Over 85% of companies use social media insights as their main business insights, largely because there are over 4.6 MILLION people on social media. These facts make social media a necessity for growing your business. However, social media is nothing with a strategy. How do you come up with this? RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS!
Social media analytics help you in several areas:
Understanding your audience better
By researching your competitors on social media and seeing what they are doing, you get a better idea of how you can appeal to that same audience. If your competitors are getting great engagement, consider using their strategy as a template. However, if there is no engagement, you know you have to try a different tactic.
Create content you know your audience will respond to
Social users will very likely respond well to brands they feel they align with; so after you have identified your brand and audience, you have to make sure your content portrays that as well.
Improve market positioning
Through competitive analysis, you will be able to determine what is working in your marketing strategy and what isn’t. Doing this will empower you to improve your overall strategy and differentiate your brand from competitors.
Overall better social strategy
Utilizing analytics allows you to better understand your methods against competitors, which in turn allows you to identify gaps in your strategy that you can work to close.
At this point, I am sure you are thinking, “Great! How do I do this?” We are here to walk you through it.
Know Your Competitors
To understand what your competitors are doing, you have to first know who they are. The good news is it is relatively easy to find them. You can do a Google or social media search for your product or service and see who comes up; you can also use online tools like Moz’s free research tool to help you identify who you are competing against.
Understand your KPIs
To grow, you need to know how you are tracking in terms of reaching your goals. How can you do this if you do not know what your goals are? Do you want to increase your follower count? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Questions like these will determine how you market yourself. SMART goals are a great place to start when setting key performance indicators.
Create a Strategy
You need to know what you are going to do in order to get to where you want to be; your KPIs help you identify if you are on the right track, but a strategy helps you know what steps to actually take. A great way to start a strategy is through a SWOT analysis. For those of you who are not familiar with a SWOT analysis, this is where you identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Be sure when you are completing your analysis that you take the time to really think about your brand, what you want it to be, and what it actually looks like. After you have done this, you can start laying the roadmap for what you plan to do to overcome your weaknesses and neutralize threats. You can ask questions like, “how will I produce content?” or “what keywords do I want to use?” These are great places to start.
Analyze Your Data Constantly
There is so much data out there, especially with social media. You can look at followers, likes, comments, reach and impressions, and so on. These are all great resources for tracking your performance.
There is a lot more to a true, in-depth social media strategy, but this is a good place to start. If you find yourself struggling with your social media, feel free to reach out to us! We are ready to help you GROW! Give us a call or shoot us a message today!
