Franchise PowerUp 
Mapping your social media marketing performance requires understanding where to go next and seeing what works and what does not. Here, social media analytics come into play into play. This term seems like a straightforward interpretation at first sight, but when you discover plenty of metrics, it becomes tough to determine the ones you require.
Let’s start with the whole social media analytics definition. In simple words, it is the process of gaining and evaluating data from social media networks. The major aim of this process is to determine the social media campaigns performance and make future business decisions on the basis of this analysis. As a result, you manage to attract target customers and bring higher interest in your activities.
What Do Social Media Analytics Do for Your Business?
Social media analytics serves business needs in a number of ways:
#1 Understanding your audience
You can verify the proper schedule for your posts using information about the popularity of your past posts. You can also understand the preferences of your target audience and the types of content they prefer to see in their news feed.
#2 Determining your best performing social networks
You may investigate your competitors and the networks where they are active to determine your own social media marketing activities. But, only proper analytics will measure your real gains from a particular social media network and outperform your competitors.
#3 Development of better content
You will be able to match specific content with the required social network. You can consult your business page analytics to accomplish this task. You can also use a specialized tool like Buzzsumo to see more detailed metrics, like a number of visitors per each network, their activity and final subscriptions or sales as a result of their activity.
#4 Updating your social media marketing
You will hardly succeed with the first social media campaign. Proper analytics will help to identify mistakes on the way and avoid them in the future. You choose the most effective tactics suiting your business goals and update your campaigns accordingly.
#5 Adjust your social media campaigns
The magic behind social media and analytics is the possibility to adapt your campaigns on the fly. You can check whether your campaigns are performing in the proper way. If yes, you continue according to the plan. If not, you adjust the campaign as quickly as possible to receive better results.
Study Social Media Analytics Tools and Metrics
A good way to adapt your online marketing is to track its performance on the go.
Follow these recommendations to investigate and optimize your online campaigns:
- Set up specific metrics for each campaign – study this quick guide as a start
- Track these metrics on a regular basis using specific social media analytical tool
- Choose campaigns with the highest return on investment and repeat them
- Change the strategy in case of a marketing failure, using only the top-performing instruments
