Some of the most successful social media marketing campaigns have gone viral because they touched people. It may have made people laugh, cry, or get angry; one thing is for sure – it hit them on a deeper, more personal level.
To improve conversions and maximize your returns from social media marketing, it’s essential that you understand your social audience and identify trends so that you can create better personas that are vital to your marketing efforts. The goal is to dig deeper into your customer’s experiences to reveal their pain points and what ultimately makes them loyal to a brand.
However, beyond consumer preferences and understanding the customer journey, you need to also constantly interpret human behavior that can change rather quickly. Failure to track and identify trends and use them effectively can ultimately decide the success or failure of your marketing campaign. Imagine creating a marketing campaign that was based entirely on a trend that lost its momentum overnight and fizzled out by the time you launched it?
By launching a campaign that is no longer relevant, your brand can suffer losses and a blow to your reputation. As a brand, the goal is always to be the authority in your niche so that your audience turns to you for their industry-related needs. By not paying attention to trends, you risk being left behind and outdone by your competitors who are keeping their ears close to where the social conversations take place.
What Are the Most Valuable Insights from Social Media Data
What Consumers Are Saying
To create a marketing campaign that has the goal to reach your target audience, you need to get a picture of what people are saying during those conversations related to your niche. What are the key topics within the conversation that relates to your brand and your social media marketing efforts?
Who’s Doing the Talking?
By knowing who is doing the most talking about a specific topic, you identify who is most affected by that particular conversation. Because industries can be broken down into niches, so can demographics which reveal how age groups, locations, or ages may react to the same topic differently.
Why Are They Saying It?
One of the most revealing insights you can gain is why people say the things they do at the time. What motivates people to say what they do when they do? This data could also indicate what is trending or a hot topic that needs to be discussed while it’s still relevant and compelling.
Where to Start Uncovering Consumer Insights
Most of the major social media platforms that you probably have a social media presence on can provide you with the analytics that you need. However, by leveraging social media tools, you’ll have the ability to delve deeper into the data.
Chances are you have a Facebook Business Page. If you don’t, then you’re missing the opportunity to leverage Facebook’s 2.07 billion monthly active users.
With a Facebook Business Page, you’ll have access to the insight tools that give you a snapshot of everything from post reach to post engagement. And you’ll see how well your CTA buttons are performing along with website link clicks.
By clicking the People tab on the insights section, you’ll see the key demographics of your audience. Beyond identifying what country the majority of your audience is from, you’ll also see gender and age.
Having a snapshot of these demographics will help you determine if you are meeting your marketing goals and reaching the demographic that matches your customer personas. If you’re finding there’s a difference between the demographics of your overall fan base compared to the people your insights is showing you are reaching, then your audience targeting may be off.
By seeing who you are reaching with your content, you can make better decisions when it comes to content creation. Seeing the metrics allow you to make informed decisions and create content similar to the one that is performing the best in terms of engagement and reach.
As of the third quarter of 2017, there are 328 million monthly active Twitter users. With tools like Fedica, you have the power to listen before you talk. Their Intelligent Publishing gives you the highlights of your audience conversations. You can identify the top tweets from key influencers from your niche and get a trending summary by city and country,
If you’re planning to create your next hashtag campaign, Fedica offers comprehensive, actionable information which includes the top 50 words or hashtags in your industry. This allows you to develop marketing campaigns using relevant keywords and trending hashtags, ensuring that you are reaching the right demographic at the right time.
You can optimize your social media investment by identifying and analyzing trends to a city level. To run an effective campaign, get analytics on the relevant topics and associated data. To manage your content effectiveness, engagement analysis lets you go deeper into any tweet or group of tweets, allowing you to identify its reach, replies, and retweets.
The secret to any successful social media marketing campaign is to be relevant and timely. With more than 700 million total monthly active users, Instagram has followed Facebook and Twitter as the top platforms for social media marketing with brands also hoping to reach their targeted demographics and engage users.
Instagram analytic tools such as Instagram Insights, Iconosquare, and Simply Measured allow you to learn more about your audience, measure success and improve your Instagram strategy, see how your promoted Instagram posts are performing and if they’re getting adequate ROI.
With Instagram, it’s important to track both account metrics and individual post metrics. Account metrics will allow you to identify top posts, top mentions, top followers, and new followers. Remember that what you post may be the reason why you are gaining new followers.
And by analyzing individual post metrics, you’ll gain insight on which type of content is receiving the most positive attention. These metrics include the number of times users interact with a specific post, number of engagements such as like mentions or comments, and the Instagram reach percentage.
Ultimately, understanding what makes your customers tick is the valuable insight that will allow you to reach them on the level that matters. When you recognize the needs of your audience, you’re in a better position to create content that will call their attention and invite engagement. And by understanding your audience, you’re better prepared to make the right keyword choices rather than having to guess whether your SEO or ads are appearing in front of the right people.