Although most brands recognise the importance of social media, it can be difficult to know how to gather valuable information from it. Without analysing social media conversations, companies can be left in the dark about their customers’ experiences. In this article, Focal Points will provide insight into the benefits of social media analysis.
What Is the Value of Social Media Analysis?
The main utility of social media lies in engagement. What do we mean by ‘engagement’? Simply put, engagement describes the interactions between customers and brands. What counts as a valuable interaction may differ according to particular industries or even businesses. Compare, for example, a social media user who says they enjoy regular Coke when it is cold with another who says that they dislike a new flavour such as Coke Mint. The former may not be all that useful – few people prefer their cold drinks to be warm – but the latter imparts new information: it provides the company with feedback about a new product.
Social media monitoring is the process of tracking posts and collecting data to determine how your brand is being mentioned on specific platforms. It can also tell you whether your influencers are meeting their targets, and help you to calculate your ROI (return on investment). But social media analysis offers more.
Whereas monitoring involves the aggregation of data related to your brand (hashtags, keywords, etc.), analysis builds on this by giving you information to help you understand the data. From measuring the impact of your key messaging to receiving insights into your customers and competitors, social media analysis can help you optimise your marketing and communications strategies.
What Are the Pros of Social Media Analysis?
Here are five benefits of social media analysis:
1. Customer Service:
A major advantage of social media analysis is that it gives you the opportunity to finetune your customer service. How are your customers experiencing your brand? Does this differ from one touch point to the next? Customers are vocal about their interactions with brands, especially when they have negative experiences. Social media analysis can show you where your problem areas lie by providing insights into negative feedback and themes. This can help you improve your marketing or communications strategy, while also providing feedback to product development teams.
2. Competitor Analysis:
By identifying the activities, messages, and strategies employed by others in your industry on social media, you can gain a competitive advantage. For example, you can get insights into product launches for competing brands and assess how the market reacted, thereby giving you the chance to better plan for your own product launch. In addition, with ‘share of voice’ analysis, you can see how much of the media share you earned compared with your competitors, allowing you to see where you are beating them and where you can improve.
3. Crisis Management:
Many people now look to social media for breaking news. Viral stories are far more likely to ‘blow up’ on Twitter or Facebook than they are on television channels, for example. Receiving an analysis of peaks and troughs in social media mentions can help you see how the evolution of a crisis has unfolded. This gives you a sense of how to react in the future, which responses successfully downplayed negative coverage, how long you were in the spotlight for, and what the impact on your business was.
4. Campaign Tracking:
Did your influencers hit their targets? Do you want to know what people thought of your event? Social media analysis gives you insights to measure your campaigns and improve future activities. It can also help you evaluate the impact of campaign keywords or hashtags, as well as track the reach and effectiveness of your campaign – from pre-launch through to post-launch.
5. Content Creation and Distribution:
One of the best ways to create brand awareness is to initiate conversations around your activities, partnerships, products and services. With social media analysis, you are able to see which content types gain more traction than others, allowing you to adapt your content strategy going forward. In addition, by seeing a breakdown of locations and languages, you can use messages to target new markets that you never considered before.
Conclusion
Social media analysis is hugely beneficial to brands. The insights into specific business objectives can help brands optimise their communications and marketing strategies. Getting valuable information about your social media posts can mean the difference between being a pacesetter or a dinosaur.