With endless consumer data available on social media, social media analytics have become critical in breaking down competitive and product research, and audience analysis.
The core of social media analytics is the gathering and analyzing of audience and marketing data, which can then base a brand’s decisions going forward. By accessing insights to their social media content, a business can optimize their marketing efforts and, eventually, their product strategy.
What are social media analytics?
Social media analytics are a critical component to a brand’s online presence and success because they can determine any trends that are relevant to the brand, what the audience expects from the brand’s content and messaging, whether a campaign on various social media platforms is quantifiable and how content is being perceived to competitors. Most of all, it helps answer one of the most important questions in the realm of social media: is your strategy working in favor of your brand?
If you’re wondering why it’s *this* significant to a brand’s successful digital presence, it’s because without measuring or analyzing your content and its performance, there is no way to know how to improve your desired results, or even understand why the data you’ve gathered is good or bad.
Measuring the right metrics
Looking at the full picture is a great way to develop a social media strategy. Ways to do so are looking into “vanity metrics,” which can include number of shares, likes or retweets. Vanity metrics helps access both basic engagement as well as any campaign performances.
“Social Media or User Engagement,” is probably something you’ve heard before— and probably often by those who are active on social. It’s essentially an umbrella category that determines how engaged your audience is. It’s basically how much users are interacting with your posts and account, and how often. The following are different types of engagement metrics:
- Vanity metrics include likes, comments, shares and retweets
- Engagement rate (The number of engagements divided by impressions. The higher the rate, the more users are interacting with it)
- Organic mentions (@mentions that aren’t part of a reply on a post or story)
Taking several metrics into account when analyzing user-data can be a great way to learn more about what your audience finds interesting and how you can use that to meet your goals. Analytics are important because they tell you if your social media strategy is successful over time.
Accessing the Data
Once you know what analytics are and why they are important, the next step is figuring out how to access the data. Currently, most social media platforms have some version of a tool that can help a person or brand analyze their content. Free social media tools can vary from Facebook to YouTube.
Facebook, for instance, has the free tool, “Insights” for those who run Business Pages, which offers metrics such as profile analytics, likes, engagement, reach and other metrics for up to a month.
Twitter’s Analytics offers viewers a snapshot at their tweet impressions, mentions and profile visits. Other platforms that offer some level of built-in social media and analytics dashboards are Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn— each with the goal of providing valuable insights to help provide informed and insightful planning and decision making on a brand’s behalf.
The Target Effect
Target is a good example of knowing what works for the brand on social media over a long period of time. I, like a lot of 20-something millennials, love Target. The stores are pretty, it feels inviting, the aisles are always clean and the merchandise is well-organized. It’s enjoyable to not only shop at, but browse through for hours (and why I always end up spending more than I planned for).
While I’m a loyal shopper and therefore follower on social media, I don’t necessarily follow the brand for any possible deals or to see what new partnerships they have. I follow the brand online because they know who their audience is and are great at posting relevant and genuinely enjoyable content for us on their pages.
For those who follow them, Target’s social media platforms are more than just company announcements and promos, it’s more about them relating to their audience and customers first. It’s also easy to see that Target knows who their audience is because of the way they interact with their audience and how they post fun and friendly replies to users who comment on their pages.
Their Instagram, for instance, is filled with both shared images from customers as well as promoted content from their influencers, both of which drive engagement and do pretty well.
Target’s Twitter account has in-trend memes, a conversational tone and voice, and posts tailored to everyone’s favorite guilty-pleasure, the #TargetRun. They do a great job of remaining relevant and post what is most likely to catch their audience’s attention. In looking at their public metrics, it’s apparent that their social media strategy is extremely effective at keeping the audience engaged.
On Twitter, the brand posts about once per day. It’s rare that they post about products or specific items they’re selling at their stores. Instead, they lean into their online reputation so their content is more of a vibe. Even by just tweeting text with no accompanying images, videos or graphics, they’re able to amass thousands of likes and hundreds replies on each post.
So, is their social media strategy effective? Short answer: It seems to be.
A Social Media Analysis
On Thursday, August 19, 2021 at 12:01 PM, Target tweeted a single text post with no graphic, photo or image. It had no hashtag or link. It was simply a post with text. Even so, it received more than 1,100 replies, 1,523 likes, 122 retweets and 139 quote tweets.
The post had a single call to action: Tell us what you’d like to see at our stores, and followers delivered with engaging responses. With more than 1,100 replies, users were able to share what they thought could make Target better, and Target reciprocated by engaging with those who responded and replied to dozens of users.
It was also tweeted around the time most people take lunch, which gives them time to unwind and check their platforms before clocking back in. What’s interesting about Target’s posts, is that by going back through dozens of their posts, their one tweet a day is usually posted between 11-2 PM, which gives those who are taking a break from work the ideal content to engage with during their short time off.
In comparison to some of their other posts with links, gifs, videos, photos, graphics or any other media, their text posts also seem to do better, which looks like an outlier for this day and age, where media, specifically video, is generally favored.
While someone outside of the Target community wouldn’t think anything of a retailer asking customers what aisle they’d most like to see at their stores, it’s interesting to see how this tweet was able to make an impact on its audience. Scrolling through the post, it’s evident that the replies were positive and from users who genuinely like engaging with the brand.
It’s fascinating to see just how much data can be analyzed on social media from an outside observer. By just scrolling through Target’s vanity metrics, I was able to learn about what the brand is doing to be successful on their social media platforms. I can imagine how detailed their own data, analytics, insights and information they’ve gathered from their own posts are and how much of that information they’ve used to create successful content and social media campaigns.
References:
Chen, J. (2021, July 30). The most important social media metrics to track. Sprout Social. https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-metrics/.
Crawford, C. (2021). Social media ANALYTICS: The Complete Guide. Socialbakers.com. https://www.socialbakers.com/blog/social-media-analytics-the-complete-guide.
Driver, S. (2018). Understanding social media analytics. Business News Daily. https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/10694-understanding-social-media-analytics.html.
Hexagon, C. (2021). What is social Media Analytics? Crimson Hexagon. https://web.archive.org/web/20181204130049/https://www.crimsonhexagon.com/blog/what-is-social-media-analytics/.