What Is Social Media Analytics and Why Is It Important

Social Media Analytics refers to the approach of collecting data from social media sites and
blogs and evaluating that data to make business decisions. This process goes beyond the usual
monitoring or a basic analysis of retweets or ‘likes’ to develop an in-depth idea of the social
consumer.”

Social media sites do not encompasses just Facebook, Twitter, and the like, but forums and
review sites as well as blogs and news outlets.

Reasons for using social Media Analytics

 It helps for understand audience

Social Media analytics help to understand your audience For example, analyzing your past posts
can help you find your unique best time to share. Timing is a very important part of social media
marketing. If you post when your fans are online and at their highest level of alertness your posts
will drive more engagement, traffic and sales.

 Show which one is Best Social Media Network

Not all social Media networks will work perfectly for all business. Just because Facebook has
over 2 billion users and Instagram has over 800 million users doesn’t mean they will drive the
best results. There might be smaller networks like Pinterest or Flickr that can help execute your
strategy better. Social Medial Analytics help for identification of best social media for our target
Audience. It helps us to design social media strategies based upon that company can select best
social media network for their product and prioritize timing for each social media website.

 It helps for creating better content

Using social media analytics, we can understand what content drives the better result. It will help
us to understand which marketing campaign works better. It will give us an idea whether images,
links or video do better. Many social Media networks provide inbuilt analytics tools that show
what type of media perform best.
 Help for understanding Competitors
Social media analytics help you to understand competitors’ marketing strategies. Analyzing
competitors’ data, we will be able to figure out what is working and what isn’t. It will help you
avoid the mistakes they are making and only focus on techniques that bring results.
 How social media campaign is performing
Once we launch a social media campaign, we are able to track it regularly. You can check if it is
panning out the way you intended it to. If things aren’t going according to plan you can make
changes to your campaign and rectify it. And if the results are very damaging you can nip it in
the bud.

Dr. Preyal Sanghavi

Associate Professor
R.B.Institute of Management Studies