How to measure success
Communication across Social Media platforms produces an enormous amount of data that can describe content, location, users, purchases, events and emotions, along with larger scale areas such as reactions to news and politics, integration with sporting events or information and knowledge exchange.
Each of these instances provides an opportunity to understand both general patterns of large-scale communication along with nuanced individual and niche communication spaces.
What are Social Media analytics?
Social Media analytics is an ongoing process of collecting data [information] about users on Social Media platforms. Based on the data generated by user behaviour, businesses can make informed decisions about their strategies to acquire new customers, as well as retain customers and build customer loyalty.
It's the task of marketers to base their Social Media marketing strategies on listening to, and analysing, user behaviour and social conversations. It is therefore important for marketers to understand what types of users they are engaging with and why they are interacting with their brands on Social Media. The timing and location of their interactions, as well as what devices [desktop computer, tablet or mobile phone] they choose to interact from all tell marketers a lot about their audience.
Social Media platforms help paint a picture of the trends and patterns of user behaviour with brands and Social Media marketing campaigns. This helps the marketer to make informed decisions on where to invest time, money and talent to promote their products on Social Media.
What can be measured on Social Media?
Social Media analytics turn a vast amount of Social Media data into actionable insights for informed business decision-making. It is important to understand what can be measured on Social Media and turned into analytics that are useful to marketers.
Let’s introduce you to what can be measured via user behaviour on social networks.
Social mentionsSocial mentions are the social conversations that are taking place on social networks about your brand, company, industry, product(s) and/or service(s). Measuring the volume of social mentions matters to analyse trends and patterns when social conversations peaked and dropped. For example, you may want to count how often a particular word, phrase or sentence is mentioned on social networks over a given time period.
SentimentWhilst it is incredibly important to know the size of our audiences and social mentions, businesses must also consider the emotion behind a social mention. Are the mentions positive or negative? This helps to measure the tone of the conversation.
Reach & ExposureExposure measures the number of connections your followers have. For example, if your tweet is retweeted [shared] by one your Twitter followers who has 10,000 followers, the exposure for this tweet would potentially include 10,000 more impressions. An impression is the number of times your content, for example, your advert, is displayed on Social Media users’ newsfeeds.
EngagementEngagement refers to interactions users have with content posted by marketers. It measures whether users are sharing, liking or commenting on content. Tracking engagement is particularly important in order to assess what types of content are gaining traction and resonating with your audience, and what types of audience are engaging. Such insights help marketers tweak their strategies, and can help inform their future activities around product launches for example.
Alternative measurements may include virality, visual mentions and share of voice. For example, visual mentions can track the number of times brand logos appear in images on Social Media. Virality measures how quickly the post is shared and spreads among Social Media users. For the share of voice, companies can track the proportion of discussion online about your brand, a trend or topics compared to similar topics.