Social media is a core part of most brands’ marketing strategies today. With billions of active users across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and more, social media offers endless opportunities to connect with customers. However, succeeding with social media requires much more than creating posts or buying ads. To truly maximize value, brands need to master social media data collection and analysis.
Monitoring key social media metrics and uncovering insights can help you engage with your audience more effectively, refine your strategy, and ultimately boost your bottom line. This article will provide 11 tips for collecting and analyzing data and implementing it into effective social media strategies that will give you a competitive edge in your digital advertising endeavors. Let’s dive in.
Data collection tips
An effective social media strategy for digital advertising begins with the right approach to data collection. This will help you avoid collecting bad data that can ultimately harm your business. Keep reading to learn the top tips to collect valuable data in an effective way.
Tip 1: Implement social media management platforms
Social media management platforms allow you to easily monitor many social profiles from one dashboard. By using tools such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Quintly, you can publish content, engage with users, and gather data across various networks. These platforms help consolidate your analytics in one place.
Tracking analytics is crucial for a digital advertising strategy to succeed as you need to to know how you’re performing and what changes you can make to boost engagement and brand awareness. In short, social media management tools simplify that process for you.
Social media management tools save time for busy digital advertisers as their analytics hubs are typically structured with clear, simple visuals that help you get a solid grasp of what’s going well, improvements to be made, your audience’s needs and preferences, and the best time to post your advertisements.
You can start by comparing and testing some of these popular tools to help you find the features that suit your business needs and style of work. There are plenty of tutorials online to help you set up an account and start managing your socials from one place.
Tip 2: Leverage APIs for data access
Most social networks offer APIs (application programming interfaces) that allow you to pull data programmatically instead of collecting it manually. This makes large-scale data extraction much simpler. You can use APIs with social listening tools to find mentions, hashtags, keywords, and more. This data will become essential to creating an effective social media digital advertising strategy.
To begin, go to your preferred social media platform and sign up for an API key. With this unique key, you’ll gain access to the platform’s data. Once that’s done, you’ll be able to access various features and data that you can use to create applications that will integrate seamlessly with your chosen social platforms and gain new insights for your business.
If you want to start using APIs from Facebook, you can start by visiting the Meta Marketing API page. This section will teach you about the different ways you can improve your marketing and advertisement on Facebook by using these developer tools.
Tip 3: Track relevant keywords and hashtags
Tracking relevant keywords and hashtags can help you identify terms that drive the most conversions and engagement in your niche. Monitoring these important indicators of digital advertising success over a long period of time will teach you how interests shift in your industry so you can adapt your ads accordingly. It will also reveal new opportunities as the interests of your audience and the market evolve.
To help you track keywords and monitor the performance of your hashtags and keywords over a given period, you can use tools designed for this purpose such as Social Report, Keyhole, Brand24, or even Google Search Console.
To begin tracking relevant keywords and hashtags, you can start by researching your audience. Take notice of the type of content they interact with, the types of problems they wish to solve, and the kinds of topics they discuss and engage with.
Gathering this data will help you craft compelling advertisements with keywords and hashtags that capture your target customers’ attention. You can also take a look at what your competitors are doing and note the type of content that gets the most engagement from their customers.
Tip 4: Monitor brand and product mentions
Building and maintaining a solid reputation is essential for the long-term health of your business. To monitor your reputation, you can set up alerts when people mention your company name or important products and services. This will help you respond quickly to any potential brand reputation issues before they scale.
To start monitoring brand and product mentions, you can use tools such as Social Mention, Tweetdeck, Awario, and Google Alerts. Tools such as these will help you track mentions across social media as well as other types of websites.
When you start monitoring brand and product mentions, make sure to also track variations of your brand and product names, as users might not always search for exact matches. Make sure to track social media mentions, customer reviews, blog post mentions, and even news articles.
Furthermore, gathering this data — particularly if it’s positive in nature — can give your advertising campaign an extra edge if you plan to use customer feedback and testimonials in your content to reassure potential new customers and build credibility.
Tip 5: Save data at regular intervals
Rather than just looking at current social data, make sure to save weekly or monthly analytics snapshots and commit to this practice for the long haul. Comparing performance over time is critical for benchmarking and identifying trends and patterns that will help your ads reach the right people and be more likely to convert.
To begin building a useful archive for your data, start by choosing among the top cloud storage providers in the market, such as Sync.com, pCloud, or even Google Drive if you’re already familiar with it. They all offer different features, pricing options, and privacy settings, so do some research to find the one that’s right for you. Once you select a cloud storage provider, make sure to schedule your backups regularly.
Data Analysis Tips
Once you have a solid data collection strategy in place, it’s important to analyze the data to gather insights that can be translated into concrete actions for your advertising strategy. Keep reading to see our top tips for data analysis to optimize your social media performance.
Tip 6: Evaluate community growth and demographics
Knowing who the customer is is crucial for marketers, so once you’ve started collecting data on community growth and demographics, you’ll start gaining insights into the types of customers that best respond to your brand. The kind of information that you collect will yield different insights that can help you pivot your strategies and distinguish what works from what doesn’t.
To do this, look at the number of followers or fans you have on each platform and take note of how they change over a given period. See who your audience is in terms of age, gender, location, and interests.
With this information, you’ll be able to tailor your ads’ format, language and overall aesthetic to position yourself effectively, for example, by creating a striking ad design based on your target customer’s interests or crafting catchy copy that resonates with your audience. Tracking your demographics gives you a push in the right direction when making these decisions.
There are several tools designed for this purpose. For instance, MailChimp has designed a tool for analytics, reporting, and AI-assisted optimization that also helps predict demographics for your audience to help you reach the right audience. SocialPilot is another tool you can use to track growth and understand your key demographics.
Tip 7: Assess engagement metrics
As you start creating and sharing content regularly on social media, make sure to track actions like post clicks, shares, comments, and likes. Analyzing these metrics will clearly indicate how well you are connecting with your audience. Google Analytics is a great place to start for this. You can also use tools such as Facebook Insights or Twitter Analytics if these are platforms where you do most of your engaging with customers.
To take it a step further, you can start comparing engagement rates across different networks and platforms to identify what type of content works best. For example, if you see that most of your engagement comes from YouTube subscribers but your Instagram posts get much less attention, this may indicate that video advertising is what works best for your brand at the moment.
A situation like this also gives you a heads-up that your ads in other formats — like posts — might need sprucing up in order to reach the right people. Make sure to keep all the data stored and available so you can gain better insights in the long term.
Tip 8: Analyze sentiment and mentions
In addition to knowing who your ideal customer is and what they need, it’s essential to get an idea of how customers feel about what your brand as it stands.
So, aside from monitoring brand mentions, make sure you also pay attention to what people are saying about your brand and whether the general sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral. This will give you vital information about how your brand or products are being perceived by your target audience and prompt you to adjust your social media strategy accordingly.
To help you analyze sentiment and mentions, you can use tools such as Brandwatch, MonkeyLearn, or HubSpot. The top sentiment analysis tools can help you keep track of comments, likes, and shares, and determine the sentiment behind them so you can understand how your audience is responding to your content.
Tip 9: Compare owned, earned, and paid content
An effective social media advertising strategy usually includes a mix of owned, earned, and paid content. Owned refers to any content online that you own, such as your website, blog, or YouTube channel. Earned refers to word of mouth, reviews, or any other content that others create mentioning your brand. Paid content refers to any ads or boosted content.
One type of content may yield better results for you than others. Make sure to analyze the performance of all three and assess the ROI of each one to determine the type of content you should focus on. You can use tools such as Brandwatch to collect relevant data for this purpose.
Tip 10: Conduct competitor analysis
Monitoring your competitors’ social activity and results can teach you much about what works in your industry. Identify what your competitors are doing and compare it to your own strategies and performance. This can reveal content gaps or untapped opportunities.
To begin, you need to identify the top competitors in your field. Gather all the information you can about how they engage with their audience and position themselves and their products. You can even analyze their metrics to see how they perform. But remember, the goal is to gain insights, not to copy what they’re doing. So make sure to also focus on any missed opportunities or gaps that you can leverage to position your own business.
Examples of things to look for in successful competitors’ advertisements include:
- Tone of voice (whether written or spoken)
- Overall aesthetic (color choices, imagery, font, style (i.e. minimalist, clean, bold, etc.)
- Format (videos, posts, etc.)
- How they engage with their target audience (comments, responding to reviews, etc.)
- Other methods of driving engagement (i.e. blog posts, product tutorial videos, etc.)
- The keywords and hashtags they use
There are tools such as Quick Search that are designed to show you the relevant stats for your own business and your competitors, so you can compare and contrast results. You can also use tools such as SE Ranking to understand your competitor’s SEO performance and adjust your own strategies accordingly.
Tip 11: Identify peak posting times
Finally, a simple yet effective way to maximize your reach on social media is to understand when your audience is more likely to engage with your content. Check when your audience is most active on social media and align your posting schedule accordingly. This will probably differ across platforms and geographies.
A bit of trial and error can also help you identify peak posting times, so don’t be afraid to test different strategies and compare your results. This will help you create an optimal posting calendar to maximize engagement and reach across all your platforms.
You can also opt for a tool such as Hootsuite, which has a feature called Best Time to Publish designed specifically to detect the optimal times for you to post on each platform you’re on. Some social media platforms, like YouTube, let you see metrics like when your audience is usually online based on your time zone.
Turning insights into action
Now that we’ve covered tips for collecting and analyzing social data, let’s discuss how to apply these insights strategically to benefit your digital advertising campaign.
Make sure to focus your advertisements based on the topics that are currently resonating with your audience and the values that align with your brand voice and mission. Use demographic and behavioral data to reveal new audience segments to target as well. And remember to gain insights from your competition to seize new opportunities in your market.
Refine your overall advertising strategy based on what content formats and platforms perform best. For example, you may choose to increase video content if you see high engagement levels. Remember to use long-term insights to continue optimizing your approach to content creation.
Finally, remember to monitor your data over a long period of time. Keeping track of how things evolve for your business can help you stay on top of new trends and pivot when necessary.
Conclusion
Implementing an effective social media analytics process to gather data that will level up your advertising game takes some time upfront, but will pay off exponentially. Tracking key metrics will give you the knowledge you need to effectively engage with potential customers, craft campaigns that resonate with your audience, and leverage social media optimally to help your business thrive.
Do you keep track of your social media metrics? Have you implemented any of the tips we mentioned above? Has data collection and analysis helped you grow your business? Let us know by dropping a comment below.
