Four Main Types Of Social Media Analytics

In an era of social media permeating our lives, there's nothing more important for businesses than tracking the performance of their posts. It's a free - for - all world - which means there's a lot of competition for our customer's attention spans. Knowing what works and what doesn't is the key to successful social media marketing.

As such, there is nothing more important than analytics. There are four main types of social media analytics you should be concerned with if you want to achieve social media success.

These four types are:

• Descriptive analytics
• Diagnostic analytics
• Predictive analytics
• Prescriptive analytics

All four seek to answer different questions and provide different insights. How do you tell which one is which? what situations are they useful in? worry not, dear reader - we're here to demystify the four types of social media analytics.

Descriptive analytics

This type of analytics answer the question " what is happening "? " What happened "? These cluster similar types of data together in order to produce a cohesive view. Comments and posts can be grouped together. Anytime you gather a lot of data points in order to analyze them and looking for patterns, sentiments and / or trends, you're dealing with descriptive analytics.

Diagnostic analytics

This type of analytics on the numbers, like counts, follower numbers, pages views, reviews and shares. This analytics focuses on the performance of posts and what made them successful. By comparing the performance of different campaigns, trends and consumer preferences can be discerned. Both diagnostic and descriptive analytics are reactive - that is, they are concerned with events that have already happened.

Predictive analytics

In contrast, both predictive and prescriptive analytics are proactive - as in, they attempt to predict trends, events and shifts based on existing data. It can range from single things, like predicting possible visits to a location based upon post expressing that intention, to forecasting entire trends based upon mentions. Social listening tools can help identify upcoming trends and shifts in consumer behavior by analyzing large volumes of social media data and indicating the shifting popularity of keywords.

Prescriptive analytics

Finally, prescriptive is the analysis of data with the intention of providing the best way to proceed at any given moment. This can be applied to situations ranging from handling social media crises and incidents ( " how well does this type of apology track with our target audience? " ) to purchase preferences ( " we've identified this group of customers - how do we optimize our sales process to their habits? " ). Although it's an incredibly useful form of analysis, it requires a lot of data in order to truly show its potential.

All managers of social media activity requires good analytics. Knowing how to understand and use your data can take your business very far - provide, of course, you know what you're looking for. If not do not worry, contact us and we will help you.

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