If you are a digital marketer who understands the value social media can offer a brand, then you probably already have a strategy in place for your social media campaigns. You’ve done your research, decided on tactics, laid out an activity schedule and assigned responsibility to the correct resources. You know who your consumers are, which social platforms they’re using, and what they’re saying about your brand within the social media world. And you’ve also been monitoring and collecting the data from day one. Sounds like a lot, but if that is all you are doing, you could be missing the most important step: using that data to make meaningful changes within your business.
As a data-driven marketer, it’s important to regularly dive into your social media data to not only monitor ongoing activity and better understand sentiment toward your brand, but also to gain insight into what’s working and what isn’t. Measure pre-defined KPIs by assigning value to the various campaigns, platforms and audiences. This makes it easier to point out trends, allowing you to adjust your social activity schedule to include more of what works for your brand while weeding out those aspects that aren’t particularly beneficial.
According to eMarketer, a recent survey collected information from senior US marketers to learn more about how they use data collected through social media monitoring tools to make changes within their businesses. Of those surveyed, 28% said they use it to influence communications strategy, 19% use it to improve customer service, while another 15% use it for media planning purposes. Social media measurement and monitoring are also great tools for improving your SEO. Look at the data to find out what keywords and topics tend to drive the most engagement with your audience, and then implement them into your paid and organic search campaigns. In addition, researchers from a separate study found that collecting and managing social media data through a single source improved campaign targeting and relevance for over 60% of respondents, made it easier to measure and deploy campaigns across multiple channels, and reduced marketing production and execution costs.
If these two surveys are any indication of how best to take advantage of social media measurement and monitoring, we know the job isn’t done until findings from that data is used to make meaningful changes within the business.