Grow Your Business With Social Media Analytics Tools

Social Media is taking over the world - we have heard that term so many times that it has lost its meaning. However, what if it was LITERALLY true and the only thing, we cared about was getting those likes, shares and subscribers and followers? Sounds like a job for Black Mirror.

Nosedive, an episode of Netflix's dystopian series Black Mirror, follows the character Lacie, through a semi-dystopian world where every social interaction both online and offline - is given a rating.

In Lacie's world, everyone has a social rating from 1 to 5, with 5 being the absolute highest. Mind you, everyone, not everything. Good ratings translate directly to good socioeconomic status, popularity and perceived happiness. People with the worst ratings are literally social pariahs.

Lacie is obsessed with ratings - with giving and receiving them. She's constantly looking down at her phone, checking her overall rating and comparing it to everyone else's. It's how she spends most of her day.


This form of social listening, though fictional, is something most of us do in real life when we monitor our likes, interactions and shares on our social profile.

Businesses do it too. Bad ratings and negative discourse about a brand on social media platforms can make or break a business's real-life reputation.

However, trying to monitor all social media data activity around your specific brand the way Lacie does is a time-consuming (and somewhat impossible) task if you approach it manually. That's where Social Media Analytics Tools come in.
 

What Is A Social Media Analytics Tool?

Social Media Analytics Tools, also called social listening tools, helps you monitor your social media accounts, brand mentions and related discussions across multiple social platforms.

They also help businesses monitor social media advertising campaigns, which are kind of important considering it can get pretty expensive if you don't know what's working and what isn't.

Some tools have publishing and scheduling features that help you wrangle your social content (e.g., create and schedule posts). Most tools compile the analytics into a dashboard, so it is easy to monitor trends across multiple social platforms at once.
 

A Brief History Of Social Media Analytics Tools

The concept of monitoring potentially damaging information about your business on the interwebs isn't new. It is called "reputation management." Companies have been faced with the task of managing their online reputations since the early days of the internet.

Reputation management is the process of identifying and mitigating negative "buzz" about a business online. Let's say you're a hotel and someone left you a bad review on a website like TripAdvisor, like this hysterical review for a hotel in Brussels:


If that's what users see when they search for your hotel, then this place is in trouble. To combat this, the hotel owner might get the review removed from TripAdvisor (that's nearly impossible) or create more positive content that would hopefully rank better than the bad review.

The ubiquity of social channel has taken the need for reputation management to the next level.

Now, users can talk about your company on their social feeds, their friend feeds and your feed.
Businesses needed tools to help them monitor social conversations and track the performance of their own social media activity across multiple platforms. Thus, Social Media Analytics Tools were born.

Types Of Social Media Analytics Tools

There are a few different types of Social Media Analytics Tools available today.
 

• Built-in Platform-Tools

  Most social media platforms include their baked-in analytics tools. Twitter analytics provides a 28-day summary of topline metrics, top tweets and top mentions.

Facebook also has insights about post interactions, engagement and audience information so businesses can better target posts (and ads) on the platform. Pinterest and LinkedIn also have Zoho Social and YouTube analytics reporting actionable insight available for business users based on such social media analysis.
 

• Social Media Management Platforms

  Social media management platforms are robust social network tools aimed at mid-to-large-sized companies (translation: they're not cheap). These tools include social listening, social analytics measurement, paid social campaign creation, monitoring/ optimization and publishing.

These are the Sprout Socials and Hootsuite's of the world.
 

• Social Analytics Tools For The Little Guy

  Free and low-cost tools help small businesses (with even smaller budgets) monitor their social media analytics and mentions. Tools like Brand24 may be affordable but can also be limited to just one or two platforms (Brand24 is focused on Facebook insight and Instagram insights).

 

Why We Need Social Media Software?

People are interacting with brands online more and more, with one recent study reporting that 96% of people who follow brands online interact with them.

If you don't monitor your social analytics and stay on top of communication, messaging and mentions consistently, you risk losing control of the conversation. That's when things can fall apart, as they did for Lacie in that terrifying Black Mirror episode.
 

Importance Of Social Media Analytics Tools

Social media analytics software enables you to understand the impact of your social media marketing efforts while maintaining your sanity.

In short, they save time (lots and lots and lots of time). As your social following grows, it becomes impossible to keep track of all the comments, mentions, shares and other actions generated in your social media universe. Popularity has a price, after all.

Some Key Benefits Of Social Media Analytics Tools

 

• It helps you keep track of social content across multiple platforms in one location (saving you time).

• It enables you to create and schedule posts within the platform and collaborate across teams.

• It improves social responsiveness. Many tools help you scale social engagement in one place, to be more responsive to comments from customers and prospects.

• It provides efficient analysis and reporting. See the results of your social media campaigns in one place, helping you understand what platforms work best for you (and which ones don't!) by viewing reports/ results via dashboards in real-time!
   

Social Media Analytics Tools help businesses monitor the many moving parts associated with social media monitoring, including your mentions, so that you can respond quickly to any issues.

Although your consequences might not be as dire as Lacie's, you can't afford not to stay on top of your social media campaign presence either. After all, we are all social media beings now.

Future Of Social Media Analytics Tools

These days business owners don't have the luxury of opting out of social media. A survey by Sprout Social found that 44% of consumers increased their personal use of social media platforms and nearly 90% of consumers who follow brands are likely to visit that brand's website.

The ubiquity of mobile is also giving social media metrics a boost, with the average daily social media usage of global internet users reaching 136 minutes per day in 2019 across a population of global mobile social users of just under 4 billion people!

Social Media Analytics Tools are needed now and in the future. Companies must continue to monitor their social media performance and activities, staying abreast of social conversations about their organization and their brand.