What Is Social Media Analytics?

Social media analytics is the process of collecting data to help social media teams (or marketing teams) better understand the impact of any social media campaign. Social media analytics relies on data, like engagement, to offer actionable insights that can be used to refine and strengthen social media initiatives.

Learn more about social media analytics, which metrics are important, and how to start working with this important information. Afterward, if you're interested in building on your social media analytics skills, consider Johns Hopkins University's Social Media Analytics Specialization, where you'll learn how to use natural language processing techniques to extract insights from user-generated content.

What is social media analytics?

Social media analytics uses data to create and refine an effective social media strategy. (It's similar to data analytics, which is the process of using collected data to describe trends, answer questions, make predictions, and reach goals.) Social media analytics looks at data around performance, audience, and sentiment, and can help social media professionals, such as social media marketers or social media managers, make informed decisions about how they should respond to customers, promote content, and target audiences. 

To fully understand your team's social media analytics, you'll need tools developed to leverage data from your social media platforms and social conversations. The function of social media analytics is to use the data, moving beyond the basics of how many likes a post received into why it garnered that many. Social media analytics helps organizations learn how customers truly feel about your brand so that you can create an effective strategy to meet your goals, whether it be reputation, sales, or customer experience. 

Why is social media analytics important?

As with so many aspects of business these days, having quantifiable data can help you make more informed decisions about your social media marketing plan, campaigns, and more. Let's look at some of the common uses for social media analytics:

• Social media strategy: Social media analytics helps you make informed decisions about strategies based on which ones are working and which are not, maximizing your strategic efforts.  

• Social media ROI: Social media analytics give you in-depth insight into your key performance indicators to see where your campaign efforts can improve to maximize the ROI of each social post. 

• Sentiment: Brand loyalty and brand goodwill help drive sales while keeping your customer acquisition costs low. You can use social media analytics tools to perform a sentiment analysis and better understand how users feel about your brand, products, and services.

• Identifying trends: Social media is often a channel dedicated to timely conversations, and social media analytics can help you identify any trends that your company may want to capitalize on—or avoid (if it doesn't suit the brand).

Social media analytics: 6 key metrics

Metrics are quantifiable ways to measure performance and success. Using social media analytics tools to understand key social media metrics can help you develop successful initiatives. Let's look at some of the important metrics you'd want to understand in social media analytics.

1. Performance

Performance metrics offer insight into the performance of a social media campaign through interactions, click-through rates, and follower increases. Another metric is reach, which tells you how many accounts see your content on their timeline or feed. Reach is an important metric to hit, as the more people view your content, the more chances you give for interaction or engagement. 

2. Audience

Audience analytics detail who views your social media channels and how they engage with them. Social media analytics often use segmentation to break your audience into demographics such as location, interests, age, gender, and life stages. Doing so allows you to define your target audience—those who will engage with your content. Defining your target audience is as new analytics tools help you predict audience behavior and save budget on paid ads that go directly to your defined audience. 

3. Sentiment

This type of social media analysis uses natural language processing to measure the tone of audience comments and about your brand. It analyzes how positive, negative, or neutral the conversation around your brand is. This metric is useful in seeing the decline in enthusiasm for a particular campaign through its analysis of the language or lack thereof, allowing you to pivot your marketing efforts elsewhere. 

4. Competitor

Competitor analytics uses performance metrics from across all competitors in a specific industry to create a baseline for social media strategies. It shows directly how you compare to those attempting similar campaigns as yours and how audiences engage with your competitor’s brand, giving insight into how your social media strategies can improve.

5. Paid social

Paid social media advertisement is a risky endeavor that can lead to a waste of resources if your goals are not met. However, paid social analytics help you decide which content has the best chance of success. Metrics show a variety of analytics on the engagement and clicks your ad spend dollars get you by breaking it down into a series of logical metrics, starting with your total ad spend and click-through rate to your cost-per-click and cost-per-purchase. 

6. Influencers

As social media analytics use segmentation to define a target audience, influencer analytics help you find which influencers can best help your brand. Influencer analytics also help you see the past success of a campaign run with an influencer by showing you their audience and posting schedule. These metrics show the influencer’s reach and engagement with previous campaigns.   

Social media analytics tools

You'll use social media monitoring and analytics tools to begin collecting data from your social media channels and producing reports that will improve your efforts. The programs and platforms below are among the more popular and common options:

• Hootsuite

• Sprout Social

• Buffer

• Keyhole

• Statusbrew

• RivalIQ

• Instagram Insights

How to pick the right social media listening and analytics tool for your needs

Social media listening and analytics tools come with different capabilities, features, and pricing structures. First, it's important to understand what your budget will be to purchase access to any of the tools above. From there, you can narrow down your options and begin investigating the various functionalities.

Here are some things to keep in mind:

• What type of channels they track: While most tools track all social media platforms, that's not always the case and it's good to verify you will be able to monitor the channels you're currently active on.

• What you'd like to track: Make sure that the tool you're considering can monitor the key metrics mentioned above, factors like performance, audience, sentiment, and competitors. Beyond that, identify what it is you'd like to be tracking about your social media campaigns and posts, and spend time researching the best tools to achieve your goals.

• Any additional functionalities you'll need: Some platforms offer features like keyword research, trends, content competition so you can see how your posts are doing compared to your major competitors. Again, these features are not always standard, so it's important to understand anything else you'll want to be measuring and make sure the tool you're interested in licensing has that capability.

Learn how to deepen customer understanding and precision targeting with AI in the Microsoft Copilot for Marketing Specialization. Over three courses, you'll learn how to use the power of AI to conduct in-depth market research and design personalized customer experiences.

How to work with social media analytics

Once you have a tool to help you collect key metrics around your social media channels, you can begin working with social media analytics. Here are a few steps your organization can use to maximize your social media ROI:

1. Create goals and collect social media data.

Create social media goals on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis. Do you want to grow followers? Or increase engagement? Understanding what it is you seek to achieve in a timebound manner will make it much easier to measure your success.

2. Focus on your audience.

Social media analytics is vital to making the customer experience as easy as possible. You can use audience analytics to hone in on your target audience to ensure your social media reaches potential customers. Sentiment analysis helps you see your brand’s reception online and areas for improvement.

3. Engage in continual improvement.

It’s essential to stay on top of trends and reduce ad spend waste. Continually generating in-depth social media reports and viewing analytics in real time will show you how close you are to reaching your benchmarks. 

Build your social media analytics skills through Coursera

Build and strengthen your social media analytics skills—and social media marketing skills—through Coursera.

• Create impactful network visualizations and interventions to understand and influence social dynamics with the four-course Johns Hopkins Social Media Analytics Specialization.

• Develop effective social media posts and create a strong social media brand presence with the six-course Meta Social Media Marketing Professional Certificate.

• Or learn engagement and nurture strategies with the six-course Northwestern Social Media Marketing Specialization.