How to Maximize the Use of Social Media

There are many benefits to a company when they have a presence on social media. Some pros include an online community, creative content, brand awareness and consumer engagement. One part of social media marketing that is often overlooked is the data that is collected by the activity of the company and the consumers. By understanding and using social media data, your company will be able understand what areas need improvement and which are prosperous. This will only maximize a company’s success and help it grow. 

According to Sprout Social, social media data will unlock answers to these necessary questions:

 

What happened?

Why did something happen?

What is likely to happen?

What action should be taken? 

 

Getting numbers and answers to these questions will distinguish whether your social media marketing plan is working and how to improve it. 

What happened? can help explain descriptive analysis and understand changes. Descriptive analysis is used multiple times during the year to reflect on how the company is doing and how to improve it. By including the raw information discovered by social media data, questions of comparison to past months or quarters will be easily understood and interpreted. This first simple step gives way to more in depth realizations about a company’s social media data.

 

“Why did something happen?”, is slightly more complicated than just what happened. Why something occurred describes diagnostic analytics, essentially figuring out why things happened based on the descriptive data that has been collected. For example, if an Instagram page got 500 new followers one day and only 5 the next day, you would use your data to figure out why. Using this method, you will see what works and what doesn’t work for your social media presence. If a company tried out a giveaway and gained 1,000 followers, that would show that giveaways work for the community that supports this company. This does not always correlate with new things that a company tries. For instance, if your page spikes in likes randomly, take a look at what you posted, what time you posted it, and how that played a role in the amount of likes you recieved.

By combining the social media data from what happened and why something happened, you are able to predict what is likely to happen. By using past data trends and information, you are able to infer what will happen if you follow those patterns. This will be beneficial when planning a posting schedule and figuring out what to post. For example, if you wanted to post a giveaway on Twitter, from your past data you can see when would be the best time to post (this could mean during the day and during the week) ,what hashtags to use, or type of photo will get the most engagement. Having knowledge of what your followers like and how to engage them will only grow your social media presence and expand your company! 

What’s next? After you collect the social media data, analyze what it means, and predict the outcome of posts, you have successfully obtained and interpreted all the information necessary to maximize the success of your social media presence. From here, you are able to make more informed decisions about your posts and how your followers will react to them. A company such as Bright Age Digital Creative Agency can help further your company’s social media presence and maximize its success.