Social Media Analytics: The Ultimate Guide

With over 4.5 billion social media users across the globe, it’s no wonder businesses must be energetic on social media to attach with their audience.

Nevertheless, simply existing on social media is not enough; marketers need to make use of social media analytics to make sure they post content with the very best ROI.  

Social media analytics and reporting give your corporation the perfect probability to supply engaging content that positively impacts your bottom line consistently.

Social media analytics provides insight into several essential aspects directly tied to your marketing efforts and business success.

Here’s a listing that explains the importance of social media analytics:

• Develop a deeper understanding of who your target market is and where they spend their time
• Discover which social platforms receive essentially the most significant amount of traffic
• Determine what variety of social content results in essentially the most conversions, engagements, etc.
• Discover what variety of social media post has essentially the most significant reach and resonates best together with your audience on specific platforms.
• Find out about what’s and isn’t working when it comes to social media campaigns and ads amongst your audience during their life and after they wrap up.
• Develop a more robust social media strategy for your corporation’s specific goals related to things like your marketing, sales, and repair efforts.

Social Media Analytics Reports

Social media analytics reports provide an summary of specific metrics and data points — reminiscent of engagements and impressions — related to the content you share on various social media platforms.

Simply put, reports are the way you’ll review your social media analytics.

Social media analytics tools (which we’ll review next) make the creation of reports easy — a few of these resources provide reports from one social platform at a time. In contrast, others offer reports from multiple social media.

Either way, social media analytics reporting tools are typically customizable — meaning you may view and pull the information and reports that matter most to you and your corporation.

With the tools we are going to review below, reports may be mechanically made and shared for you. But listed below are a number of the unique facets of social media analytics reports that you could typically customize:

• Statistics and data points that matter to you will likely be displayed within the report
• Time-frame (weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, campaign begin to end)
• Progress growth (i.e., the way you’ll share your progress growth over time through a report — typically, either in the shape of a snapshot or a comparison of stats in a given period).

Learn how to create impactful monthly reports to show ROI on your social media efforts.

As stated, your reports will likely be unique based on the analytics software or tool you utilize. Nevertheless, let’s have a look at a number of the commonest social media analytics reports chances are you’ll come across or create in some unspecified time in the future.

Forms of Social Media Analytics Reports

Let us take a look at HubSpot’s social media analytics reporting options to present you some different reports available in commonly-used tools.

1. Audience Analytics Report

The Audience report displays your current variety of followers for every social account in comparison with the number you had in a previous period.

2. Published Posts Analytics Report

The Published Posts report shows the variety of social posts published across your social accounts during a particular period.

3. Interactions Analytics Report

The Interactions report displays the variety of likes, reactions, and comments in your posts across multiple platforms.

4. Clicks Analytics Report

The Clicks report displays what number of clicks you get in your social posts published through HubSpot.

5. Shares Analytics Report

The Shares report displays the variety of posts your audience members shared.

6. Impressions Analytics Report

The Impressions report shows the variety of views that posts in your LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram pages received.

7. Sessions Analytics Report

The Sessions report displays what number of web sessions in your site took place inside a given period driven by social media.

8. Recent Contacts Analytics Report

The Recent Contacts report displays what number of latest contacts have been created in HubSpot as a result of web sessions driven by social media inside the chosen period.

Now chances are you’ll be wondering what tools can be found to enable you to pull these reports and data — next, we’ll cover a few of your options.

Best Social Media Analytics Tools

There are lots of social media analytics tools available today, which is why identifying the suitable one for your corporation can seem daunting. We’ve compiled the next list of seven of our favorites to assist get you began.

Download ten free social media templates to help you manage and optimize your content for the best results.

1. HubSpot Social Media Software

HubSpot Social Media Software gives insight into the client journey through integrated analytics tools.

These enable you to understand which marketing tactics work best amongst your audience, determine how your marketing efforts impact your bottom line, and study your search engine marketing (web optimization)-related ROI.

Try HubSpot’s social media tools free for 30 days.

As well as, HubSpot’s Social Media Software has severala resources available so that you can implement in your strategy.

These resources include social media analytics report templates, free social media analytics tools, and social media courses.

Note: HubSpot also integrates with other analytics software, like Oktopost. LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are powerful platforms HubSpot can integrate with.

To learn more about HubSpot integration, visit our integrations marketplace.

2. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is an analytics tool used for Twitter. It really works in real-time to enable you to view and analyze your Tweet engagement, organization, management, and tracking on the platform.

3. Buffer

Buffer provides an in-depth have a look at how you may strategize to grow your brand on social media.

The software does this by measuring your performance on various social platforms, creating detailed reports in regards to the data points that matter to you, and recommending ways to enhance your reach, engagement, and more.

4. Hootsuite

Hootsuite lets you create customized social media reports using over 200 metrics across your social channels and campaigns.

These reports are easily shareable with members of your team and your clients to maintain everyone on the identical page and prove ROI.

5. Sprout Social

Sprout Social provides a glance into your customers’ needs through the conversations your customers and followers are having on social media.

The software also measures your specific content and campaign work across various platforms and channels to find out what’s working best amongst audience members and what ought to be improved upon.

(Note: Sprout Social is one other social media software integrates with HubSpot.)

6. Mention

A mention is a tool that enables your organization to observe, listen, and analyze your posts and your interactions with and amongst audience members via different social channels and platforms.

The software also makes creating automated reports to share this data with fellow employees or clients easy.

Next, have a look at applying these tools and resources in your day-to-day work by reviewing the steps in tracking social media analytics (also referred to as your social media analytics strategy).

Work through the next steps to start tracking your social media analytics and gaining a greater understanding of which parts of your processes are working and which must be modified. Again, you may consider this as your social media analytics strategy.

1. Set SMART social media analytics goals.

Create and set SMART goals to enable you to achieve your social media analytics goals.

By ensuring your goals are SMART, they’ll be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound and also you’ll have the ability to focus your strategy to achieve and even exceed your expectations efficiently.

First, ask yourself, “What do I would like to learn from my social media analytics?” Then, dive into each a part of the SMART goal. Here’s an example of a SMART plan related to your social media analytics strategy for reference.

Use a free template to help you create SMART goals and achieve them.

• Specific: I would like to make use of social media analytics to discover specific data points related to my marketing tactics to find out which posts and campaigns work best in reaching and interesting our audience members.
• Measurable: I would like to have the ability to discover some specific data points to perform this goal.
• Attainable: I’ll discover three specific data points to help accomplish this goal.
• Relevant: These data points will help my team, and I measure our success in reaching and interesting our audience members across social media channels and discover gaps or areas for improvement in our social media strategy.
• Time-bound: I would like to discover these specific data points over the subsequent month. 

  This manner, in 4 weeks, we are able to use them to measure our success in reaching and interesting audience members across social channels and discover gaps and areas for improvement in our social media strategy.

2. Determine which metrics you’ll deal with and track.

Now it’s time to make a decision which social media metrics you’ll track. There are several commonly-tracked social media metrics on your consideration.

Metrics may vary by social platform and which analytics tool you select. But listed below are some all-encompassing metrics applicable to virtually every social channel and analytics tool to start.

• Reach is the entire number of people that have seen your content.
• Engagements are all interactions, including shares, likes, and comments.
• Impressions are the variety of times content is displayed on someone’s feed.
• Mentions are when audience members or other corporations reference your corporation and brand on social media.
• Social ROI provides insight into whether your investment in your social media marketing leads to a rise or decrease in customers, sales, brand awareness, and customer loyalty.
• Social listening is while you monitor conversations about your corporation and brand on social media to see what customers and audience members say about you.
• Likes are when an audience member taps (or double taps) in your social content to point out they’re a fan of your post.
• Retweets/shares/reposts are when audience members post your corporation’s published content on their profiles.

3. Determine which social media analytics tools you’ll use.

Next, determine which social media analytics tools you’ll use — we covered some popular choices above, but you may all the time review other options through an easy Google search.

Before deciding on which tool or tools you’ll use, think in regards to the following questions:

• Do you wish a tool or software to enable you to manage your social media analytics across multiple channels and platforms (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) or simply one (e.g., Twitter)?
• Which metrics did you choose to trace (as discussed above)?
• What’s your budget? Do you would like a tool with flexible pricing options and features that you could add to or remove over time? (To seek out this information, review the pricing pages like this page on Sprout Social’s website.)
• Which tools and software options are suited to enable you to achieve your SMART goals? (Take a look at feature pages for such a information, like this page on Oktopost’s website.)
• Do you wish your tool to integrate together with your team’s more powerful software to run your corporation (reminiscent of HubSpot’s CRM, for instance)?

4. Measure the success of your social media analytics efforts.

When you implement your social media analytics software, you’ll have the ability to measure the success of your efforts.

To do that, you’ll have to make use of the analytics tool you implemented. Depending in your software, you may create customized reports and dashboards or pull the precise details about data points you care most about.

Along with applying your tools to assist measure your success, chances are you’ll also consider your answers to the next questions:

• Did you achieve your SMART goals?
• Did the metrics you selected to deal with tell a story helpful for your corporation?
• Did the software or tool you implemented support your corporation needs?

5. Make needed social media analytics adjustments.

When you measure the success of your social media analytics efforts, you’ll have the ability to find out whether or not any a part of your strategy must be modified or updated.

Perhaps you realize certainly one of your data points isn’t providing the extent of insight into your marketing efforts across social platforms, so it’s essential discover a latest one to measure.

Perhaps your software doesn’t help you customize cross-channel reports how you must, so you need to implement a latest tool.

Or, in case you’re glad with how your social media analytics reporting and strategy is working, you should definitely revisit your system in the longer term to make sure it continues to satisfy your expectations.

Begin Tracking and Applying Social Media Analytics

By tracking and applying social media analytics to your strategy, you’ll have the ability to achieve your audience more effectively.

And while you do that, you’ll see improvements in aspects directly tied to your ROI, like engagement, conversions, loyalty, and more.

Consider which tools and software are best for you and determine the way you’ll track your social media analytics to create deeper relationships together with your customers and followers.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in March 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.