Social Media Analytics is Crucial for Marketing

All businesses know that marketing is critical to survival and growth. Marketing makes consumers aware of a company’s products or services and guides their buying decisions, while a good marketing plan can drive everything from product development to customer service, and business development.

Marketing without good knowledge of your market and consumers is like running blind and can only end in failure. So how do successful companies gather knowledge and ensure it’s high-quality, fresh, and relevant? Increasingly, businesses are turning to social media to tap into a virtually unlimited supply of real-world, real-time market data. 

About 72 percent of businesses use social media data to help guide business decisions because the data helps them gain valuable insights into their target audience’s behavior, preferences, and interests, which is necessary for building effective social media marketing campaigns. 

This article will explain why social media analytics is crucial for marketing and introduce the best software for maximum results with your social media campaigns.

What is social media analytics? 

Social media analytics involves monitoring, measuring, and analyzing social media metrics to better understand how social media marketing campaigns perform. It uses specialized tools to monitor social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, to collect data on user engagement, content performance, and audience behavior.

Businesses can then analyze this data to optimize their social media marketing strategies and improve their online presence. Some standard social media metrics are likes, shares, comments, followers, engagement, click-through, and conversion rates, though advanced analytics can go deeper than this by analyzing written content and comments, images, and more.

Benefits of social media analytics for Marketing

1. Understand consumer behavior and preferences

Using advanced analytics, companies can study their target audience, and build up reliable customer personas and groups, including behavior, preferences, and interests. This information helps them create more targeted marketing campaigns.

2. Measure social media marketing campaign effectiveness

Aside from profiling your audience, social media analytics helps organizations measure how their social media marketing campaigns perform. They can use metrics, such as reach, engagement, and conversions to determine the necessary changes to improve their campaign.

3. Make data-driven business decisions

Social media metrics provide data-driven insights that can bolster good decision-making. This way, companies can minimize risk, optimize costs, and increase the effectiveness of social media campaigns.

4. Stay competitive in your industry

By using social media analytics to track their performance, understand customer needs, and optimize their strategies, companies can remain competitive and keep up with changing consumer behavior.

5. Justify social media marketing investments to stakeholders

Social media analytics provides helpful data to demonstrate the ROI of social media marketing to stakeholders and decision-makers. When stakeholders find consistent and measurable progress with social media marketing campaigns (and other marketing generally), they feel more at ease to keep investing in the business.

Best social media analytics tools to boost your marketing:

According to a third-party survey of 150 Marketing Executives commissioned by algorithms, 91% of marketers value a tool that enables their teams to review, analyze, and act upon customer and marketing data in a continuous and real-time fashion.

Here is a small list of highly valued, industry-certified analytics tools used by marketers worldwide to boost their marketing efforts.

1. Brandwatch 

One of the unique features of Brandwatch is its image analysis capabilities. The tool uses machine learning to analyze images shared on social media and identify objects, emotions, and scenes. Businesses can use this information to understand the context of social media conversations and better target social media campaigns.

Brandwatch also allows businesses to create custom dashboards to monitor social media performance across multiple platforms. The version can include metrics such as engagement rates, sentiment analysis, and share of voice. Custom dashboards make it easy for businesses to track their social media performance and adjust their strategies accordingly.

Influencer identification is another remarkable feature of Brandwatch. This tool allows businesses to identify social media users who influence their industry or niche significantly. With this insight, they can quickly build relationships with influencers, which can help to increase brand awareness and drive sales.

2. Mandala AI

Mandala AI is a social media analytics tool that provides businesses with helpful insights to optimize their social media strategies. Our software uses AI and machine learning algorithms to give businesses personalized insights and recommendations to boost their social media performance. These include recommendations for improving engagement, increasing reach, and optimizing content.

Mandala Analytics helps you analyze the performance of the channels and gather mentions from social media using the relevant keywords. 

Mandala AI also allows you to do competitor analysis by comprehensively analyzing competitor social media accounts, including engagement rates, follower growth, and top-performing content. Companies can use this information to benchmark performance against competitors and identify areas for improvement.

Track and monitor the performance of the channels you are interested in using Ripples from Mandala Cosmos.

Sentiment analysis is another incredible feature our software offers. With this tool, businesses can understand how their audience feels about their brand and social media content. This information helps adjust messaging and content strategies to better align with audience sentiment.

3. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a popular social media management platform offering robust analytics capabilities. Hootsuite's social media analytics tool allows businesses to monitor social media conversations in real time. Hence, they can quickly identify trends, track brand mentions, and respond to customer inquiries quickly.

Hootsuite allows companies to generate cross-channel reports, including data from social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. With these reports, they can have a comprehensive view of their social media performance and make data-driven decisions.

The tool provides various report templates that companies can customize to meet their needs. This feature includes the ability to add custom metrics and branding elements. Employees can easily collaborate on social media analytics and reporting on the same project. Thus, they can stay organized and be on the same page.

4. Talkwalker

A unique feature of Talkwalker is its image recognition tool, which uses artificial intelligence to identify logos, products, and other objects in images shared on social media. This information can help businesses track the reach and impact of their visual content and identify opportunities for improvement.

Talkwalker's social media analytics tool includes a crisis management feature that allows businesses to monitor social media conversations during a crisis. The tool can identify potential issues before they escalate, enabling companies to respond quickly and effectively.

There's also a virality map that provides companies with a visual representation of how their content is being shared and discussed on social media. This map is essential for identifying trends and influencers and optimizing their social media strategy accordingly.

5. HubSpot

HubSpot offers a marketing and sales software platform that's all-in-one and includes a social media analytics tool. It allows social media managers to schedule and publish posts on multiple platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This multi-platform support saves time and streamlines the social media management workflow.

HubSpot's social media analytics tool features attribution reporting, allowing businesses to track the performance of their social media campaigns, to determine what channels and posts drive conversions best. With attribution reporting, companies can easily collect valuable data and use that to determine how to best optimize their social media strategy for better ROI.

The tool provides fully customizable dashboards to allow businesses to track the metrics that matter most. This can help businesses stay focused on their goals and monitor their progress over time.

6. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo focuses on content analysis and influencer identification. It allows businesses to analyze content performance across social media platforms, identifying the most popular topics, formats, and sources. With content analysis, they can create content for customer pain points and increase conversion dramatically.

The tool's influencer identification feature is excellent for identifying key influencers in any industry and tracking their social media performance. With such insights, they can easily build relationships with influencers and leverage their reach to expand their social media presence.

There's also a backlink analysis feature used for tracking links back to their website, identifying which content is driving the most traffic and engagement. Additionally, BuzzSumo's content alerts help to track brand mentions across the web, providing real-time insights into the conversation around the brand. 

7. Sprout Social

Sprout Social's unified inbox allows businesses to manage all their social media.

accounts in one place, providing a streamlined approach to social media management. This way, companies can save time and improve their response times to customer inquiries.

The tool's engagement reports provide businesses with a detailed view of how their audience engages their social media content using metrics, such as likes, comments, and shares. With this information, they can understand what types of content their audience is most interested in and optimize their content strategy accordingly.

Sprout Social also provides businesses with detailed insights into their social media audience, including demographics, interests, and behaviors. Hence, they can create more targeted social media campaigns and improve their advertising strategy.

Elevate your social media marketing with Mandala AI 

A unique benefit of Mandala AI is the ease of accessibility. It offers a user-friendly interface that doesn’t require extensive technical expertise with social media analytics. This feature makes it an excellent choice for small businesses that may not have dedicated marketing teams or resources.

Monitor the performance of the channels and the mentions that you have gathered based on the keywords in the campaign, using Mandala Analytics. 

Analyze what keywords are most popular among your audience on social media using Mandala Analytics. 

Our software is priced competitively, making it accessible to small businesses with limited marketing budgets. With Mandala AI, you can maximize your resources without investing in more expensive social media analytics tools. You can sign up for a free account today to test-run the software or compare our plans to determine which is best for you.