Understand and improve social media analytics

Learn which metrics will help you improve the effectiveness of your campaign

Like it or lump it, social media is here to stay. But just like accounting, once you understand the data and a few metrics, it’s easy to find your groove. If you regularly check what’s working and what’s not, your social media efforts will start paying off. In this blog, we help you understand social media analytics and how to track results so you can improve them.  

What is social media analytics?

Social media analytics deciphers whether or not your investment is getting good returns. Collecting data and analysing it against certain metrics can accurately measure your performance. Are your campaigns resonating with your audience? Are you targeting the right people? How high is engagement? These are all questions that social media analytics can answer. BOMA will give you a complete picture of performance with campaign analytics. Even on multiple social platforms, BOMA will analyse data, trends and consumer insights to give you a single view of the results.

The S.M.A.R.T way to track social media analytics

Understanding social media analytics is as easy as tracking a client’s financial data. The hard part will be tracking the right metrics and doing it regularly. With clear goals and relevant data, you’ll know exactly how to improve your results. Here’s how to start:

Outline your goals

Social media analytics should always begin with clear goals. Otherwise, how can you know if your campaign has hit or missed? You’ll need a single sentence that specifies what you want to achieve with your campaign. At BOMA, we use the S.M.A.R.T outline to make sure we have everything covered. 

  • Specific

Along with an action – like generating leads, onboarding clients and driving traffic – it’s important to outline specifically what you need to accomplish. Clear, numerical targets will help you measure the success of your goal, for example, doubling your followers or improving engagement by 20%.

  • Measurable

Decide how you’re going to measure the goal. For example, are you tracking likes, clicks, shares or views?

  • Attainable

It’s tempting to shoot for the stars, but setting realistic, achievable goals improves long-term motivation. 

  • Relevant 

Make sure the goal aligns with your business objectives. If you want to enhance your connection with current clients, engagement and customer service are key. But if you want to grow your business, generating leads may be more important. 

  • Time-bound

The final step is to give your goal a deadline. Without one, there’s no urgency and goals can easily be forgotten. 

Decide which metrics will help to achieve your goal

With limitless capability to track data, it’s crucial to find a few key metrics that will let you track your progress towards your goals. They can be categorised into four groups:

  1. Engagement – how many people who see your campaign or post are interacting with it?
  2. Awareness – how big is your current and potential audience?
  3. Loyalty – how do your customers feel about your services?
  4. Conversion – how many people who see your post are getting in touch?

Here are some ideal examples of social media goals matched with specific data metrics:

Goal 1 – Generate 20% more leads in one month

Generating more leads through social media is about growing your audience and making sure target customers are interested enough to contact you. So, while you can easily count the number of leads you get each month, you’ll need to know how, where and why those leads are coming through to improve upon that. Here are the key metrics you’ll want to be tracking: 

  • Audience growth rate –  how many new followers you get on each platform in a certain period 
  • Click-through rate –  how many people see your posts on each platform and click on the link to learn more 
  • Conversion rate –  how many new clients you get through social posts on each platform
  • Website – how many people visit your website in a certain period  
  • Google traffic – how many people click through to your website from a Google search 

Goal 2 – Improve customer (client) satisfaction by 50% 

Providing your current customers with valuable content and information is a huge driver of lasting satisfaction. Measure your goal specifically and then look to other metrics to work out how to improve it. To make sure you’re on the right track, we recommend using this insightful metric to measure progress: 

  • Customer satisfaction score – This determines how happy your clients are with your service and information.

Goal 3 – Increase traffic to your website from your social platforms by 100%

The number of people who visit your website becomes the number of opportunities you have to gain a new customer, so it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on. To improve it, you can track how successful your social content and targeting are by measuring:

  • Reach – Monitor the total number of people who see your posts on each platform.
  • Impressions – This will tell you the number of times people viewed your posts on each platform and can help you understand if something isn’t working.
  • Click-through rate –  Monitor how many people see your post and click through to your website.
  • Audience growth rate –  Count how many new followers you get on each platform in a certain period. 

Check regularly

As with any goal in life, success depends on your commitment to the process. Social media analytics is not something you can set and forget. It takes regular checks to make sure you’re not missing any opportunities for improvement. Even though social media have their own analytics tools, they can be tedious and confusing to analyse one by one. BOMA will work as your all-in-one tool, giving you regular custom reports of your analytics.

With understandable insights and expert advice, your social media activity will have the best chance of smashing your targets. Learn more about how BOMA can help your firm today.