The Importance of Social Media Analytics to Increase Brand Awareness

Social media analytics assist marketing teams with analyzing which content is working and which is a flop. These metrics can also track competitors and give insights into their welfare.

Audience

Social media analytics help take the steps to better understand the audience. By analyzing previous posts, brands can determine the best time(s) to post content based on when their audience is online. There’s zero point to posting valuable content if no one is going to be online to see it! These analytics can also be used to see what other type of content the audience is engaging in at the time. Maybe there is a trend that your audience really seems to like, and now the brand knows to create their own content based around the trend to increase their own metrics.

Create Better Content

There’s no reason a brand should reinvent the wheel every they post content. By using analytics, they can see which content is creating the highest engagements and mimic future posts off that content. For instance, Facebook has their own analytics tool that tracks different metrics of each post. On one screen, a brand can see the different engagement numbers of each of their posts (likes, follows, comments, reach, impressions, etc). Analyzing this data can help a brand determine if photos, videos, blogs, or meme content performs the best on their page.

How is the Campaign Performing?

Most notably, social media analytics help track how the overall campaign is performing. Are things panning out the way the brand intended them to? Maybe the campaign’s goal was to increase brand awareness, but engagements aren’t reflecting the wanted outcome. There are ways to fix this, or maybe the campaign is a flop and needs to be nipped. Tracking the metrics that align with the goals is the key way to ensure campaigns and content and performing up to par with the expected outcome.

Daily Reporting for Brand Awareness

With so many metrics to choose from, it can be daunting to decide which to focus on and when. This decision is based around the goal of the brands page and what they are trying to accomplish at the time. Assuming the brands goal is to increase brand awareness, these are the metrics that should be tracked each day to see how the page is performing — unique profile visits and leads. Regardless if new followers are obtained or post engagements increase, knowing the number of unique users that visit the page each day will give insights into the potential for new customers. It should be noted if unique visits increase based on a specific content post. A lead can be anything the brand wants, depending on the goal and resources the brand has available to them. It could be anything from a website visit to filling out an email form. Leads are another metric to help measure if the brand is reaching new potential customers.

Weekly Reporting for Brand Awareness

Weekly reporting is used to see big picture items from the weeks content.

• New Followers
• Compare each posts engagement — impressions, reach, likes, comments, follows from post

These metrics can help make decisions to guide the page in the right direction for the remainder of the month/reporting period. For instance, if the brands goal is to increase followers by 5% each month, and the weekly follower percentage was already at 3% for the first week of the month, it would be key to track the type of content posted throughout the week and mimic that for the future. Again, brands shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel — use the data and recreate what already works.

Don’t reinvent the wheel, use what you have!

Monthly Reporting for Brand Awareness

The monthly report should give a snapshot into the entire month. Although in depth, the report should be simple and easy to follow. It will combine past metrics with an overall analysis of the month.

Introduction

Include a quick snapshot summary of the goals, strategy, and success metrics for the page. This may remain the same month to month, but gives context to the rest of the report.

Snapshot

Combing the daily and weekly reports, create a snapshot of the following metrics for the entire month:

• New followers
• Engagements
• Leads

Data Tracking

This is where a bulk of the data tracking and analysis will occur. Again, some of the metrics may have been tracked in daily or weekly reporting, making it easy to combine into a monthly report. With the goal being to increase brand awareness, these are the metrics that should be tracked on a monthly bases to ensure the page is on track with the goal:

• Number of posts
• Net followers gain or loss
• Number of likes
• Post reach
• Number of comments
• Number of shares
• Number of story views
• Number of video views
• Top performing post(s)

The following metrics show the data of users going through the customer journey:

• Number of leads generated
• Number of conversions
• Total revenue generated

Analysis

This is where the brand will create a story around the data. Was this month successful? What were the high and low points of the month? Data without analysis is just numbers, so it’s important know why the page is performing the way it is. This is where the brand will suggest improvements to the overall strategy and tweak any goals.

Social media analytics and reporting work hand in hand to ensure the goals of the brand are being met through the content they’re posting. Without analytics, brands would be flying blind and potentially wasting time and resources on creating content that isn’t effective. Without reporting and analysis, the numbers are just numbers. It’s important for brands to create a story out of the data and improve their strategy.