Social Media Analytics

 Tyran Jackson

18 February 2022

Social Media Analytics

Social media analytics is the basis for a company’s entire social media plan. Social media analytics encompasses an audience’s perspective of a brand. The public’s opinions and pain points shared on social media are what a company builds a business plan to address. Social media is the largest platform globally for everyday people to connect. Social media analytics is the way of processing and understanding all of the content and data on social media to improve a company’s business plan.

Strategic communication and social media analytics are closely related. Social media analytics does not work without strategic communication. A marketing team must be strategic about its approach. The first step in a social media campaign is listening to understand public sentiment about a product (Fan & Gordon, 2014). Then, the team can create a plan to change public opinion through strategic social media posts that engage with the audience.

The opportunities brought by social media analytics are near endless with the development of new technology for social platforms that enable users to create and upload new kinds of data. Product development has the most significant potential for improvement through social media analytics. Social media analytics uses several tactics to gain information from an audience, such as opinion mining and trend analysis  (Fan & Gordon, 2014). Social media analytics takes the data shared by the public. It identifies trends on social media, common phrases about a company or product, and conversations about a company or product. The data identified give feedback about how to improve to meet their customers’ needs. When the product is re-developed to please the customer, the company observes an ROI (return on investment). The threats to social media analytics stem from the ever-changing nature of social media. Marketers struggle to keep up with the new platform developments to “track return on investment (ROI), how to identify and engage with popular influencers, and how to create an effective social media strategy” (Fan & Gordon, 2014). The difficulty of understanding and analyzing multiple languages also poses a threat to the efficiency of social media analytics.

References

Fan, W., & Gordon, M. D. (2014). The power of social media analytics. Communications of the ACM, 57(6), 74-81.