How To Use Social Media Insights

Social media takes an important role in any organization’s strategy to improve growth, increase brand awareness, and engage with their community in a meaningful way. Social media insights provide organizations with crucial knowledge to take it further, enabling their marketing teams to create a personalized social media experience for their audience and pave the way to future strategies.

What are Social Media Insights?

Social media insights are consumer insights from social media channels. Those insights help analyze human behaviors such as habits, interests, demographics (age-gender-location), and needs to enable marketers to gain a deeper understanding of their audience and build effective marketing campaigns. Social media analytics tools can provide marketers with additional complex insights such as key performance indicators (KPI), a quantifiable way to measure performance over time for a specific objective.

How Important Are Social Media Insights in Organizations?

High-quality social media insights offer businesses a data roadmap to help improve their social media marketing efforts and get impactful results. Organizations using social media listening can track if their social media strategy is on the right path and adjust as necessary to make proper decisions for future marketing campaigns.

Benefits of Leveraging Social Media Insights

The benefits for businesses integrating social media insights in their marketing strategy range from identifying trends and improving content creation to understanding customers and tracking performance. Here are our top 5 ways your business can use social media insights to grow and improve your business.

Understand your customers

Social media insights will help your organization understand your audience and how they interact online. This way, your marketing strategy can target customer interests with a personalized experience that is more likely to catch their attention amongst all content available on social networks.

Find out which social media channels are best for your business

Each social media platform is important for your business as it introduces your brand to new audiences. Some channels might be more beneficial than others for your organization — TikTok is wildly different from Reddit, for example. Social media insights will help your brand sweep through the data to find out what social media channels work best for your audience and your brand.

Improve your content creation

Customers are exposed to a lot of content on social media on a daily basis. Social media insights help your organization stand out from the content saturation across all social media channels by focusing on social media campaigns and marketing efforts that offer high-quality content, as well as evaluating what content types work best.

Track your performance

Social monitoring tools, sentiment analysis, and real-time social media reporting can help you understand what channels are performing (or not performing). Performance tracking enables you to measure and analyze content performance to know what content appeals to your target audience to facilitate brand growth.

Identify trends

Social media insights can help your brand discover new topics related to your brand and industry (or brand-adjacent topics and hashtags). New trends can help your brand improve its content marketing strategy, reach potential new customers, and strengthen your current customer base.

What Social Media Metrics Should You Be Tracking?

Organizations can easily lose count of what is important amongst all the possible data and metrics they can be tracking. Here are our top 5 social media metrics and analytics to track right now.

Followers and audience growth

Audience growth rate measures the percentage of new followers your organization gained on a specific platform during a specific time period. This metric helps track brand awareness and fine-tune audience targeting strategy.

Impressions, reach, and visibility

These three metrics are vital to understanding how your social media content performs by tracking the number of times your content was displayed, your share of voice, as well as your online conversation visibility and relevance compared to your competitors and your industry.

Engagement metrics

Engagement metrics help your brand track how engaged your audience is with your social media content. Also known as likes, reactions, comments, shares, and retweets, engagement metrics measure social interactions, volume, and frequency as well as the quality of the interactions.

Demographics, interests, and behaviors

Organizations that have success on social media take the time to get to know their audience. This information will facilitate marketing efforts by crafting a personalized content experience aligned with their needs, interests, and social media behaviors.

Social listening and sentiment analysis

Social listening helps you track all mentions, hashtags, keywords, and comments related to your brand to learn more about your audience. The process of sentiment analysis enables you to collect and categorize each conversation about your brand to measure social media success and understand how your brand is perceived online.

6 Ways To Use Social Media Insights in Your Business Strategy

Your social media marketing strategy can benefit from using social media insights in multiple ways such as optimizing content creation, monitoring brand reputation, and identifying influencers, to name a few.

1) Identifying trends and patterns

Social media insights can help your organization track the latest social media trends. These trends and patterns can help you stay relevant with your audience and help inform decisions on future campaigns.

2) Optimizing your content creation

High-quality social media content is an important part of any business strategy. Social media insights can help your brand upgrade its content marketing strategy to stay on top of your competition and retain customers.

3) Identifying optimal posting times

The optimal posting time for each social media platform may vary depending on your audience demographic, content, and industry. Social media metrics can guide you on the best time to post according to the data for maximum effect.

4) Identifying influencers

Social media insights are a great way to identify people in your local community, industry, or market that your audience looks up to and have similar interests. Influencer marketing can lead you to the right people to help you promote your brand on social media.

5) Monitoring brand reputation

Unhappy customers are most likely to share their negative experiences with others. Social media monitoring allows your brand to stay on top of customer sentiment toward your brand, manage the impact on your brand reputation, and reduce the severity of any potential crisis.

6) Optimizing ad campaigns

Organizations can use social media insights to learn about what their audience cares about and what influences their purchase decisions and get real-time feedback from customers, allowing adjustment mid-campaign. The information will help craft more personalized and relevant customer experiences, as well as boost campaign performance.

Top Social Media Analytics Tools to Track the Right Insights

Social media analytics are key to improving any organization’s marketing strategy. Here are our top 5 tools to help you track the right insights for your business growth.

ICUC Social Listening

Social media listening tools can track, analyze, and optimize brand, industry, and competitor mentions to understand when, where, and how your organization is talked about online. Customer satisfaction can also be measured, tracked, and improved with the help of social listening insights. ICUC social listening tools generate campaign leads backed by social listening data across new sites, online publications, social media, and review sites.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free analytics platform that helps keep track of different metrics, from website traffic and ROI of social media campaigns to audience demographics and conversion rates.

Facebook and IG insights

As Meta platforms, Facebook and Instagram insights can be accessed via Meta Business Suite or directly on each platform. Meta Business is a robust reporting tool that can pull data from both platforms side by side to track how your content performs and learn more about your audience.

X (Formerly Twitter) Analytics

Twitter, now known as X, Analytics shows tweet activity, audience demographics, and how your audience responds and engages with your brand content. This data can help your brand see what is working and what could be optimized for future Twitter campaigns.

LinkedIn Analytics

LinkedIn Analytics provides valuable insights on how your audience responds to your organization’s website, content, and overall strategy. Your business can also access a plethora of metrics like page views, impressions, and engagement rate, as well as competitor analytics to see how your brand compares.

Examples of Organizations Using Social Media Insights in Their Strategy

Businesses can benefit greatly from using social media insights to add value to their brand. Here are a few examples of how organizations can implement social media insights in their strategy.

Track progress toward clear goals and make adjustments when needed
Identify which social media accounts are driving traffic and which need improvement
Measure ROI to see if social media marketing efforts are worth pursuing
Connect and identify the right influencers to boost traffic and sales
Understand customer sentiment to provide better customer service and support

Start Gathering Insights From Your Audience With ICUC

Social media insights are undeniable tools to identify trends, understand customers, track performance, and improve content. Your organization can benefit from social media insights to optimize your social strategy and reach your goals.

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