Determining your goal is one of the most critical steps in developing a social media strategy. A goal enables you to have a plan for how you want to reach it. However, after setting the goal, you must also monitor your metrics to determine if you are progressing.

To determine your ROI, you need to check your social media analytics. The good news is that most social media platforms have their analytics tools to enable you to monitor your performance. In this article, we will take you through the importance of social media analytics and provide insights into the key metrics you should be paying attention to. We will also guide you on top social media metrics.

What is Social Media Analytics?

Social media analytics is a tool for collecting data and metrics that will show you the overall performance of your social media accounts. This data is essential as it helps social media managers and marketers understand if their campaigns resonate with their audience and shape and adapt their strategy accordingly.

The tool analyzes various social media metrics, such as shares, likes, comments, and clicks, and translates this data into insights. This helps it provide a clear picture of the strategies that are working and those that aren't. It will also show you how your team ranks in the digital arena.

Most tools come with intuitive dashboards and data visualization methods to help users decode their performance on social media platforms. They can track the growth of your social media account, create reports, and enable you to make data-driven decisions.

By reviewing the social norms, teams can make more informed, data-driven decisions about changing their marketing efforts and taking their businesses to the next level. Social media managers can use native tools on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, X, and TikTok to track their analysis or third-party management tools such as HootSuite or Sprout Social.

Why Social Media Analytics is Important

Social media analytics aims to help users with a wide range of tasks such as getting ideas for their content and planning their campaigns. That said, there are several benefits of social media analytics, such as:

Trendspotting

A key social media strategy involves staying on top of trends. With social media analytics, marketers can quickly determine upcoming trends such as:

• The platforms that are becoming more or less popular.
• Interesting topics that your audiences are discussing and if they are mentioning your brand in their conversations.
• Ads that your audience finds attractive.
• Upcoming products and influencers in your niche.
• What your audience is engaging with.

Appropriately analyzing your social media analytics can quickly determine the kind of content you should post more, its growing popularity, and what your audience wants to see more.

Measure Your Brand Sentiments

Brand sentiments refer to people’s online perception of your brand and could be positive, negative, or neutral. Checking your social media analytics can help you measure your brand's sentiments. You can quickly determine if you have a happy audience and discover opportunities to solve customer’s problems. This can also help you find new business opportunities.

For example, sentiment analytics can help you determine if your customers are asking similar questions about product features. You can, therefore, update your help center or FAQ page. You can also combine sentiment analysis with competitor analysis to find new competitors and topics your customers are buzzing about that you hadn't considered before.

Social Media Goal-setting

Another benefit of social media analytics is that it can help you improve the content and channels performing well. You can then use that data to create some realistic, actionable goals. For instance, you might look at your social media analytics reports and discover that your account is growing with 20 followers every week. That means it might not be realistic to try and grow your account by 1000 followers weekly. On the other hand, it would be realistic to have a goal of 20 followers every week and keep growing your goal from that place.

Proving Your ROI

Social media analytics are also an excellent choice for helping to prove the ROI of your social media marketing goals. Every time you run a new campaign, you need to check your analytics to see the performance of your content, the click-through rate of your site, and whether you are making new sales. Social media analytics enables you to measure your ROI quickly.

Value Perception

Also referred to as perceived value, value perception is customers' opinions about your brand's products or services and whether they meet their needs. You can use perceived value to determine whether your brand has value and the price at which the product is selling. For instance, a product with a low perceived value means customers may only be willing to pay a low cost.

Social listening tools are an excellent choice for measuring value perception. You can monitor data from tools such as Google Analytics to see the value perception. Then, you can use this data to create relevant content and increase value perception by showing how your product or service addresses the customer’s pain points.

Different Kinds of Social Media Analytics

You can track different kinds of social media analytics, such as:

Performance Analysis

Regardless of your social media goal, you want to measure whether your strategies work. You can look at social media metrics such as impressions, likes, comments, reach, views, clicks, and shares. Most of the social media tools will show you these metrics. You can, therefore, quickly determine if your content is performing well or if you need to change your content strategy. You can also quickly determine the kind of content that your audience loves.

Audience Analytics

Another critical data you need to pay attention to is Audience Analytics. This can give you a good view of the demographic your audience is reaching and whether your content is reaching your target audience. If not, you can change your content strategy to meet your audience's needs. Some of the data you will see under audience analytics are age, gender, location, and device. Third-party tools such as Sprout Social will provide you with extra audience data related to your industry that you can use to create a customer profile.

Competitors Analysis

You need to check the performance of your competitors on social media by looking into different data, such as the number of followers they have, their engagement rate, and the number of people engaging with their posts. You can compare this data with your site to see how well it stacks up against competitors. It will also help you to set up a more realistic goal. You can leverage third-party tools to see this data in one place. If your competitors are performing better than you, you can adjust your social media strategy to tap into any opportunity gaps.

Using Paid Social Media Analysis

You must ensure ads bring the desired results as part of your social media strategy. That’s why you need to watch your paid social analytics. You can measure different analytics, such as:

• Number of active ads
• Number of clicks
• Clicks
• Cost per click
• Ad spend
• Cost per action
• Conversion rate

If you run your ads on different platforms, each will have a dashboard providing all the necessary information. However, you can also put the information on a spreadsheet to track the ad spend and total ads.

Influencer Analysis

This is a great metric to track for marketers working in collaboration with influencer marketers as it helps them track the success of their campaigns or the ROI. When doing influencer analysis, you can track various data such as:

• The number of posts the influencer created.
• Interaction on the influencer's posts.
• Influencer’s audience size.
• Whether they are using hashtags and engagement.

This data can provide essential insights into the engagement of the influencer marketing campaign. If you are in an affiliate marketing program, you can use promo codes of the individual influencer to enable teams to track the number of sales each partner is driving.

Sentiment Analysis

Finally, you can also track sentiment analysis. As the name suggests, you will track customers' views about your brand and can even take it further by digging deeper into social listening to determine the actual brand connotation. This analysis will provide significant insights into how customers feel about your brand and the topics and keywords they use.

Top 5 Best Social Media Analysis Tools

Now that you understand social media analytics, let us look at the best tools available. Remember that the best tool for your needs is the one that is best suited for it.

HootSuite

HootSuite is a social media analytics tool designed to provide social media users with a complete picture of the results of their social media marketing plans. It has an all-in-one dashboard where you can manage and analyze your social media channels. It also has an advanced reporting feature that provides clear insights into your campaigns. Some of the top  features of Hootsuite are:

• Advanced ROI analytics. You can use this feature to quickly show the value of social media and tailor the different metrics to your social media goal. You can also analyze website traffic and compare the performance of organic and paid posts.
• Optimal posting time. You can enhance the performance of your social media posts by posting at the best time as long as audience activity insights guide you.
• OwlyWriters AI is an excellent tool for saving your content creation efforts. It can repurpose social media posts, enhancing efficiency and adaptability in your social media content strategy.
• Consolidated reporting. Advanced Analytics makes it easy for you to track data across different social media sites. This can enhance the customer journey from social media to your site.

You can use HootSuite to compare your performance with that of your competitors. It will provide you with essential data on the best posting time to align your schedule with when your competitors are mostly online. This makes aligning your business with your social media marketing plan possible.

Zoho Social

Zoho Analytics is an excellent tool for tracking, visualizing, and analyzing social media activity without hassles. It has excellent features such as activity analysis, which enables you to track peak engagement periods, and ad analysis for a higher advertising ROI. It provides important insights such as engagement analysis and competitor analysis.

The tool has a user-friendly dashboard that shows the profile analytics and provides a detailed profile overview and follower insights to understand your audience better. You can use the tool to get better insights into your audience's preferences, post evaluations, and performance of your ads. The tool will also enable you to monitor your competition easily.  Some of the top features of the tool are:

• Collaborative analytics. Zoho Social supports teamwork, as you can collectively analyze your social media data with marketing teams to provide shared insights.
• Prebuilt visualization. The tool has 75 pre-built dashboards and reports providing unmatched performance insights.
• AI analytical assistance. The Zia AI-powered feature will provide instant answers using intuitive reporting and KPI widgets. All you need to do is type your question.

Sprinklr

We rank Sprinklr among our top five social media tools because it combines data integration and AI-driven insights from over 30 social media platforms. It also has a library of over 75K pre-customized queries to provide fast results without a large setup.

When using Sprinkler, you can be guaranteed better insights from different channels, providing a more competitive edge for the user. It integrates all your data to provide a holistic view and advanced analytics. The tool will enable you to analyze over 500 million digital conversations to offer great insights into your brand, customers, and competition level. You can, therefore, use it for fast and well-informed decision-making. Some of the top features of the tool are:

• Visual reports in real-time. Sprinkler provides you with prompt reports on customer conversations for over 30 platforms.
• Custom dashboard and automated reporting. The automated reporting and custom dashboard will enable you to save time and collaborate seamlessly with your team members.
• Platform integrations. The analytics integrates with social media platforms such as Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, providing comprehensive insights from your multiple channel optimization.

MeltWater

MeltWater is another excellent social media analytics tool that provides essential insights from different business platforms, such as product development, marketing, investor relations, customer service, and employer branding. The tool offers real-time data from various social media platforms, review sites, blogs, forums, online news media, and podcasts.

Other great features of the tool are competitor benchmarking, sentiment tracking, trend analysis, emotional analysis, top channel identification, audience affinities, and influencer analysis. Some of the top features of the tool are:

• Competitor analysis. The tool enables you to benchmark your performance against competitors by quickly analyzing brand sentiments, mentions, and other marketing metrics to provide a more refined marketing strategy.
• Audience profiling. The tool features a sophisticated algorithm that enables you to analyze the audience. It can reveal specific demographic details, including brand following, influencer following, and the most popular social media platform for your audience.
• Trend Analysis. The tool allows you to leverage trendlines to understand an underlying topic theme and its popularity over time, providing deeper insights into the market dynamics. It can be a great feature that enables you to understand popular trends on TikTok.
• Customized dashboard/ reporting. The custom dashboard provides better flexibility, providing historical data on demand and exporting insights using an API tailored to your business's unique needs.

SOCi

Another integrated analytics that provides all your metrics in one place is SOCi. It has a wide range of tools to enable businesses to manage their presence on social media. These include management software, chatbot software, and analytics software. It also provides you with all the essential metrics for your social media campaigns on different platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, X, and Google My Business. The platform has a white-label and customizable reporting option, allowing users to create impressive reports for their teams and clients.

Additionally, with the reporting and insights from SOCi, you are assured of some actionable and real-time insights into different solutions. This allows users to analyze their account, location, and group data. Some of the top features of the tool are:

• SOCi listening. This feature enables you to track social media conversations, leverage user-generated content, and manage crises.
• Reporting suite. Provides you with actionable and real-time insights across different solutions 
• Industry trends and competitor analysis. This tool offers insights into some benchmarking strategies while optimizing your social media approach to suit the current market trends.

Conclusion

Social media analytics are great tools for showing key social media metrics and analyzing the performance of your social media marketing campaigns. Without a social media analytics tool, monitoring, tracking, and understanding the information in posts, comments, and shares can be tricky. If you're getting started with these essential tools and don't know which one to choose, you can consider using one of the tools above. We recommend you read our guide on the role of business analytics in digital marketing.