In the times when businesses are competing for attention in social media, there’s a growing need for social media analytics.

With billions of users and a huge number of companies aiming to promote their businesses effectively, achieving visibility in social media is harder than ever. Here comes a social media analytics tool which can help you to understand your social media performance and to improve your outcomes.

Social media analytics tool is usually a web application that uses graphical dashboards and charts to visualize social media performance data and to give users a better understanding of their social media activity. The data in such a tool is gathered from various social media sites, including major social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, via their official APIs. Additionally, integrating Google Analytics with social media analytics tools allows for a comprehensive analysis of website traffic, helping marketers understand the impact of social media on website performance, including traffic sources and conversions.

A well-designed analytical tool has an intuitive interface and it gives insightful data about key social media metrics. Most commonly, it sums up organic and paid social media activity. It is mostly used by marketers, marketing agencies, media houses or small businesses that run social media on their own.

Why should you use social media analytics tools?

1. First of all, social media should be an important part of your marketing strategy. And every strategy needs to be well-thought and most preferably based on data. Social media analytics tools deliver a wide range of data regarding your social media activity.
2. An in-depth social media insight helps you to better understand your target audience, your audience behaviors and preferences.
3. With an access to social media tools you can easily identify social media trends and successful practices amongst your audience.

What is a Social Media Analytics Tool?

Definition and Purpose

A social media analytics tool is a software application designed to monitor, evaluate, and improve social media performance. These tools tap into social media metrics, ranging from likes and shares to comments and clicks, and translate this data into meaningful insights. The primary purpose of a social media analytics tool is to provide a clear picture of what’s working, what’s not, and where the brand stands in the digital landscape. By using a social media analytics tool, businesses can track social media growth, create automated reports, and make data-driven decisions to optimize their social media strategies.

What can you measure in a social media analytics tool?

Social media analytics tools provide a wide range of metrics that can help to better understand your social media activity, but also your target audience. These tools assist in managing and analyzing multiple social media accounts across various platforms. We’re going to bring them closer on the example of Sotrender and its newest module, Sotrender Ads.

Analyzing organic results

In the Sotrender app, you can track lots of useful data, starting from basic insights and including performance across different social media channels.

Profile overview and key output data

When analyzing your social media presence, you might need to start off with some basic data that gives you a general idea of your social media results. You can check for example:

• number of fans and how is it changing over time,
• reach (organic, viral and paid) with peak values on particular dates,
• total engagement with the Interactivity Index (which is a sum of weighted activities on a Facebook page over time),
• consumptions over time (link clicks, photo view, video play),
• user reactions and top performing posts by sum of activities.

Interactivity Index (INI) is Sotrender’s authorial metric which is not available in other social media analytics apps.

Getting insights about your audience

Social media analytics tool helps to better understand your audience which, apart from social media context, comes handy when preparing your marketing strategy and aiming to address your product most accurately.

Here are some of the target audience useful insights:

• fan and reach demographics,
• fan segmentation by country,
• top countries, cities and languages of your audience,
• active users on particular days and hours.

Analyzing reach & engagement

Reach and engagement are one of the most important metrics as they reflect the effectiveness of social media activities. Within this section you can check and analyze among others:

• reach, impressions and consumptions over time,
• user activities and reactions, 
• frequency which is the average number of times your page content was shown to one user,
• user activities and reactions to the content that you share,
• response rate and time.

Evaluating content strategy

Content strategy is a very important part of social media marketing. Thanks to a social media analytics tool, you can see what types of content formats that you use in your content strategy are the most successful. You can check for example:

• how particular posts performed during a selected time period and which of them turned out to be the most engaging,
• what were the most popular post types that you used,
• how did users interact with the content that you created.

Analyzing paid results

Social media tools can be even more useful if it comes to analyzing paid results. Since social media campaigns can consume a lot of money, it is really important to track key metrics and make sure that your investment pays off. If it doesn’t, having access to additional data can help you to implement necessary changes and optimize your results.

In Sotrender Ads, designed to track and analyze paid social media performance, you can:

• track the most important KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) over selected time periods, e.g. CPC or CPM,
• compare ads, ad sets and campaigns between each other to see which of your ads are most successful,
• analyze your campaign results in the real time to make more informed and accurate decisions (whether to invest more in a particular campaign or allocate your budget for some other advertisement),
• generate comprehensive pptx reports with the most important data to sum up each campaign’s advertising spends on social media.

Measuring reach

Reach is one of the key metrics especially if you choose it as your campaign main goal. In Sotrender Ads, you can compare the reach of your particular campaigns over time to see which of them were seen by the biggest number of people. You can also check how the reach was correlated with your campaign spends.

Tracking conversion

Conversion metrics are the most evident results of your campaign. You can clearly see how many users performed an expected action, which can be for example submitting a contact form, making a purchase, signing up for a subscription etc. If you correlate conversion to your spend, you will get a clear idea of your ROI (Return on Investment).

Traffic measurement

Traffic is an essential KPI, especially if you decide to focus your marketing efforts on directing your audience to a specific landing page, a blog post, an app and more. In Sotrender Ads, you can measure link clicks with relation to your expenses so that you can learn about your campaign profitability.

Understanding user engagement

Another important metric is engagement. You can check how many users interacted with particular campaigns and what type of content was the most engaging for them. It helps to improve your advertising strategy and choose the content format that seems the most relevant.

Why is it worth using social media analytics tools?

Social media analytics tools are commonly used by marketers and marketing agencies. Modern marketing is data-driven and it focuses on developing personalised marketing strategies.

At the same time, experienced marketers know that choosing an advanced social media analytics app over a native Facebook & Instagram solution is just beneficial. After all, it’s not only about having access to more data, it’s also about having access to functions that are not available in the built-in solutions.

Benchmarking your business against competitors

Social media benchmarking is something that can strengthen market position. Who wouldn’t want to snoop on competitors to see what they do and how they perform? 

In a social media analytics tool like Sotrender you can either analyze a single competitor’s profile or create a comparison group that includes your profile and selected competitors’ profiles. Analyzing particular metrics against the competition can be really insightful and helpful in developing a better marketing strategy.

Reporting your performance with ease

Preparing monthly reports is not the fanciest task – we know that. Nevertheless, your boss or client will require from you a summary on what you’ve done over the selected time period and how you performed. That’s why you need to be able to prove your hard work quickly and professionally – that’s also exactly how your report should look like. 

Social media analytics tools are the perfect solution for that as well. And you can’t choose better than Sotrender, simply because:

• The whole process of generating a report takes literally just a few minutes. 
• All your social media data is automatically pulled into Sotrender. That means you’ll no longer have to spend time on aggregating data from different sources – you’ll get them visualized and presented in one document.
• You can generate a report anytime and just how often you need it. Unexpected meeting in 10 minutes? No worries, it’s enough time to get your report ready. 
• Sotrender reports are professional and whitelabelled. You don’t have to think about the report’s structure or metrics you should include. 

How does a social media analytics tool facilitate a marketer’s work?

There are various tools that can be incorporated into a marketer’s work to facilitate everyday responsibilities, and a social media analytics tool is definitely one of them. It is usually so intuitive that it doesn’t require wide experience and can be easily used even by a beginner. 

Here are some of the reasons why such a tool make a marketing workflow smoother:

1. Social media analytics tools make budget management easier and more effective. Thanks to comprehensive data, one can decide in real time whether to invest more in a particular campaign or to allocate a budget for some other advertising.
2. The data about each channel’s performance (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube) is stored under one roof and can be analyzed simultaneously. It surely contributes to a more effective work!
3. The time that has been spent on gathering and presenting social media data can now be devoted to completing other important tasks. A social media analytics tool gives access to easily generated reports which are quick and comprehensive!

Social media analytics tool – conclusion

Social media analytics is an inherent part of a successful social media marketing. It helps you to track the most important metrics, optimize your budget and save a lot of time that you would normally spend on creating long reports yourself. It is definitely a great way to support your marketing strategy and to constantly improve your performance, especially that you have a chance to compare your results with competitors.