How can social media analytics inform your strategic planning?

Social media analytics guide strategic planning: Audience Insight: Grasp demographics and behavior. Content Evaluation: Measure engagement, reach, and conversions. Brand Health: Monitor sentiment and mentions for reputation insights. Competitor Analysis: Benchmark metrics to identify gaps/strengths. Trends: Leverage industry topics for timely marketing. Campaign ROI: Assess success of promotions. Influencers: Identify and partner with key industry figures. Feedback Loop: Use user feedback for improvements. Crisis Detection: Address negative sentiment swiftly. Budgeting: Prioritize high-performing platforms. Harness this data for agile, effective strategies.

Social media analytics can inform your strategic planning by 1. Helping you understand your target audience 2. Identifying trends 3. Measuring the performance of your campaigns and 4. Identifying areas for improvement In short, social media analytics can help you make better decisions about how to allocate your resources and achieve your business goals.

Social media analytics serves the purpose of quantifying actions, allowing you to measure your audience's engagement with your content in detail to drive data driven insights.

Let me explain this as a college student Imagine you post a photo of your lunch on Instagram. Later, you check to see how many of your friends liked it, who commented on it, and maybe even how many new followers you gained after posting it. That's the basic idea behind social media analytics, but for businesses. Social Media Analytics is like a report card for companies on social media. It tells them: How many people saw their posts. How many liked, commented, shared, or clicked on their posts. Who their audience is What kind of posts work best In short, social media analytics helps businesses understand what they're doing right or wrong on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, and guides them on how to do better.

Social media analytics can inform strategic planning by providing insights into audience demographics, content performance, competitor benchmarks, campaign effectiveness, emerging trends, customer sentiment, platform optimization, goal tracking, budget allocation, and crisis management. These data-driven insights help optimize social media strategies to align with business goals and target audience preferences.

To set the right social media analytics for your social media account, the first step is to set your objectives for your social media accounts. Also, all your strategies which include content strategy, creative strategy, target audience strategy, and if there is any other, all need to be aligned with your objective, and only you can be able to define the social media analytics. Brands come on social media with these objectives - - To build brand awareness/ visibility - To get more audience eyes - To generate leads/ potential collaborations/prospects - Promote their brand, business, product, or service. - Increase sales and revenue - Cater global audience Your brand objective is always according to your future goals.

Many social media platforms, like Facebook, X, have built-in analytics tools. These are often called "Insights". If you want more detailed information or have multiple social media accounts, you might consider using dedicated tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social. If you’re using built-in tools, you often just need a business account (for example, an Instagram Business account instead of a personal one). Decide what's most important for you to track. Do you care more about likes, shares, followers, or something else? Common metrics include Engagement (likes, comments, shares) Reach (how many people see your posts), and Conversions (how many people do something because of your post, like visiting your website).

Start small !! First try internal plateform anlytics. Learn then use analtics tools and concrete observations. You ll get excited by what you see

Setting up social media analytics involves defining goals, choosing the right platforms, selecting analytics tools, using UTM ( Urchin Tracking Module) parameters to track links, integrating social accounts with analytics tools, establishing baseline metrics, tracking KPIs, creating reports, analyzing data, making adjustments, regularly reviewing and improving, budget allocation, competitor analysis, staying informed.

The data obtained through social media analytics may seem overwhelming. However, the recommended approach is to define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that align with your business objectives and then identify the metrics related to these KPIs to monitor. This strategy allows for more meaningful and strategic planning.

Social media analytics provide invaluable insights for making strategic decisions for the company's social media growth! For example, by analyzing the reach and engagement of a set of posts in accordance with the date/time published, creatives, and assets, you can identify the best-performing posts, repurpose them, or create similar posts to achieve even higher KPIs.

Social media analytics can be used for strategic planning by setting goals, tracking metrics, analyzing data, identifying insights, adjusting strategy, iterating, and reporting findings. This process involves setting specific goals, tracking metrics, analyzing trends, refining content, and sharing findings with the team. Document Controllers may document these steps for reference.

Always have a 360 approach, SM should be part of your communication Mix. For big brands it should also resonate with efforts in on ground, in store, PR/Press, paid Ad's and so on as a whole and not just stand alone, for smaller players missing the above due to obvious constrains it serves a different purpose and should have a unique approach behind it. In short don't chase likes and higher engagements blindly.

You need to first categorise your metric into vanity and value metric. Vanity metric would be your likes, engagements, comments, shares. Value would be the saves, messages, and leads. This will help you prioritise your efforts which again would depend on your goals. Say, for instance, you want to be an influencer, then you should check when are your followers active, what is the time that you get maximum responses, what times are best to get max engagement for lives, what kind of content got maximum response, which types of posts do well, and so on and so forth. If you are looking at leads or responses, the aforementioned metric would have to be monitored more on the weekly basis because that is the minimum time frame you’d need.

Set Goals: Define clear objectives. Choose Tools: Select suitable analytics platforms. Monitor KPIs: Track key metrics. Understand Audience: Analyze demographics and behaviors. Competitor Insights: Keep an eye on rivals. Optimize Content: Identify top-performing posts. Timing & Frequency: Determine optimal posting times. Paid Ad Refinement: Adjust ad campaigns. Conversion Tracking: Track conversions. A/B Testing: Experiment with content. Engagement & Support: Interact with followers. Influencer Impact: Evaluate partnerships. Adapt & Improve: Make data-driven changes. Competitor Comparison: Benchmark against rivals. Data-Driven Decisions: Use insights for strategy. Skill Development: Stay updated with training.

One of the most-important aspects of social media optimization and paid social advertising is a direct result of the accelerated pace of social. Things happen fast... a broken audience feed, a missing image, an irrelevant landing... can result a rapid failure to serve, reduced IMPs, sagging CTR, a lack of engagement. Setup your notifications with care, ensure they target the right person or role with sufficient permissions to remedy common issues. And, remember, only masochists (or beverage advertisers) set campaigns to go live on a Friday!

Drive the engagement differently. Speak different to the right focused/detailed target You will also see your competitor perfoance. An open book.

Using social media analytics for strategic planning involves understanding key metrics from your online activity. Start by analyzing Engagement, Reach, and Conversions to gauge your content's effectiveness. Trends can show which post types resonate most. Set clear goals, like increasing followers or boosting engagement rates. Regularly review these metrics to track progress. If a strategy isn't working, pivot. For instance, if videos outshine photos, produce more videos. Remember, as social media evolves, so should your strategy.

Keeping up with social media analytics trends and best practices is crucial for businesses and individuals looking to maximize their online presence and engagement. Here are some strategies to stay updated on social media analytics: - Follow Industry Blogs and Websites - Subscribe to Newsletters - Attend Webinars and Online Seminars - Join Social Media and Marketing Groups - Follow Industry Experts on Social Media - Participate in Online Courses and Training - Experiment and Learn - Attend Conferences and Workshops - Use Social Media Analytics Tools - Join Online Forums - Stay Informed About Platform Changes - Analyze Your Own Data

How?? Follow me :) Or more seriously just practice the plateforme test new features and see how competition is twisting them.

it's really important to keep up with what's going on in social media analytics. One big change I've seen is that it's not just about getting lots of likes or followers anymore. Now, social media platforms care more about things like comments, shares, and how many people actually click on the things you share. These show if people are really interested in what you're posting. So, I pay attention to these new trends and adjust my strategies to fit what's working best. For example, instead of just trying to get more likes, I focus on getting people to talk and share, and it's been making a real difference in how well my social media efforts work.

To conclude it here, you always need to understand and track how your social media analytics are changing and affecting your objective. Because all your future moves will be dependent on this only.

The Core is to grow the brand and not get lost in what's resonating more with the audience. The goal isn't to increase clicks, likes and engagement. The woke campaigns might get better engagements and go viral but it can have negative repercussions for the brand, the recent Budwiser campaigns are a testament to that. Social Media communications are about building and maintaining an Image hence clickbait campaigns in the long run can do more harm. Using SM to understand your core audience better so you can have effective tailor made campaigns should be the goal. A strong community of 5000 folks might be more profitable for a brand than a 5 Million following, use social media to filter those 5K from the 5 million.