The Evolution of Social Media Monitoring and Analytics
by Heather Timmerman Moller
It can be difficult to remember that there was a time when social media was just a place to be social. Even though a solid social presence is now a requirement for business, not all companies are taking advantage of the marketing and data insights gleaned from these strategies.
Vanity metrics such as followers, likes, and comments have their place, but they aren’t going to show the impact of your social media presence. After all, how many likes equal a sale?
Historically, the tech needed to report and analyze at scale has lagged far behind the evolution of social. Data-driven and data-informed marketers need to measure and prove the value of their social media strategies on an ongoing basis.
Fortunately, our LinkedIn Marketing Partners are constantly developing and improving social media tools to provide the insights and analytics that marketers need to measure impact. Here are two powerful tools that can connect with LinkedIn, showcasing the evolution of social media monitoring and how analytics can be used to inform your broader marketing strategy.
Listen, monitor, and analyze
Listen to the audience
The best social listening analytics use AI and machine learning to find mentions of your brand outside of your content. Listening provides valuable metrics and helps you safeguard your brand reputation by flagging conversations that could be problematic.
It isn’t enough just to listen to your brand; you have to keep up with the competition too. Sprinklr’s Media Monitoring & Analytics platform uses AI-based crisis detection to create easily-staged alerts on events generating social buzz. Crisis detection helps you find out if you are on top of the trends of the moment and how you are holding up against your competition.
Monitor and analyze with AI
If you’re lucky, conversations about your brand aren’t just happening in your content. Sprinklr monitors and analyzes community engagement at scale. Sprinklr scours over 30 digital channels and social platforms to provide the best information about current trends and sentiments. Their enterprise-grade governance protects your reputation, and in-depth analysis helps you shape more effective content.
Social media is happening all the time, and it changes incredibly quickly. This means your social can be stale — or worse — at a moment’s notice. Sprinklr AI gathers important data in real-time so that you can improve your content and engagement:
- Brand detection
- Negative sentiment
- Positive sentiment
Tailor your messaging
One valuable byproduct of social listening is that it can help you pick up on hidden product benefits or use cases. You might encounter an instance where someone used your solution to solve a new problem, which can then be incorporated into your marketing to reach others in the same situation. You might also, for example, come to recognize common phrases, traits, or hashtags within your “power user” or “super fan” community, helping your content speak to these high-value customers more effectively.
Comprehend, track, and optimize
Hootsuite offers a holistic view of all your social networks in one place. Gain insights into audience behavior, measure the effectiveness of your social media strategy, and use what you’ve learned to create scroll-stopping social posts and campaigns—all in one dashboard.
Justify the true value of social media
Analyze the ROI (return on investment) on your spend and show how your organic social media and social ad campaigns work together to drive results in a unified social dashboard.
Measure and assess how each social post affects every stage of your conversion funnel and connects back to your business objectives. View how each post, campaign, and channel affects your web traffic with web attribution to understand how your audience interacts with your brand across channels.
Develop a well-rounded social strategy
Use Hootsuite’s Best time to publish feature so you always post when you have the best opportunity to capture your audience’s attention. Understand which channels are most effective based on time, effort, and spend so you can refine your strategy and invest more in the networks that work best for you. Define social effectiveness through customized metrics so you can measure what matters most to your business.
Personalized Insights that matter to you
Hootsuite helps you stay ahead of the competition with insights and recommendations tailored to your business. Set benchmarks and monitor results over time to refine and optimize your content. Hootsuite draws from an assortment of metrics for social media analysis and reporting, and allows you to customize reports to include the insights you care about.
Better insights mean better marketing. The full-funnel insights provided by Hootsuite’s array of metrics for monitoring audience engagement, behavior, and sentiment can have a huge impact on how you strategize to reach and influence potential customers.
Social media evolution is here
Many businesses can’t access or use the mass amounts of social data that they already have. Technology is available to help turn info into insight and make informed decisions. We’re proud of our marketing partners like Sprinklr, Hootsuite, and more, and their ongoing advancements to help marketers meet their goals.
Browse the wide range of solutions our partners offer to help you create successful content, monitor and protect your brand reputation, and automate your social strategy. Find the LinkedIn Marketing Partners that can solve your business challenges today.