Skip to content 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.