to go. In fact, if you want to establish brand awareness, offer customer support, generate leads or build engagement with your audience, you won’t find a better channel for this than social media, according to the State of Social 2016 report by Buffer. So what social media goals should you be looking at? For most businesses, brand awareness comes as reason number one to use social media. This can be measured by taking a look at how many shares, retweets, likes or mentions your brand has on different social media channels. Another way is to look at how many followers your brand has. This represents the number of people you can potentially reach. Other than brand awareness, your social media goals could also include enhancing public relations, lead generation or building brand loyalty. These goals are, of course, not mutually exclusive, but can work together towards helping your business grow. Should your goals be fixed for all time? Absolutely not. If you see that you’ve started reaching them a bit too easily, you know it’s time to up the ante on your goals. How Philips Lighting Reached 5 Million Users in Just 3 Days In October 2014, Philips Lighting managed to reach nearly 5 million users and increase the number of their social media followers by 1.5 thousand within just three days during The Festival of Kinetic Art of Light and they did it chiefly by first setting up clear goals before them. The company set the following goals: Drive online traffic to its digital channels Increase engagement on its social media profiles Increase social media reach, and Improve its brand image How it was executed? Philips Lighting had the help from Socialyse, an interactive media agency from Havas Media Group. Together, Philips, Socialyse and Clipatize (B2B content marketing agency also involved in the campaign) encouraged visitors to use a special hashtag #cityoflight in their content. Socialyse and Clipatize then collected all mentions of the Festival using the special hashtag via social media and provided a live coverage from the Social Newsroom to which they previously invited Lodz city authorities and social media influencers to boost the campaign. They then published content in RT on different social media platforms. What were the results? At the end of the campaign, 3,206 mentions of #cityoflight were collected. 13% of them included Philips Lighting, or 429. The brand also gained 1,430 new social media fans and the campaign is estimated to have reached nearly 5 million people. Takeaway? By using the right hashtag at the right time and leveraging the power of influencers, Philips Lighting, Socialyse and Clipatize managed to accomplish in just three days what would certainly take them a lot longer if they did it outside the festival for instance. Analyze Your Competition and what it is doing on Social Media There is no company without a competitor. Of course, not all competition is equal and you need to compare your company with someone who is similar to you in size and business goals. Also, you might want to pit your company against another with a similar approach to social media as you. So if you use Pinterest as one of your main channels of communication with your audience, logic dictates that you analyze competition that also uses Pinterest. Many take this social analytics step too lightly and only do it in broad strokes, but the truth is, analyzing your competition requires a great deal of actionable data. It’s best if you do a side-by-side comparison between your business and the competition. For this, you can use Fanpage Karma or similar tool, which will analyze your competition across major social media channels. 2. How is Your Social Media Performing? Are your social media marketing efforts actually delivering what you intended them to? If not, you are wasting time and money. There are two types of data a marketer should keep an eye when evaluating their social media performance: Total Engagement Total engagement is simply put, a sum of all interactions on one of your posts, including: clicks, comments, likes, RTs, +1’s, etc. You can calculate this yourself by putting them all in an Excel spreadsheet, or you can use a tool such as LikeAlyzer to do it for you. Of course, you can, which probably makes more sense, measure total engagement per channel. For example, you would then sum likes and comments for Facebook separately from RTs and likes on Twitter or comments and +1s on G+. Track ROI from Social Media While Total Engagement is a bit like patting yourself on the back, tracking your ROI from social media gives you a much clearer picture of the success or failure of your SMM efforts. The key here is to identify how much money you are actually investing in social media and then attach a specific amount to your already established social media goals. In other words, what you need to do is choose and track a specific goal (for example number of people who filled out the contact form) and then assign a monetary value to that goal (such as average sale or LTV). From here you can easily calculate your investment and see how much an ad on social media is worth to you. 3. What are Your Best Lead Sources Focusing on only one social media platform, like Facebook to bring traffic to your website and generate leads is not a sound marketing strategy. You need to use more platforms for this. Of course, not all of them will give you the same results, so you will have to compare your lead sources. You can track leads from social media by using Google Analytics. For this, you would have to first create a measurable URL using an URL Builder. This will allow you to generate custom campaign parameters for your social media ads. Make sure to have a unique URL for all landing pages across any social media network that you use. To know which network gives you the most leads and conversions, after setting your goals in your Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources and then to Campaigns. 4. Engage with Influencers that are Sharing Your Content Hopefully, your content hasn’t gone unnoticed on social media and it is getting shared by your followers. Even better if it gets shared with someone with a lot of followers. An influencer. Congratulations. You can see who shared your content for yourself in one of three ways: Using Twitter advanced search for the URL Using an alert tool such as Mention Taking a look at the referral report in your Google Analytics Dashboard Then, once you’ve found what influencers are sharing your content, it’s just a matter of engaging with them by returning the favor and mentioning them, liking or sharing their content, or you can go a step further and connect with them offline by inviting them to your next business event and introduce your business more to them. Remember, influencers are only interested in the best of the best content. But once they find it, they’ll be passionate about your brand and will want to share that with their followers, so take advantage of this and engage with influencers. Trello Boosts Twitter Following by 71% Using Influencer Power Trello, popular project management software, successfully increased its Twitter following by 71% in one month and had 33% more @mentions by reaching out to Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” to tweet about them using the hashtag #ReadySetGoal. According to Trello Community Manager Brian Cervino: “Learning how influencers are using Trello and which influencers are using it helped guide our campaign.” He said the #ReadySetGoal did more than just increase Trello’s brand awareness. It also brought in new users of the project management software. Conclusion Social media is not only an important, but in today’s business environment, it is a crucial step in driving your company to success. However, without knowing exactly what you are doing and what your efforts are bringing you, you will never know if they are successful or not. Remember, there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to social media strategy. Each industry and business is unique and a story for itself and a smart use of social media analytics can tell you this story better than anything else, so be sure to use it to your advantage.