How to Get True Insight from Your Social Analytics

The key to getting meaningful insight is being able to actually put it into action. There's no point spending hours and hours examining data if you don't know how it should influence your strategy in the future.

Social analytics often means measuring a wide range of KPIs, which can lead to a lot of information. But do you know how to get true insight from it?

Find the best way of exporting

Most social media management tools will give you the option of exporting the data collected from a certain period into a spreadsheet. This allows you to see all the information in one place and more clearly. You will also find this makes it easier to edit, move and delete the data.

However, the same method won't work as effectively for everyone and it's important that you find the solution that allows you to gain the most insight.

For example, you can import figures directly from Twitter and Facebook rather than going through a third-party platform.

Exclude any anomalies

You may have one or two posts that perform extraordinarily well or poorly during a set period. This will throw off your figures so remove them before you start to make any calculations. Of course, there's still stuff you can learn from these oddballs but they will skew the rest of your data and lessen the value of the insight you're able to gain.

Once these abnormalities are removed, you can work out the median or average result using the most important KPIs you've set. This will give you a much more accurate idea of how your social media strategy is working overall.

Create benchmarks

One of the most difficult things about social media analytics is knowing what's good or bad, especially in the beginning. For example, if you get 100 clicks on a certain post that's great if only 102 people saw it but not so good if 10,000 people did. Gaining better insight from your social media analytics is all about determining your benchmarks to clarify what success looks like for your company.

Once you have worked out your average result, you can then decide whether you want to replicate this for the month ahead or increase it. You can then use additional formatting on your spreadsheet to highlight any posts that reach or surpass this target.

Identify actions

How your social media analytics influences your future strategy will largely depend on what your organizational goals are. For example, the total number of clicks, mentions, retweets and likes is going to be more important than CTR if you're looking to raise brand awareness or want to push a single marketing campaign. If this is the case then you can look at the posts and content that triggered the highest engagement rate and try to identify trends among them. This will help guide your future digital strategy as you look to build on the foundations of your previous success.

However, if you're looking to prove the ROI of social media then the total revenue generated from social is likely to be the most important metric. This can feel a little more complicated to work out as it's not as simple as just taking a single KPI but will be incredibly valuable once it's all set up. It can also mean identifying actionable findings can be more difficult but looking at trends over time can help you to understand your data better.