How Data Analytics Can Transform Your Social Media Marketing

Data is one of the most powerful tools that any business has at its disposal. As long as they use it properly, of course. Doing social media well is a challenge, and it is one area where many of the biggest businesses still fail. Here are some of the ways that data analytics can take any business’ social media to the next level.

Anticipate Trends

It doesn’t matter what specific market or industry your business operates in, if you are able to accurately predict market trends then you will have a serious advantage over your competitors. Being able to predict trends means that you can get ahead of the curve and can plan proactively instead of reactively.

But if predicting trends was so easy, everyone would do it. By setting up social media bots and listeners to gather and scrape data for you, you can automatically monitor the most important people and groups on the platform who are relevant to your business. This data enables you to anticipate what your competitors are going to do and what your audience is about to start demanding.

Getting even slightly ahead on this stuff can translate into a massive advantage over your competitors, so it is worth investing the time and money necessary to set up an effective social media scraping and listening operation.

Gain Insight About Consumers

Understanding your market as an abstract entity is important, but it is also important to understand your consumers as individuals. Think about all the communications that your customers send to their friends and family through social media. If you can gain insights about these communications you will gain similarly prescient insights about the individuals sending them.

Not all of these communications will be accessible to you, but a great many of them will be, more than enough to be of value to you. Social media listening tools will enable you to identify when messages relevant to your business are being sent and automatically capture the data.

Of course, the analytics are just as, if not more, important than the data collection itself. If you don’t currently have a data specialist on your staff, consider hiring someone with a graduate certificate in data analytics or higher. Make sure that you pair your listening setup with a streamlined workflow for the storage and analysis of any data that you collect.

Precisely Target Your Content Strategies

Social media users are used to having content wash over them. There’s so much content coming at most users that they will only interact with a small fraction of it and won’t even be aware of most of it. If you want to capture your users’ attention and win their engagement, you need to serve up content that speaks to them.

The more data you have about your users and their engagement with your existing content, the more you will be able to refine your future approach. It’s no good just telling your social media manager to be more engaging.

Instead, you need to give them specific direction. If you can show them the data underlying your decisions, this will enable them to do their job better.

Collecting and analyzing the right data from your social media efforts will make it much easier to formulate effective strategies for the future. Don’t rely on indirect metrics for assessing your social media performance. Instead, use listeners and scrapers as you need to get the data you need.