5 Ways to Use Social Media Data for Business Insights

What does your target audience care about? How are customers actually using your products? How did your competitor’s campaign perform compared to your own? These are questions every brand wants to answer.

Social media data holds the answers to these questions because consumers are constantly posting their feelings about brands, products, and countless other topics everyday. But due to the vast amount of data, it can be challenging to separate the signal from the noise. Luckily, social media analytics allows brands to turn social data into powerful business insights.

So what does “social media analytics” really mean? In his Seven Layers of Social Media book, Gohfar F. Khan defines social media analytics as “the art and science of extracting valuable hidden insights from vast amounts of semistructured and unstructured social media data to enable informed and insightful decision making.” That definition helps us understand, in the abstract, how social media can help brands make better decisions. But what specific questions can brands answer using social media data?

Here are 5 of the top questions you can answer using social media analytics:

●What does my target audience care about?

●How do consumers feel about my brand?

●How are customers using my products?

●How did my campaign perform?

●How does my brand stack up to the competition?

What does my target audience care about?

How well do you know your brand’s audience? Social media analysis gives brands the opportunity to get detailed insights about their audience, including interests, age, gender, geography and more. Instead of getting a static report on your audience’s demographics and interests, social media analysis allows you to dynamically monitor how your audience is changing in real-time. Understanding your target audience on a deeper level helps you create the products and campaigns that will resonate with them.

Uncover what your audience is interested in and compare those interests to a competitor’s audience

How do consumers feel about my brand?

How are consumers reacting to your new product line? How do they feel about your customer service? Social media analysis provides up-to-the-moment insights on how consumers feel about anything, without the need to wait for results from surveys or studies. Tracking consumer sentiment and emotion about your brand or products in real-time can help you identify a win for your brand early or stop a potential crisis before it starts.

Understand how consumers feel about your brand and your competitors

How are customers using my products?

How are people actually using your products? The billions of images added to social media every day reveal how people are interacting with your products in the real world, even if they don’t specifically mention the name of your brand or product. Image analysis gives you the full picture of what’s happening on social media. Identifying moments of consumption in images gives brands a powerful to understand how customers use their products. Instead of just looking at what consumers are saying, you can understand what they are doing.

Identify logos,objects, scenes, actions, faces, and more in billions of social images

How did my campaign perform?

It isn’t easy to track the true impact of a global marketing campaign. Sure, modern digital marketing makes it easy to track clicks, views, and likes, but what about the big picture? Are you reaching your target audience? What is their reaction to the campaign? Is the campaign changing the conversation about your brand? Luckily social media analytics can help you answer these tough questions and track the performance of any campaign far beyond just clicks and likes.

Track every aspect of your campaign from engagement to top influencers and emotions

How does my brand stack up to the competition?

How are consumers talking about your brand vs. your competitor’s brand? How does your audience compare to your competitors’? Social media analytics provides instant access to competitive intelligence, allowing brands to make smarter decisions about campaigns, products, creative, and more. Having access to detailed competitive insights in real-time means that you can quickly identify opportunities and take action.

Understand how consumers are talking about you vs. your competitors

The ultimate value social media analytics provides is a real-time window into the mind of the consumer. Any questions about how consumers feel about a brand, product, campaign, or any other topic can be answered in seconds. The answers fuel fast, data-driven strategy decisions to keep your brand one step ahead of the competition.

Want to learn more about gaining business insights from social media data? Check out the free Elements of Social Media Analytics series: