You can learn a lot about your customers on social media. Whether they’re engaging with your brand or having completely separate conversations, you can get to know more about them, what they like and don’t like, and most importantly, what drives them to buy. Social media insights let you tap into this information so you can use it to your advantage.
When using social media insights, you’ll focus on three priorities: how to collect them, how to understand them, and how to use them in your business.
We’re going to cover all of the above so you can start using social media to get better business outcomes.
Contents:
What Are Social Media Insights?
Leveraging Social Media Insights for Business Growth
Key Metrics and Analytics for Social Media Insights
Tools and Techniques for Gathering Social Media Insights
Case Studies: How Businesses Have Leveraged Social Media Insights
What Are Social Media Insights?
We define social media insights as the valuable data points that reveal trends, patterns, and audience behaviors. These insights go beyond likes and shares. Ultimately, they reveal what your target audience likes, their preferences, habits, or needs, how they feel about a brand, and what drives them to act.
Social media insights examples include:
- Discovering who your customers are based on customer profiling, demographics, shared interests, and other customer segments
- Analyzing customer sentiment about a particular topic or campaign
- Learning what customers love about your product or service
- Finding opportunities for improvement based on customer comments and feedback
- Knowing the best times of day to post content so your audience will see it
Businesses can use social media insights to create content strategies that resonate with their audience. By doing so, they can boost engagement and conversions and grow their bottom lines.
Leveraging Social Media Insights for Business Growth
Social media insights can help marketers improve decision-making, expand their reach, and increase conversions. Let’s look at some ways that the right insights can enable business growth.
Identify preferences and behavior
Social media insights can reveal a lot about how your audience engages with content on social media and the types of content they prefer. Using a social insight tool like Meltwater, you can learn more about what your audience talks about, the content they engage with, and the actions they take (such as clicking links and converting to leads).
These insights can contribute to business growth by meeting your audience where they are and giving them what they want. The more you cater to their preferences, the more likely they are to stay engaged and become your social media advocates.
Optimize content strategy
Using social media insights, marketers can decide what content to create, the best formats for engagement (e.g., videos, blogs, memes), and where to post them.
Let’s say you start receiving an influx of DMs about a certain product or feature. This might inspire you to create videos, fact sheets, FAQs, or even separate landing pages that address their questions.
Or maybe you find that most of your audience isn’t watching your videos in full. You might opt for shorter videos or try other content formats.
These insights can help you optimize your content strategy outside of social media, too. By learning what your audience likes and doesn’t like, you can use these insights to drive your entire content strategy — including email, webinars, landing pages, and more.
Tip: Check out our guide for building a comprehensive content strategy, complete with a free content calendar template!
Measure campaign effectiveness
When you run marketing campaigns on social media, you automatically collect data and insights on those campaigns, but likes, comments, and shares don’t tell the full story. When you compare campaign data to other campaigns, you can start learning more about what makes a campaign effective.
For example, you might notice that a video ad campaign got more views, traffic, and conversions compared to a static ad campaign. You might also compare things like creative elements, calls to action, and the product being promoted to find the common denominators of your most successful campaigns.
Over time, these social media insights can help you craft more impactful campaigns and maximize your marketing budget.
Read more: Dive into our Complete Guide to Campaign Measurement, learn more about the top marketing campaign measurement tools, and take a look at the most important marketing metrics to help with your measurement.
Find new customer segments
Customer segments refer to multiple customers who share characteristics. The deeper you dig into your social media audience, the more you can uncover about their preferences, interests, habits, and decision-making processes. These social media consumer insights can tell you a lot about why customers buy, what motivates them to act, and how to capture their interest.
When you uncover new segments, you can create content and campaigns that speak directly to the unique attributes of these segments.
It’s easier to personalize your marketing and optimize your budget when you can narrow your focus to niche audiences. You also have a better chance of getting their attention when you can speak directly to their needs and interests.
Manage reputational risks
Social media insights can act as an early warning system for potential reputational risks. Monitoring brand mentions, sentiments, and information spreading through social channels helps marketers identify issues and respond to them accordingly.
Timely and effective responses can mitigate reputational damage and even turn challenging situations into opportunities for growing your brand image. Take advantage of these moments to demonstrate your customer service and commitment to quality.
Tip: Want to learn more about reputation management? Check out our article on the best reputation management software and services.
Key Metrics and Analytics for Social Media Insights
Marketers need to collect the right metrics that will help them understand and use their insights. Let’s review some key areas you can analyze to make better business decisions.
Reach and impressions
We define reach as the number of unique people who see your content, while impressions refer to the number of times people see your content. One person might see the same content multiple times, which is why we differentiate between reach and impressions.
Both are necessary when talking about social media insights. This helps you see whether your content is being seen and how many people you’re reaching with it. They also add context to your engagement metrics (more on those in a moment) — if reach and impressions are high but engagement is low, you might be targeting the wrong audience or need to improve the quality of your posts.
Tip: Read our full breakdown of social media metrics and their importance.
Engagement metrics
Typical engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and views give you a great starting point for deeper insights. These metrics can help you see how your audience responds to your content.
While engagement rates aren’t everything, they do help brands learn what their audience likes. Content that gets high engagement can inspire future content decisions. If your content gets a sudden spike in engagement, you’ll know you’ve struck a chord (or a nerve) with your audience.
Learn what drives engagement and build on your successes — and avoid repeating your potential failures.
Customer sentiment and brand perception
Customer sentiment and brand perceptions are a little harder to calculate just by looking at the numbers. Instead, you can use social media analysis tools like Meltwater to learn more about the emotions and context behind conversations.
We define customer sentiment as the way people feel about a brand or topic. It’s not something we measure by likes and shares, as you don’t know each customer’s motivations behind their engagement. Sentiment analysis adds this extra layer to the puzzle by revealing what people are saying and how they’re saying it.
Learning about customer sentiment can also help you understand how others perceive your brand. You can use these insights to see whether your branding and messaging are creating the results you want or missing the mark. From there, you can take control of the narrative and shape the perceptions you want them to have.
Tools and Techniques for Gathering Social Media Insights
Your social media analytics are a great place to start gathering insights. But these tools don’t provide a complete picture. Beyond engagement rates, reach, and impressions, you can use other tools and techniques to peel back the layers of your social media impact. Here are a few social media insights examples to get you started.
Sentiment analysis tools
Sentiment analysis tools are purpose-built to look for context behind comments and behaviors. These tools analyze text data from various sources such as social media, reviews, and surveys to gauge how customers feel about products or services.
This allows marketers to track trends in sentiment over time. They can also get real-time insight if there’s a potential problem that needs to be addressed. These tools are valuable not just for learning about customers but also for protecting your brand’s reputation.
Tip: Learn more about sentiment analysis, and sentiment analysis APIs.
Customer segmentation tools
We talked earlier about customer segmentation. Dedicated tools can uncover hidden connections and links between customers so you can identify new segments at scale.
Customer segmentation tools use data mining and analysis to group customers or social media users based on behaviors, demographics, engagement, and other criteria.
Tip: Check out our customer segmentation examples to learn how to use segments in marketing for social media and beyond.
Case Studies: How Businesses Have Leveraged Social Media Insights
Companies of all sizes and industries can benefit from social media insights. From discovering who your audience is to learning how they engage with you (or other brands), take a page from the playbook of brands using social insights right.
For example, Domino’s France uses Meltwater to glean social media insights and create more effective content. Meltwater helped the brand bring its social media management in-house and stay in the loop about all things pizza. Their team relies on Meltwater to learn about real-time traffic spikes, engagement, and sentiment, which allows them to be responsive with content and messages.
Hyundai is another example of social media consumer insights done right. The car brand uses these insights to learn the general sentiment about electric cars and know how to discuss the cars with their audience.
One final example is realme, a trendy consumer tech company with a global presence. The company uses Meltwater to stay ahead of trends and topics on social media, monitor share of voice, and see how others are talking about their products.
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