Today, marketing professionals are signing up for the latest in business analyst courses to stay competitive in this domain. Let’s understand what is social media analytics and how companies use these as part of their established Business Analytics and Business Intelligence operations. According to recent reports, social commerce is worth more than $100 billion and it would become a $1 trillion economy by 2030. Let’s see how organizations leverage business analytics in social media activities to meet global demands.
What is social media analytics?
Social media analytics is the science of extracting meaningful insights or actionable insights from data collected from social media channels. These could either be collected as first party data or third party data sourced by the social media companies themselves. From identifying social behavior to designing advertising campaigns based on sentiments, social media analysts work in sync with other online data management teams such as website analytics, email marketing, call centers, and so on. But, out of all the modern online channels, there is nothing that comes close to toppling the social media channels. These are the uncrowned kings of data science.
Let’s try and break it down further.
Today, more than 4 billion accounts exist in the social media industry. A large part of these is owned either through Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube. Millions of posts are posted every day. There are over 10 billion+ videos, 100 billion images, and countless blogs and microblogs that people interact with daily as part of their learning, business goals, or simply for entertainment. Irrespective of the end goal, customers like to be online and engage with social media personalities. Now, with the power of social media analytics, brands, people, personalities and organizations are all playing together to gain the attention of the audience who could end up becoming loyal customers, an influencer, or advocates, influencing thousands of others in the community and the cycle of social media influencing continues. The greatest part about working with social media analytics is that you begin to understand that human-focused trends change in minutes and second, if not days and weeks. Everything has the potential to become a viral phenomenon, a hysterical mania, a revolution, or a money making idea if you understand how analytics works.
So, how do brands and organizations really identify what kind of social media content really works and how to set a budget for these kinds of activities? Well, they use smart data to make decisions. These decisions are based on what we call social media analytics. In the modern digital marketing realm, social media analytics has become a core component of B2B business intelligence and business analytics.
Business analysts provide information to companies in driving various activities. These are:
- Product Features Development (seen mostly in applications, website designing, smartphone designing, and creative arts)
- Customer Experience Management (likely in services industries and online sales such as B2B software, e-commerce or retail commerce, online reviews, and real estate)
- Market positioning (business leaders rely on social media analytics for strategic decision making before launching a new product in the existing markets, or launching a successful product in a new market, or simply for diversification into new business areas)
- Business sustainability goals(Connecting with the audience and fans to gain insights on what they feel about socio-economic trends, politics, etc)
- Hiring and talent management Competition analytics and so much more
If you want to truly understand the power of business analytics in social media, you should check how businesses have pulled out of Russia after the country attacked Ukraine. Or, how Elon Musk revealed his plans to buy out Twitter.
Social media marketing is one of the fastest growing domains in the realm of online Marketing and Advertising, also referred to as digital commerce. Almost 98% of the global brands have a social media presence. As per market research firms, businesses of all sizes have at least one social media channel which is handled by one or more team members. These team members could either be using their own marketing skills or creative competencies to run the channels. However, in the last 2 years, the marketing budgets for social media campaigns have doubled down due to the larger interest shown by the online audience. These audiences mostly want their favorite brands to share relevant and contextual content on their social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn and TikTok, and other big and small platforms. There are so many options to choose from!