Katie Coen

Social media has taken the world by storm, creating a wave of trends and also starting new business opportunities. There are many industries that resulted from the rise of social media, one of them being social media analytics. Before you can understand what that is, you need to have a good understanding of social media and it’s history. 

Long before social media, the World Wide Web and internet started with websites where an organization could post, but no one could respond. It evolved overtime into a collaborative space where billions of people are able to post and interact from across the world. Social media is any platform that allows users to share content and participate in a community. We commonly think of Facebook or TikTik or Instagram, which are social networking sites, but social media started with blogs. Many people are still using blogging sites, along with content communities, like Youtube, microblog, like X (Twitter), and tagging, like Pinterest. Mobile apps and review websites also count as social media. 

Social media may have started as a fun way for people to read or learn, but it has changed to encompass much more than that. It can help businesses increase their sales, save money, spread their brand message, and build relationships. It also helps businesses learn about their customers and build a reputation for themselves. This is where social media analytics comes into play. 

Social media analytics is the art and science of finding information from data on social media to make informed and insightful decisions. It involves looking at data from when posts were uploaded to how much interaction it got, and if that feedback was positive or negative, and everything in between. The data is then interpreted and aligned with business goals to make good decisions and improve an organization’s social media campaign. It helps brands engage, find new customers, get feedback, measure customer loyalty, track their impact, help in future projects, and more. 

The analysis of an organization’s social media can be done by paid professionals, but that isn’t obtainable for some. There are also softwares that can help a brand monitor their pages and track trends. Plus, many social media platforms allow businesses to track their data right on their app.

Now that you have a general idea of what social media analytics is, let’s take a closer look at how it works. The eight layers of social media analytics describes the different types of data analysts use. They are networks, text, actions, search engines, location, hyperlinks, mobile, and multimedia. Social media network analytics looks at the data on personal and professional social networks. Text analytics is used to understand themes users follow by analyzing business insights from textual parts of posted content. Social media actions analytics focuses on what the consumer is doing. It interprets what they like and share. Search engine analytics is more about analyzing search data from the past, while location analytics is focused on the “right now,” mapping out where consumers are using social media from. Hyperlink analytics can help an organization find out where their users are coming from and if they click on a link included in a post. Mobile and multimedia analytics deal with mobile applications and the wide variety of content that can be posted on social media, including videos, images, animations, and text.

Social media analytics is a relatively new field, as new social media platforms continue to hit the market. Right now, the industry is focused on what’s called Descriptive Analytics, which explains what happened and why it is happening. This process gathers data in reports and visualizations to help an organization identify and understand a problem or opportunity. Then they use the data to improve their platforms. But this industry is still evolving and the technologies will be updated as things continue to change.

Resources

Cotriss, D. (2024, January 17). Social Media for Business: Marketing, Customer Service and More . Business News Daily. https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/7832-social-media-for-business.html

Khan, G. F. (2018). Creating Value With Social Media Analytics: Managing, Aligning, and Mining Social Media Text, Networks, Actions, Location, Apps, Hyperlinks, Multimedia, & Search Engines Data. CreateSpace.

Rouse, M. (2023, June 5). Social Media Analytics. https://www.techopedia.com/definition/13853/social-media-analytics-sma

Thony, S. (2024). MODULE 1: Introduction to Social Media Analytic. Lecture.