Leveraging Brand Equity on Social Media is Easier if You Just Pay Attention to Data Analytics
As is widely known, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and whole host of social media platforms are becoming a medium of choice for an ever increasing number of brands. According to a recent survey, an average user spends almost two hours on social media everyday which presents brands with an unprecedented opportunity to engage with them. From product development to marketing, and consumer outreach to building communities of loyalists – the opportunities for brands to engage directly with consumers is vast.
This phenomenon has also led to the evolution of existing platforms and proliferation of new platforms, each of which cater to a different audience and engage with them differently. So the questions for marketers to answer include - which platforms to leverage, the messaging to deliver, the format and tone of content, and most importantly when and how to scale the marketing efforts. And the answers to these could lie in ‘data analytics’.
Experts have hailed data as the currency of the age we live in, and the last one year has yielded enough evidence to point in that direction. From being a domain largely restricted to the IT function, data is fast becoming a tool of choice for all stakeholders, including the top-brass by helping take business decisions and even disrupt business models by the sheer power of insights and intelligence it can generate. This, combined with the enormous amounts of data collected for every interaction and transaction makes it a goldmine for marketers.
So how does one go about it? Below are five metrics understanding which could help you develop and deploy an effective social media strategy to enhance your brand’s social media equity:
1. Setting the Benchmark – There are some basic metrics such as followers, subscribers, mentions, and likes to help you understand where your brand lies in the social media universe. It also helps marketers see their brand in perspective, against peers and the industry in general.
2. Understanding your Audiences – Perhaps one of the most critical criteria is understanding who your audience is, what they do and how they behave. Some metrics that help doing this include demographic data, geographical data, impressions, as well as their likes, dislikes and preferences.
3. Analysing Engagements – The next thing to do is to understand how your audiences are connecting with the brand, judged by number of likes, comments and shares generated along with frequency, quantum and timelines of their interactions.
4. Tracking Interactions – Once your audiences have engaged with the brand, it is critical to track the business impact it has had. This could be done by analysing the sales funnel using social media metrics – clicks, leads, conversions. It could also be used as a feedback or CRM platform.
5. Generating Opportunities – Analysing all the metrics mentioned above while drilling down a couple of levels, can yield a treasure trove of opportunities for your brand; data analysis can help you make sense of all the conversations about your brand, give insights of your audiences’ attitude towards the brand among other things. And all of this could possibly help you farm opportunities, user-generated links, generate hashtags, and in general, help you keep a close eye on how your brand is evolving in a dynamic market.
