3 Reasons Why Your Social Media Strategy Is Incomplete Without Analytics

Manish Arora

Social Media is no longer a novel space for marketers although it continues to evolve itself with times. However many businesses haven’t successfully kept up with the evolution of social media and are still stuck in what some have called as Social Media 1.0.

Often businesses feel that the main objective of their presence on Social Media Platforms is to showcase their products and services. The term Social Media Marketing has been hijacked to imply “promotion” and as any marketer will tell you: promotion is one significant but small part of marketing.

In order to realize the promise of Social Media businesses should look at it as a tactical choice available to them in order to realize corporate objectives: grow revenue, cut costs, improve customer experience, create new products/services, etc.

In this post, I want to make three simple arguments to assert that businesses will be able to formulate a more effective social media strategy by incorporating analytics into it.

1. Better understanding of customers:

Often businesses go no deeper than looking at the top level metrics such as “Number of Likes/Followers”, “Number of Shares”, etc. While relevant at a macro level, these metrics hardly help you understand your customers. You ought to dig deeper and understand who your customers are: whether they are men or women, their interests, how they engage with you over Social Media, etc.

For example, a simple demographic analysis of your audience may be able to help you determine what kind of product label is likely to work well with your products.

2. Richer conversations:

Today, most businesses realize the importance of two-way conversations on Social Media but that is not what I mean by richer conversations.

Imagine, you are having a conversation with someone while your eyes are closed. Does that make you feel uneasy? Most, if not all, people will find it difficult because they are unable to pick up non-verbal cues such as the other person nodding, looking at his watch while pretending to listen, and so on.

Yet, this is what businesses do when it comes to managing their Social Media presence. They miss the equivalent of “non verbal cues” or things that need to be heard but are not explicitly said.

In a recent project, we showed our client how his business could gain by breaking longer videos (lower engagement for client’s video channel) into shorter videos. We could build this insight by looking at the impact of video duration on engagement rates.

3. Superior ROI:

Spend on Digital Marketing, and in particular Social Media, is on the rise and it is of paramount importance to ensure that there is a solid return on this investment. It is almost impossible for businesses to measure and improve ROI on Social Media unless they leverage analytics to understand what is working and what is not.

For example, a number of businesses spend their social media budget on “influencers”. Often, influencers quote things such as the number of followers that they have on Twitter to demonstrate how “influential” they are. Yet, not all influencers may be valuable for your business. Using analytics, you can quickly distinguish a relevant influencer from an irrelevant influencer.

To sum it all up, businesses need to adapt their approaches to Social Media as it evolves. Leveraging analytics is a key aspect of utilizing Social Media and it is something that all businesses, big and small, can benefit from.

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