Understanding Social Media Analytics for Small Business

By: Marlene I. Urena

So you have implemented a social media strategy for your business, but you don’t know how to monitor its success. This is where social media analytics comes in handy! Tracking social media analytics is a vital step for business success because it can expose any areas that need improvement in your company’s online strategy. Let’s go over how social media analytics work and what they can reveal

How do these tools work? 
Social media platforms each have their analytics available for business pages and even personal accounts. This tool allows you to monitor multiple metrics that can be used to analyze how well your social media strategy is working. The information provided by these metrics is public, but no personal information is compromised in the numbers these platforms expose. There are even other analytics tools like HootSuite and Social Studio, which allow you to monitor the performance  of multiple accounts on different platforms, giving you an overall view of how your company’s marketing strategy is performing online. 

1. Engagement: One of the most important metrics to track is engagement. This metric includes the amount of retweets, likes, shares, and comments on the respective social media platforms. Engagement on any platform is increased by more interactions between the company and its consumers on social media.
2. ​​Mentions: One metric associated with engagement is mentions.This is  where a company is brought up or mentioned through a tag in someone’s post or if someone replies to a post by the company. Organic mentions consist of the former, where the company is brought up in a post without the need of prior content creation. Organic mentions indicate that people are aware of your brand’s existence so this is a good sign of engagement assuming the post is positive. 
3. Responsiveness: The engagement on posts associated with your brand can reveal how individuals feel about your company. What they write online can be either positive or negative, but as a business you must be ready to face any reaction from consumers. It comes down to how your business handles the situation when someone has a bad experience. Being responsive and timely in these instances can help boost your company’s image, even if faced with negative attitudes. This example shows that tracking your engagement alone can help solve a multitude of problems that may hinder your business’s success.
4. Impressions & Reach: Some other metrics that are important to track are the impressions and reach of your posts. Impressions reflect the number of times your content is displayed, while reach is the amount of people who have seen it. These numbers are important to track because it gives you an idea of how many people are actually seeing your content and how many accounts are being made aware of your brand. Your content may be displayed on someone’s screen, but you won’t build brand awareness if your posts aren’t being noticed. If your reach is small compared to your impressions, there may be room for some enhancements in your social media strategy. 

Before looking at any analytics on social media, however, businesses must review the goals of their strategy. Did you want to boost your engagement total by 1,000 per post? Did you want to shorten your response time to under 2 minutes? By defining the goals of your strategy, you will be able to effectively analyze whether or not it is performing as intended. You will be able to see if the outcome of the strategy falls in line with the numbers you wanted to achieve. If not, then there needs to be a re-evaluation of the strategy to find out what can be done in a better way. Overall, Social media analytics are great tools to use in measuring the success of a social media strategy and business can only benefit from employing their use. ​