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Unlike other marketing or branding channels like Email, influencers, or podcasts, social media has a highly personal, real-time, and interactive nature.
In short, once you post social media content, people can respond directly, engage in conversations right in the comment section, or resolve issues with your brand in real-time. That’s why brands prefer social media for community building to understand customers better, track brand reputation, monitor competitors, and more.
If you are just starting out with social media marketing or branding, here is how you can make the most out of the most used social media data.
What is the Most Used Social Media Data?
Simply put, social media data includes observable or measurable data points that come from people posting and interacting on various social media platforms like X or Instagram. These data points include likes, comments, dislikes, tags, shares, and more.
To ease the process of making strategic decisions from analyzing these data points, we often group them. Sometimes, we may just work with one data point. Here are five of the most used social media data you should know:
1. Engagement data
At the top, we have engagement data. This is the most used data because it reflects active audience participation. You post and people comment, like, click, save, or share. That’s engagement!
High engagement means your post resonates with the target audience, either positively or negatively.
Remember, consistent engagement signals an active or loyal community. If most of the engagement is negative, it is your responsibility to work on what the audience dislikes. If it is positive, work on consistently delivering and improving your service or product.
2. Reach and impressions
Want to know how widely a specific social media platform distributes your content? Focus on reach and impressions.
Reach is a measure of the number of unique people who’ve seen your content. If one person sees your content multiple times, they’re only counted once.
Impressions, on the other hand, is a measure of the total number of times people view your content. Even if someone views your content repeatedly, each view counts.
Reach and impressions come in handy whenever you are running a brand awareness campaign. You can also obtain reach and impressions social media data from third-party providers to help with tracking competitor growth trends.
3. Follower growth
To know how fast your audience is expanding or shrinking, focus on follower growth data. You look into metrics like follower growth percentage, unfollows, and net new followers.
Keeping an eye on follower growth helps you spot what posts are bringing in more followers. You study the posts and replicate them to attract more followers, enhancing brand trust and authority.
Moreover, analyzing follower growth per platform can tell which platform to focus on. Rapid growth on a specific platform means that most of your ideal target audience is on that platform. This way, you not only save on marketing costs, but you also know where to invest more time and resources.
4. Click through rate (CTR) and Conversion rate (CR)
Whenever your posts aim to compel people to take action, CTR and CR can tell you what’s going on.
CTR refers to the number of people who view your content and get interested to the point of clicking that call-to-action button or link. CR refers to those who follow the steps in place and complete the desired action. Both data are measured in percentage.
Click Through Rate (CTR) = Clicks/Impressions *100
CR = Conversions/Clicks * 100
CTR percentage tells how persuasive your message was. CR, on the other hand, tells how well your offer, funnel, or landing page converts interest into action.
Great CTR and CR shows that you are reaching the right people. If the percentages are low, you need to study how people are engaging with your content to identify where the issue is at.
5. Demographics
Some social media platforms like Facebook and X do have analytics tools that collect demographic data. This includes, location, language, income level, occupation, education, and age. All these data points describe your audience, helping you determine whether your posts are attracting the right audience.
Knowing the traits of your audience helps with tailoring content to their needs and interests. The more you appeal to their needs, the higher the chances of you getting more followers and identifying opportunities or gaps in the market.
Demographics data also helps with Ad personalization, especially if you are running a brick and motor business. You group the target audience based on their characteristics, positioning each Ad correctly.
New to Social Media Data? Don’t Fall Into These Traps
1. No clear sense of direction
When you are just starting out with social media marketing, it is pretty tempting to just start posting and collecting data for analysis. You all of a sudden want to track everything.
To avoid wasting time and resources, always have a clear social media marketing strategy. And, within the strategy, define what data you’ll collect and why collecting and analyzing that data is essential.
2. Overlooking platform differences
Social media platforms structure user interactions differently. So, don’t assume metrics and audience behavior on TikTok and X are interchangeable.
Avoid ending up with misleading insights, wasted resources, and missed opportunities by having unique strategies for each platform. Understand a platform and determine what data points you want to track. Then, compare performance across platforms to find what works for your brand.
3. Focusing only on positive data
Like posting and collecting social media data for analysis without clear objectives, it is also tempting to get excited about positive results and ignore the negative data.
Negative data can be overwhelming and discouraging. However, it is essential to track both sides to avoid bigger issues. A small issue like customer dissatisfaction can escalate to many customers unfollowing your brand simply because you decided to ignore the data.
4. Waiting too long to act on insights
As highlighted, social media is highly personal. If you respond slowly, fail to spot performance shifts, or don’t catch trends in time, you miss out on opportunities.
So, set clear data collection and analysis timelines, alongside clear decision deadlines. Acting on insights quickly sustains your brand’s relevance and boosts brand loyalty.
5. Ignoring emotional cues from your target audience
As a beginner, you are more likely to prioritize hard metrics and ignore audience feelings. This may erode brand trust and loyalty because people feel like they are just but another number to your brand.
Embrace sentiment analysis to understand how your audience feels about your products or services. Emotional cues appear in shares, comments, and reactions. Look through such data to gauge audience emotions and respond thoughtfully.
Wrapping Up!
Thanks to social media data, you can identify trends early, improve marketing, track brand reputation, understand customer behavior, and more. However, few know where to start from.
If you are a beginner, this piece takes you through the five most used social media data. As you delve into each, practically, don’t forget the beginner pitfalls. Avoid those beginner mistakes to optimize time and resource usage.