Grow Your Business With Data

Planning Is Everything

Before you start implementing analytics, you want to decide for yourself what it is you want to analyse. A broad ‘big data’ approach is fine, but you will be rewarded more for a more focused approach that places an emphasis on your own company. With that in mind, here are some objectives to keep in mind:

• Identify the goals of your company – every company is going to have different objectives for their social media campaign and it’s important that you settle on yours. Are you looking to make more people aware of your brand? Do you want people to start looking to your business for certain content or products?

• What is your place in the market? – Know what your competitors are doing on social media. Note what’s working for them and what isn’t. Then adjust your own strategy to suit. A good thing to keep an eye open for is any sign of dissatisfaction amongst potential customers and work provide a solution with your own social media campaign.

• Where would you like to be in the market? – Pick a high benchmark for yourself in terms of readership/followers/clicks and work towards that. If there’s a clear market leader in your field, base your objectives on their own numbers. If you’re already in front of the pack, measure your recent growth and set yourself a target to see that continue.

• How are you branding yourselves? – It’s important to know your brand early on so that you can hone your social media presence and track your keywords with analytics. If you’re just starting out as a business then you should just be able to decide that with little fuss. If you’re already established however, analytics can be used to isolate and identify your company’s key search terms. If the search terms you find aren’t best suited to your brand, you can also use analytics to make the necessary changes to your web presence and bring everything in line with your ideal search terms.

• What is your proposed value and USP? – It’s not just about having people talk about your company online, you want them to be discussing your brand and telling others about its worth. A lot of analytics trackers now actually offer mood tracking on a lot of social media sites, particularly Twitter, and can tell you when you’re doing well in the eyes of consumers. It can also be hugely useful as an early warning system, allowing you to head off any negative publicity for your business online before it gathers speed.

When and What To Publish

Analytics can not only tell you when the best times to publish are (it differs depending on your objective and where in the world you want it to be seen), it can also give you a good hint about the kinds of content people want to see. For example,recent analytics suggest that generally it’s best to post on Twitter on the weekends from 1pm to 3pm in the time zone of your choice. They also reveal facts like the length of the most successful tweets (under 100 characters) and the optimal number of hashtags (never more than two).

This information is very general, taking in datapoints from across all social networks. It’s still useful, but the true worth comes when you analyse your own presence. Apps like Hootsuite and Buffer both give you an idea of your social reach and what’s being successful, and by paying close attention to them you should be able to increase your influence online.

Who To Share With

You should have identified in your planning stage who your demographic is. Social media only has any value if it reaches the people you want to influence and make aware of you. This is why, for example, if your audience is over 60 years old social media may not be for you because they are unlikely to be using it. If you’re selling materials for the elderly that younger people are likely to purchase however, that’s a different matter.

Analytics can also help you to find thought leaders and social influencers who you want to target for retweets and shares. Social influencers often have a significant reach on their chosen media platforms, and are seen as curators of quality content by their followers. Sometimes they’re clearly labelled in their descriptions (though just claiming to be an influencer doesn’t make it true) others may be more niche, and harder to locate without the aid of analytics to point you in the right direction.

Engagement

Social media should act as a lead generator for your business. Identify which ones are more likely to do that for your work. Pinterest is worth considering, as is Twitter. Facebook less so these days, as their new algorithms are less than ideal for those looking to reach new (or old) fans.

• Twitter – Perhaps the most dominant and popular network for businesses to promote themselves on, Twitter gives your business a platform to promote yourself from. Unfortunately, it also gives that platform to millions of other businesses. To ensure you get the kind of engagement that benefits and promotes your business, you need to make good use of hashtags (a kind of categorisation system) and influential thought leaders.

Hashtags in particular are a good thing to track with analytics. With a decent analytics program you can get an idea of which hashtags are evergreen and constant, as well as being able to lock in on any hashtags that are increasing in popularity, but haven’t hit the mainstream yet and therefore guarantee yourself more unique views.

• Pinterest – Often overlooked by businesses, Pinterest is actually one of the best social media sites to have a web presence on. Its users are dedicated, spending a lot of time on the site weekly, and much of the activity on the site (80%) is made up of ‘repinned’ content rather than original. Meaning that if you’re a content creator, you have fewer unique competitors within Pinterest.

Pinterest is also a great place to advertise your products and services. Recent analytics of the social media site show that Pinterest users are much more willing to spend money than Twitter and Facebook users, with the average spend after clicking through on a link being between 160 and 180 dollars.

• Email Marketing – Email marketing is also open to use as a social media tool, and there are a vast number of analytics available for analysing the success of an email marketing campaign. What’s nice about email marketing is it allows you to reach out to every customer, seemingly as an individual, and appeal to them without any of the chatter of a social network distracting them from your message.

A good email marketing solution can take a while to develop, but it’s also perhaps the most open to being combined with analytics. Services like Mailchimp allow you to track information like which links were clicked, what links were clicked most often, and which links aren’t getting any attention at all. It’s a wealth of information for your business to exploit and learn from for future campaigns. As well as being able to apply in other social spheres.

Whichever social media network you choose, make sure to compliment it with analytics. Not only is it a useful device for improving your audience, it also provides a huge amount of peace of mind. The popularity of a business used to be something very hard to quantify, but now, with the prevalence of social media sites and the huge number of analytics services out there, you can get a solid number of how your business is doing, who’s engaging with it and what you can do to make everything even better than it already is.