Social media analytics and reporting | Google Digital Marketing & E-commerce Certificate
[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER: Let's say
you've implemented a bunch of social
listening strategies, and you've gained
some valuable insights about your customers, potential
customers, and competitors. Tracking and analyzing
data collected from your social media platforms
can provide even more insight into your campaign's
performance, which you can use to adapt your
social media strategy to make your campaign more successful. For example, you might realize
that a particular post is generating a lot of engagement. So you decide to create
a similar post like it. Once you've collected
the data, you can report on it and
the strategic decision that you've made based on your
analysis to the team members, stakeholders, and clients. That brings us to the fourth
pillar of social media marketing– analytics
and reporting.
In a later course,
we'll explore how to use analytics for all
of your marketing channels. This section, you'll learn what
social media analytics involves and why it is so beneficial
for your marketing campaigns. We'll discuss common metrics
to track in your social media campaigns and how different
platforms define their metrics differently. You'll explore some popular
social media analytics tools and learn how to use them. You'll also learn how to
conduct social media testing. We'll also talk
about how to analyze the data you've collected to
inform your decision-making and overall marketing strategy. Finally, we'll discuss
how to share your analysis and findings through
social media reports. We'll discuss what information
a social media report should include and how to present it. You'll also be introduced to
some tools and templates that can help you create
social media reports.
Meet me in the next
video to get started. [MUSIC PLAYING] Social media analytics
can be a powerful tool to guide your current
and future campaigns in the right direction. Just like social
listening, you'll use analytics to help you
make better decisions, solve problems, improve
performance, and understand your audience. With social listening,
the information you gather is qualitative. Qualitative data describes
qualities or characteristics. It is data gathered
through observation, such as listening to
the language people use when talking about
your business. Analytics, on the other hand,
looks at quantitative data. Quantitative data
is the information that can be counted or
compared on a numeric scale. It's data you can
measure numerically, such as a number of clicks on
a platform in a certain time period. Analytics will be a
crucial component of all of your marketing efforts. Imagine you developed and
launched a social media campaign for your
company's latest product. To find out how your audience
is receiving your campaign, you might want to
learn some specifics. What percentage
of your followers interacted with your post? How many people
watched your videos? Social media analytics can help
you answer these questions.
Social media
analytics is a process of tracking, collecting,
and analyzing data from social media platforms
to improve an organization's strategic business decisions. Let's discuss the different ways
in which social media analytics can support your campaigns. To begin with, social
media analytics can help you better
understand your audience. Using analytics, you can
learn which types of content result in the best
audience engagement. And analyzing audience
engagement with posts shows you when your audience
is most active online. This can help you
determine the best time to post on different platforms. You can also draw
insights from data to inform your platform choices. As we've discussed, your
content may perform better on some platforms
than on others. Using analytics, you can measure
your engagement, traffic, and sales on
different platforms.
You can then use
this information to decide which
platforms to publish on and how to prioritize your
time on different platforms. You can focus more of
your time on the platforms that are giving you
the best performance. Through analytics, you can learn
what content drives the best results. For example, you can monitor
whether images, videos, or links do better on
particular platforms or which type of
images perform best. Some platforms like
Facebook and Twitter have analytics tools that
show you what type of content receive the highest
level of engagement. Analytics can help you learn
from your competitors, too.
Twitter, for
instance, allows you to analyze all public
conversations on the platform. Analyzing your
competitor's data allows you to evaluate
what they do well and what mistakes they make. This can inform how you adapt
and improve your own content and strategy. Social media
analytics also allows you to measure your social
media ROI, Return On Investment, for your clients. If your goal is to
increase brand awareness, for example, you might
use analytics tools to measure how many
followers you've gained on different platforms
in a given time period. Presenting this data
to your stakeholders helps prove the effectiveness
of your social media campaigns. The insights you
gained from analytics can help you improve your
social media strategy. Analytics helps you understand
what is working well in your social media strategy
and what is not as effective. This allows you to better focus
your time, efforts, and budget.
For example, you
can use analytics to compile demographic
information about your target audience on social media. This can help you refine
your marketing tactics for that audience. A number of social
media platforms have analytics tools that enable
you to collect and evaluate data from their site. There are also many social
media analytic tools available to help you track performance
across multiple platforms and create reports. Examples include Google
Analytics, Sprout Social, Hootsuite Analytics,
and Buffer Analyze. We'll talk more about
the tools like these later in this lesson. Social media analytics
helps you better understand your brand, your
audience, and your competitors. By analyzing the data, you
can refine your social media strategies to help achieve
your goals and objectives.
Coming up, we'll discuss common
social media metrics to track. [MUSIC PLAYING] From potential reach
to applause rate, there are dozens of
social media metrics you could track to help
you measure progress towards your campaign goals. This video, we'll explore some
of the most common social media metrics, how they fit into the
social media marketing funnel, and why it's helpful
to track them. To review, a metric is a
quantifiable measurement that is used to track and
assess a business objective. Your social media
goal will determine which metrics you focus
on and work to optimize. As we discussed
earlier in this course, you'll set goals when you
develop your social media strategy. You'll select these goals
based on the goal of the larger marketing campaign
you're working on, which is often determined by
the goals of your business. Each goal of your social
media marketing campaign will be geared at guiding
people through the stages of the social media
marketing funnel– awareness, consideration,
conversion, and loyalty.
Consequently, each
goal will have related metrics that will
help you measure progress towards that goal. Let's discuss some
common metrics related to goals in each of the
stages of the marketing funnel. To review, the first stage
of the marketing funnel is awareness, which is when
your goal is to capture your audience attention. At this stage, you
would track metrics related to brand awareness. When you measure
brand awareness, you analyze the attention
your brand receives across all of your
social media platforms during a reporting period, such
as a week, month, or quarter. Metrics related
to brand awareness include the number
of shares, mentions, links to your content,
and impressions your brand has received
in a given time period. An impression is when
a piece of content is displayed to your
target audience.
Another common
awareness-related metric is potential reach,
which measures how many people have
potentially seen a post since you published it. For example, if a person
retweets a post on Twitter, then you can assume
that potentially a certain percentage
of their followers will also see the post. This metric helps you assess
your progress towards expanding your social media audience. Once your potential customers
are aware of your brand, they enter into the next
stage in the marketing funnel, consideration. This is when your
customers are thinking about doing business with you. At this point, you can start
to measure engagement metrics like applause rate, which
is a number of approval actions such as likes,
mentions, retweets, or favorites that a post receives relative to
your total number of followers. A high applause rate shows
that your audience finds that piece of content valuable. It indicates a level of interest
in your brand, which could lead to making a purchase.
Additionally, knowing
what kind of content your audience engages
with can help you decide what content to create next. Once potential customers have
decided to make a purchase, they'll enter the
conversion stage. At this point, you
can measure things like referrals, which
indicate how someone was guided to your website. You can track how many people
were referred to your website from all your social
media platforms and measure the referrals you
receive on a specific platform. You can also
measure conversions, which refer to the completion
of an activity that contributes to the success of a business. These activities
can include anything from clicking on a link
to buying something. Social conversions are
actions a person takes on your website because of
having seen your social media campaigns recently. After someone
becomes a customer, your goal is to
build their loyalty. In this stage of the funnel,
you might measure things like the number of customer
testimonials you receive. A customer testimonial
is any customer review, assessment, comment,
endorsement, or interview relating to your brand.
When people are enthusiastic
about your brand, they are more likely to
share their positive feelings with others. Customer testimonials
on social media can help build trust and
credibility in your brand while boosting your brand's
social media presence. You can also measure
customer loyalty with specific metrics
called Net Promoter Score. A Net Promoter Score, or NPS,
helps predict future customer engagement by
asking customers how likely is it that
you would recommend our product to a friend. Customers respond on
a scale of 1 to 10. Depending on the
number they choose, they are considered
either unhappy customers, satisfied but
unenthusiastic customers, or loyal enthusiasts. Reviewing NPS can help you
measure customer satisfaction and predict potential
future sales. Metrics are important
because they show whether your
social media strategy is successful over time.
By studying different
metrics from each stage of the marketing
funnel, you can better understand your brand's
social media performance. As you adjust your
social media strategy, you can track
additional metrics that are relevant to your business. [MUSIC PLAYING] At the beginning
of this course, you learned to develop a
social media marketing strategy before you start
planning and publishing posts. Based on insights, you
discover through analytics you might also need to
adapt your social media strategy during your campaigns. In this video, we'll discuss
how data analysis can inform your social strategy.
Once you've identified metrics,
chosen a tool to track them, and collected the data,
you need to determine what the data means and which
strategic decisions you'll make in response to it. Let's discuss some
different ways that data might affect
your decision and strategy. To begin, data analysis can help
you improve your social media content. Measuring engagement data shows
you what content resonates with your audience and what doesn't. You can also assess how things
like post length, visuals, hashtags, and tone
affect engagement. You might decide to adjust
your content strategy based on those findings. For example, if the data
shows that posts containing infographics are getting
higher engagement, you can plan to publish more
infographics in the future. Similarly, you can track
competitors' engagement data to identify their
success factors, including which of their content
performs best, which platforms their content is shared
on most, and which influencers are most effective
at promoting their content. Based on that information, you
can adjust your own strategy. Furthermore, tracking data
like the shares or retweets of different content can
help you spot emerging trends across social media.
For example, augmented
reality, a technology that superimposes a
computer-generated image onto a user's view
of the real world, is an emerging trend
on social media that's very interactive and,
therefore, highly effective for engagement. Analyzing this data
can give you insights into what content, products,
and advertising are creating the most interest online. This can help you create
real-time marketing content that's relevant to what
people are most interested in at any given time. If you find that a large
percentage of your audience is sharing posts about
a particular news story, for instance, then you
might create content related to that story. Analytics can also help
you determine the best platform for your brand. When you track different metrics
on each of your platforms, you can get a
better understanding of how your content
performs on those platforms. Then you can target
the platforms on which your content performs best. For example, if
some of your posts are performing much better on
Facebook than on Instagram, then you could continue
to publish similar content on Facebook while adjusting your
content strategy for Instagram. And finally, analytics enables
you to customize content for your customers.
By gathering data about
specific customers based on their personas,
you can provide customers with customized content. For instance, you might
create targeted content for a local audience
that references local issues, interests,
locations, or weather. Customized content
has been shown to drive engagement
and conversions. This is because
customers appreciate brands that seem
authentic and trustworthy, and personalized content
can provide that impression. Social media marketing and
analytics go hand in hand. As a digital
marketer, you'll use analytics to learn more
about your customers and find out how they
feel about your brand and your competitors' brands. You can then make
data-informed decisions that can improve your content
and marketing strategy.
Later in this
section, we'll discuss how to present the data
you've gathered to others in a social media report. [MUSIC PLAYING] Imagine you're working on
a social media campaign. You've used analytics
to measure your progress towards your goals at every
stage of the marketing funnel. And you've analyzed
the data you've gathered to make
informed decision about your social media
strategy moving forward. Now it's time to share those
learnings and decisions through a social media report. A social media
report is a document that presents and
tracks relevant data about your social
media activities. Social media reports
allow marketers to visualize and present
their social media data in an easy-to-understand way.
They help justify their strategy
and the decisions they've made based on the data
to colleagues or clients as well as provide them
with valuable insights. Depending on your role,
the size of your company, and what resources
are available, you might be adding to a
report someone else creates, making one yourself,
or just reading over a report for insights. Additionally, a
social media report can be anything from a quick
email with a few key data points, a snapshot of a
particular post's performance on a given platform, a
spreadsheet with detailed data from all of your
social platforms, or a slideshow with key
findings and analysis.
Regardless of your
contribution to the report or how the data
is presented, it's important to understand what
components are generally included. To begin with, there are
some things marketers need to consider when
crafting a report. Social media reports need to
be tailored to their audience. For example, marketing
team members, stakeholders, and clients will have different
needs and different information they want to know. Reports might include
more or less detailed data on a specific item depending
on who the audience will be. For example, a report
created for a marketing team might include detailed data
about a particular social media campaign, while one created
for managers might focus more on campaign highlights. Also, a report should include
the data most relevant to the audience and to the
company's social media KPIs. A KPI, or Key
Performance Indicator, is a measurement used to gauge
how successful an organization is in its efforts to reach a
business or marketing goal.
Social media KPIs
are used to assess whether a social media
marketing strategy is effective. They are determined by campaign
goals, such as awareness or engagement. A useful social
media report will focus on the KPIs
and metrics that are most relevant to the business. For example, if a business
has a social media KPI related to reach, then a report
might highlight data about impressions, audience
growth rate, or follower count. Reporting frequency also varies
and can be customized depending on what data will
be reported and how the insights will be used.
Most social media
platforms allow data to be pulled from
their analytics tools based on specific data
ranges or reporting periods. For example, social
media reports could be produced weekly,
monthly, or quarterly. Now that you understand
what marketers need to consider when putting
together a social media report, let's discuss some
specific elements that might go into one. Let's say a report focuses
on a campaign's performance on Instagram in a
particular week, and the main goal of the
campaign was engagement.
The report would include
relevant campaign information for that week, such as the date
range and the number of post, followers gained or lost, likes,
comments, shares, link clicks, and video views. Many social media reports
also include charts or graphs. Visualizing data with charts
can help an audience understand the information in the report. These charts can
be created using analytics tools such as
Google Analytics or HubSpot or reporting tools on
individual platforms. An effective social
media report also provides context that helps the
audience understand the report and connect to the story
the data is telling. Reports should
indicate how the data relates to particular
KPIs, for example. Our reports might
include a comparison of data in the current reporting
period to the previous data. For example, a report could
compare number of likes in the current reporting
period to the number in the same reporting
period last month and highlight any growth. This allows the audience to
spot trends, note progress, and identify issues. That brings us to analysis. This is the part of the
report that explains what the data actually means.
For instance, analyzing the
number of engagement per post could help identify the types
of content that resonates best with the target audience. This section should include
an evaluation and explanation of why the campaign may have
gotten the results it did. The reasons behind the data
can help marketers determine and justify to
their audience how best to adjust their strategy. Social media reports
help marketers convey key information about
their strategy, activities, and progress towards
their goals to others. Understanding what goes
into a social media report helps prepare you to
contribute to them and read them for insights that
can improve your social media strategy. Coming up, we'll discuss how
to present a social media report to stakeholders. [MUSIC PLAYING] When you are a digital marketer,
presenting is part of the job. Even if you've put together a
clear, compelling social media report, you still need
to present it well to make sure your
audience understands the data, your analysis of
it, and the decisions you've made based on that analysis. You may not be expected to
present social media reports yourself early in your
digital marketing career, but presenting is
an essential skill that you'll eventually
need and that only gets better with practice.
In this video, we'll discuss
how to present your social media report effectively. When you're delivering
your report, you need your
audience to understand the key points you're making
about the data you're sharing, but you also want to connect
with them emotionally. For example, if you're growing
your social media audience by 30% on LinkedIn in the last
quarter, share excitement.
Or maybe inject some
surprising statistics, entertaining anecdotes, or a
particularly favorable customer review received on
social media platforms into your presentation. Tapping into your
audience emotion will grab their attention
and help keep them engaged. In order to make sure your
audience is following you, pace yourself. Speak slowly. Keep your sentences brief. And use intentional pauses. Guide your audience through your
presentation by helping them notice what you've
noticed about the data. And transition between
sections by using phrases like "building on this point"
or "as I mentioned before." Also, check in
with your audience periodically throughout
the presentation to find out if they
have any questions. If your audience isn't familiar
with a social media term or metric, for example, you
may need to define it for them. As you're presenting, you
also need to be flexible. For example, it's
possible that someone may have to leave your
presentation unexpectedly, that other attendees
may arrive late, or that answering people's
questions take longer than you had planned for.
Consider the approach
you take if you had to shorten your presentation. Know the most
important points you'd want to make, and be prepared
to share only those points should the unexpected occur. You should also be ready to
pivot the discussion according to what is the most
important to your audience. If your audience contains
your company's finance analyst or upper management,
for instance, they may want to spend
extra time discussing data related to conversions. Lastly, to present effectively,
you need to be well prepared. Ample practice can help
you identify things like awkward phrasing
and other issues. Or if you tend to feel a little
nervous before you present, good preparation can
help calm your nerves and make you feel
more confident. Preparing ahead of time also
helps you identify and come up with answers to the
types of questions your audience might have. And it gives you time
to prepare to justify the strategic
decisions that you want to make if any member
of your audience have concerns about them. For example, let's say you like
to expand your social media marketing efforts
to a new platform, but a manager is concerned
about having the resources to do so effectively.
By having prepared for this
type of response in advance, you can clearly
explain both why you think expanding to a new
platform is a sound strategy and how you plan to
reallocate resources to make this possible. To help you prepare
ahead of time, you might practice
delivering your presentation to a member of a team and
invite them to offer feedback, ask questions, or
share concerns. The presentation techniques
we've discussed here will serve you
well, not just when you have to deliver
social media reports, but in all of your
marketing presentations. When you connect
with your audience and take the time to respond to
their questions and concerns, you keep them engaged
in your presentation and help them understand it. And by being prepared, you
can feel more confident that your presentation will
be effective, regardless of any unexpected arisings. Developing your
presentation skills can also benefit when
you're looking for a job because employers
value these skills. And the same techniques you
use to present to an audience you can also use to present
yourself at interviews.
MIRIAM: Congratulations
on finishing this video from the Google Digital
Marketing & E-Commerce Certificate. Access the full experience on
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