97% of Fortune 500 companies are using social media successfully to generate awareness and foster positive communication with the stakeholders. And these companies do not get such awesome results by posting guess-based content.
Posting just any type of content won’t produce the results you want. You must have a strategy to identify the type of posts your customers need to go for your product.
But how do you create such a strategy?
In this informative blog, we’re going to tell you all about social media data and how you can use it to take your social media game to the next level.
Let’s get started.
What Is Social Media Data?
The data collected from the social media platforms that show you how users interact and engage with your posts is called social media data. In the social media analytics dashboard, this data is referred to as metrics and demographics.
Moreover, the data collected from the content that users post publicly is also called social media data. But this data is not visible in the native analytics dashboard of the platform. If you want to collect this data for marketing, you’ll need to take help from social media analytics tools like Radarr.
Why Is It Important to Collect Social Media Data?
Here’s a truth about strategies — they work better when based on data instead of guess work. And it’s no different for social media marketing.
Data tells you what’s working for your social media growth and what’s not. When you know these factors, you’re in a much better position to create informed strategies.
Now, users present on different social media platforms behave differently. It would be foolish to force one strategy on every platform and expect them all to deliver results. But with social media data, you can analyze what works where and then customize your strategies based on different platforms.
Here are some of the things that social media data tell you about your audience:
- The demographic profile of your followers
- Time of the day when your audience engages the most
- Hashtags that align well with your audience
- Type of content that interests your audience
- The top-performing organic post that you can boost, and much more.
In short, social media data enables you to utilize your resources in the most efficient way possible. When you have collected a good amount of social media data, you can tie it up with your real business metrics like sales and awareness.
35+ Ways to Use Social Media Data
Social media data with the right interpretation and execution can solve every problem a social media marketer ever faces. It can help you identify and reach your target audience. You can use this to measure ROI, create more engaging content, etc.
Here are the 40 best ways to use social media data to open new growth opportunities for your brand.
Audit Your Current Social Media Status
For you to truly understand your target audience, you have to know where you stand yourself. You can set a robust foundation for your account’s performance by auditing your social media data.
Check your engagement metrics and demographics to access your current growth trajectory, and look for opportunities to improve it.
Track Follower Growth Trajectory
The number of followers you have on social media doesn’t directly translate into business growth. However, it still is an important metric considering the stat that 89% of the customers buy from the brands they follow.
Moreover, the accuracy and reliability of your social media data increase with the increase in the follower count. By tracking and visualizing the growth of your follower count, you can find out specific campaigns that work best for you.
Demographic Data for Better Content Strategy
People of different age groups have different interests. Their cultural references and experiences with social media are also distinct. The same goes for people from different countries and genders.
Using social media data, you get a breakdown of your audience, which helps you understand them better and create marketing campaigns that align with each group.
Radarr gives you detailed audience demographics reports that can help you create better content strategies.
Identify the Platform Where Your Audience Engages the Most
Every social media platform has a distinct user base. Twitter is more about the text, whereas Instagram is all visual. You need to identify the platform where your potential customer engages the most. And it’s not possible to identify it without using social media analytics.
When you do it without data, it’s like having a destination in mind but heading out without the map. You can use social media data to target the right customers on the right platform.
Audience’s Interest Above Everything
By tracking your performance metrics and audience demographics, you get to understand them better. But to convert them, you’ll need to know more. You can investigate their interests, requirements, and intent for a clearer understanding.
For example, find out your top-performing post and try to establish a pattern. Create your future content based on this pattern to gain more reach, shares, and clicks.
There’s Never a Shortage of Data
The data from your own social media account will work the best for you. But it doesn’t hurt to have access to more data.
There are tons of marketers who share their personal social media data on platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. You can test the effectiveness of these data in batches and can base your strategies on them if it works for you.
Set Informed Publishing Cadence
Setting a publishing cadence is one of the most confusing tasks for social media marketers. At the same time, it’s not that complex. There’s only one way to find the right publishing cadence — the trial and error method.
You can begin your cadence with respect to the industry benchmark and keep up with it for a few weeks. If you don’t see enough traffic and want to publish more, just go for it. Compare the weekly report of the new cadence with the average of the industry benchmark to find out what works best for you.
Data Supports Creative Decisions
Making assumptions about what type of creatives and designs your audience likes is lethal for social media growth. You can get powerful insights to support your creative decisions with measured and structured social media tests.
Identify the variables you want to test, like image vs. video vs. captions. Then in the upcoming content calendar, design multiple posts and put tags on them. At the end of the month, analyze what works best for your audience and the brand.
Fine-Tune Your Tone of Voice
The tone of voice reflects your brand’s personality, values, goals, and expertise. It helps you establish brand identity.
With social media data and testing, you can fine-tune this tone to influence your audience to take the next step.
Know When to Pull Back
Social testing results can validate some of your assumptions. More importantly, it tells you the areas where your time and effort are of no use. When you find such areas, it’s best to shut the doors on them.
For example, you might be inclined towards publishing video content. And videos demand a truckload of effort. But if your social media data shows that this strategy is not working, you should pull back and try something else.
Get Answers Directly From Your Audience
Data can come from everywhere. You just have to be a collector and interpreter with the right set of tools. If you’re struggling with anything regarding your social media strategies, reach out to your followers for the answer.
If you’re struggling with content creation, you can use a social listening tool like Radarr that enables you to identify what your audience cares about. You can then create content based on their pain points to make it relevant for them.
Poll Your Audience
Almost every notable social media platform has introduced the polling feature. It’s a simple way to collect data from your audience without having to do a lot of work.
Polls are intriguing, and your followers are very likely to engage with them. It tells your target audience that you care about their opinions. Use the data collected from the polls to give your followers what they want.
Use Data to Pick the Fan-driven Contest Winner
You can host a fan-driven contest, where you can track the social polls, hashtags, and engagement metrics to find the winner. These contests bring more traffic to your brand and contribute to social media growth.
Use Pop Quiz Data to Educate Your Audience
Every brand wants to know how much its audience knows about the industry, business, and products. You can find this out by quizzing them.
The data collected from these quizzes will reveal the education gap. You can use this data to educate your audience about the things they don’t know much about.
Tagging Works as Personal Referral
The option of tagging accounts on platforms like Facebook and Instagram acts like a personal referral that can help grow your brand awareness.
You can encourage your customers to tag you when they purchase from you or add a location when they visit you. Doing this will enhance your demographic data, which will make your ad targeting more accurate.
Determine Where to Promote Which Products
A watch company, MVMT, has chosen Pinterest as their go-to advertisement platform. And when they introduced new segments, they relied on their past marketing data to create strategies for the new products. Accessing the past campaigns, they found out that images with people wearing their products while on the go performed much better than product-only shots.
When you have collected enough data from your past campaigns, you can use it to find out where to promote your new products and how. Using data this way can reduce your CPA by four times.
Use Data to Link Objectives With Social Media KPIs
Every brand has a long-term objective. Use your historical campaign data to link the big picture with SMART goals and KPIs. It’ll not only help you make better strategies but will also set the right path for you to execute them.
If you’re new to social media KPIs and engagement metrics, read this post.
Use Organic Performance Data to Boost Posts
If you are planning to boost your social media posts, your best bets are the ones that have already performed well organically. You don’t even need to create a new ad. Just put $50 behind those posts and see how it impacts your hypothesis when it reaches a wider audience.
And even if your budget is high, don’t go all in. Invest a little, analyze performance using social media data, and then let the results decide if you should invest more or pull back.
Add Specificity to Your Data for Choosing the Right Platform
The more specific your data is, the more accurate your strategies will be. When you publish your campaigns on social media, don’t forget to add UTM parameters to your links.
With UTM parameters, you can find user trails from your social media campaigns to your brand’s website. This will tell you on which platform your campaigns work the best. Moving forward, you can double your efforts on the platforms that produce good results.
Tags Aren’t Just for Testing
The best way to learn what converts your target audience is via campaigns. You can track your campaigns with a platform like Radarr to ensure every data you want to gather from it is accounted for. This makes the data more purposeful and specific.
Evaluate the Success of Your Campaign Hashtags
Hashtags and campaigns are two sides of the same coin. Hashtag analytics captures the audience interaction and shows how far your campaign has reached.
Data Helps You Keep a Check on Traffic Coming From Social
The tops two goals of a social media marketer are building brand awareness and bringing more web traffic.
Other than analyzing your engagement metrics, keep a close eye on Google Analytics. It will tell you how much traffic is redirected to your website via social.
Let your colleagues know how good your strategies are by showing off this social media data.
Use Audience Feedback to Improve the Experience
Social media marketers have the best view of the brand’s audience and customers. Their knowledge about what customers expect from the brands is unparalleled.
You can share the feedback you receive from your social media audience with your product and development teams to create a better experience for the customers. Learn more about audience intelligence here.
Show How Social Contributes to Revenue and Lead Generation
40% of customers follow brands on social media to know about upcoming sales and discounts. You can share the promotional content’s engagement data, like link clicks, direct messages, CTR, etc., with your sales team to show how social media is contributing to brand revenue and lead generation goals.
Help Sales Teams Find the High-Converting Channel
Social media marketers know on which channel most of the potential customers are located. Basically, the channel that converts the most.
You can share those channels with your sales team so they can work on their self-brand building. This will make the sales process more efficient because of the presence of more ideal customers.
Make Positive Changes Within Your Organization
If your brand stands for something, people are going to visit your social media profiles to find out how it’s delivering promises and commitments.
Keep your eyes open to the inbound social DMs and collect as much feedback as you can from your customers. You can then use this sentimental data to show how the public is reacting to the ongoing action.
Track the Performance of Employee Sharing
People who work for your brand are your best assets. When they share something about your brand on their account, their connections are going to listen. This helps you extend the reach of your social media campaigns.
Using social media analytics tools, you can collect the required metrics to see how employee sharing is impacting your campaign.
Align Design Team With Customer’s Taste
A brand’s face and identity must change with the evolving user needs and tastes. You can use social media data to bring your design and creative team on the same page as the customers. Data can help you find what resonates the best with your customers on different channels.
Influence Decisions Beyond Social
Social media insights related to your audience appeal the most to them. Your audience will love to see what your fellow customers have to say about your brand.
By monitoring the tags, you can reshare UGC images in not just your social media accounts but also in email marketing content or website blogs. You can analyze the posts your users have posted about you. If it has performed well for them, you can reshare it to reap the benefits of good content.
Manage Brand Reviews Using Data
Reviews play a significant role in shaping a brand’s reputation. The review sites, forums, social media posts, etc., are filled with opinions about your brand. You can use these opinions as insights to improve your brand from within. Learn more about getting more positive reviews here.
Data Helps You Standout on Glassdoor
When you sit to make a list of all social media channels, Glassdoor will probably be one of the last names to hit your mind. But it’s far more important for brands. It has a star rating from those who interviewed for a role or those who work in the company.
You can share the data collected from here with your Human Resource Department and leadership board to provide a good experience to those who want to work for the brand. Learn more about managing online reputation here.
Improve Your Employer Branding
By using a sentiment analysis tool like Radarr, you can catch the sentiment and emotions behind the review. Apply the insights you get from here for employer branding on Glassdoor and other reviewing sites.
Use Data to Add New Questions in FAQS
You tag your incoming DMs and questions using a social media analytics tool. If a certain tag is escalating, you can add the question associated with that tag to provide an easy and quick solution to the customers.
Improve the Efficiency of Customer Service
It’s very common these days for brands to use social media as a channel for providing customer support. Considering that 79% of customers expect a response within 24 hours and 40% want a reply within the first hour — using social media for customer service is the need of the hour.
You can set a response time benchmark in your social media analytics tool to access the current response rate and encourage the team to do better. Learn how to get better at customer service with real-time data analysis.
Solves the Social Media ROI Mystery
Most social media marketers are struggling to establish an ROI on social media. Well, it’s not actually possible to measure it without analyzing social media data.
You can start measuring the ROI by setting goals for specific actions and then tracking those actions in Google Analytics. Learn more about marketing analytics here.
Social Media Data That You Must Track
The best thing about social media data is that you can track almost everything. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. It’s your business goals that decide the social media data you must track.
For example, if you are a new brand that wants to increase awareness, you should track the engagement metrics. However, for established brands who want to sell through social media, tracking conversion metrics is ideal.
Here are the top 16 social media metrics you must collect:
- Reach
- Impressions
- Audience growth rate
- Engagement Rate
- Amplification rate
- Virality rate
- Video views
- Video completion rate
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate
- Cost-per-click (CPC)
- Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
- Social share of voice (SSoV)
- Social sentiment
But before you jump on to collect these metrics, set SMART goals. Based on the goals, pick out the metrics that will help you in the journey, and then collect them.
How to Track Social Media Data for Marketing?
The first step toward collecting social media data is to identify where you can find it. If all you want is basic engagement and demographic data, you can find it in the built-in analytics dashboard of the platform.
This data, however, is not enough to quickly improve the growth trajectory of your brand’s account. You’ll need a unified view of your social media data to get the most out of it. And here’s how to make it happen.
Use a Social Media Analytics Tool
By using a social media analytics tool like Radarr, you get access to a full-view dashboard of your social media data across different platforms.
When you have access to all the data under one roof, you can analyze what strategy is working for which channel. It allows you to create platform-specific strategies.
Record What You Find
As we mentioned, social media has a lot of data to offer. And if you don’t have a comprehensive system to record the collected data, things can become overwhelming for you. Keep in mind that your recording system should allow you to compare data from different platforms and timelines.
Share Results in the Social Media Report
Social media data is not something people enjoy looking at in its raw form. But to use it in marketing strategies, the stakeholders need to see it. Therefore, it is essential for you to compile a report in an easy-to-digest format.
Tips to Collect Social Media Data
Keep Your Goals and KPIs Clear
Social media data won’t be of much use if you can’t connect them with your real business objectives and KPIs. Connecting SMART goals with social data builds context for the bigger picture.
When your objectives are sorted, you can use social analytics to keep a check on how your brand is going towards it. This will help you find areas where you can improve.
Track Platform-Specific Social Data
As we mentioned, social media data can provide you with a unified view of how your strategies are performing across platforms. It also helps you fine-tune the strategies and create new ones to work best on a specific platform.
For example, your Twitter audience might be most active during the daytime. On the other hand, the Facebook and Instagram audience might engage the most in the evening. You can schedule your posts at the time when your audience is most active on a particular platform.
Leverage Social Listening
Social listening can provide you with a completely distinct set of data from the audience which is relevant to your business. The data we have covered so far is collected from people who are connected with you on social media. At the same time, social listening data is gathered from social media users who have no connection with your company but are relevant to your business.
Social listening is based on the concept of social media data mining. It helps you collect valuable insights, pain points, problems, and requirements from users who don’t even know about your brand’s existence.
The social listening feature of Radarr helps you stay relevant to your audience by improving your products and experiences to fit their expectations.
Here’s a complete guide on social listening and how to get started.
Personalized Ads (Don’t Overdo It)
Using social media data, you can personalize ads to the granular level. But going too far with personalization can hurt your brand’s image.
More than 50% of internet users know that sharing personal data helps users find the items they’re truly interested in. The other half believe that when brands collect personal data, it feels invasive.
This is why you must not overdo the personalization, or customers will perceive you as a “creepy” brand.
Streamline Social Media Data Collection
When you are present on multiple social media platforms, it can become overwhelming to track the performance and data at scale.
Now, switching amongst built-in analytics of different platforms is not an efficient solution for marketers considering the fact that it eats a lot of time and provides only basic metrics.
Therefore, you need a solution that not just offers high-end metrics but also provides data from all the platforms under one roof. And Radarr is that social media analytics tool for you.
In addition to all the metrics, it also has social listening features, which makes it a tool for all your social media needs.
