Social media marketing is an essential part of any marketing campaign. Brands need to always be on-point and find new ways to stay ahead of the game by reinventing periodically.
They need to readjust strategies and messages all the time, to keep the audience engaged.
That’s when social media analysis comes in handy.
By going through your social media platforms' data and comparing your stats, you can find everything you need to know about the performance of your brand and your audience.
Today I will show you how to use cross-channel analysis in your social media reports and why this is important.
Social media analysis: the benefits of using cross-channel data in your reports
- What is a social media cross-channel data analysis?
- What does your social media analysis report consist of
- How to enrich your social media analysis: competitive cross-channel report
- How to best analyze your social media accounts
- Best social media analytics tools
- How to do your social media analysis with Socialinsider
1. What is a social media cross-channel data analysis?
A social media analysis using cross-channel is meant to provide data about how your posts rank, the volume of posts you have during a campaign, the overall engagement, but also the engagement for each social media platform.
Just like cross-channel marketing, where you use different types of channels, both digital and print, to best deliver a message and an idea to your target audience, it is essential to do so when it comes to the different social media platforms.
All social platforms work together to create context and reach as many people as possible.
You have to keep your community interested as long as you want to increase your audience, lead generation and your number of prospective clients.
But to see how well your overall marketing strategy performs, you need to access cross-channel data.
This social media analysis will show you which platform works best, which campaign is more successful and which post has brought in the most engagement.
The benefits of a social media analysis containing cross-channel data
A well-rounded brand analysis report will keep your clients happy.
Including a cross-channel overview of your social media analysis will come with many actionable insights, like:
- Get a clear overview of how your social media efforts are performing.
- See if your initial estimations were on point.
- Conclude how well your posts across all social media platforms perform.
- Adjust your strategy across the platforms.
- Help your clients decide where they need to invest more and where they can afford to cut down and adjust budgets accordingly.
- Help your clients better understand where the audience engages more.
- Help your client understand what messages ring true to the audience so that they can apply that across all marketing strategies, both on and offline.
- Define specific industry benchmarks
2. What does your social media analysis report consist of
Whether you want a short stand-alone report or need to add a few more important ideas to your social media report, turning to social media analysis using cross-channel data will lead you towards key conclusions.
By gathering data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, you will see which KPIs have greater values.
These are the key social media metrics that should not miss from your social media analysis report:
- post ranks across all channels
- number of posts
- post engagement and engagement rate
- all campaigns
- total campaign engagement
- number of posts per campaign
- posts volumes by campaign (numerically and percentage wise)
- total engagement by platform
3. How to enrich your social media analysis: competitive cross-channel report
It’s not always enough to look at your own social media insights. While social KPIs such as impressions, reach or engagement are pretty telling, the true value lies in how they compare to your competitor’s metrics.
To get a complete picture of the competitive landscape your brand is trying to succeed in, you need to get a grip of how your competitors are performing - the do’s and don'ts of the industry. And, of course, how your brand is performing by comparison.
Using Socialinsider, you'll be able to benchmark against your top competitors in your industry.
4. How to best analyze your social media accounts
Before starting any social media analysis and reporting process, you should make a plan that clearly outlines your expectations. Ask yourself what data you need to retrieve.
- Do you want to know how your posts are performing?
- Are you interested in finding out your strengths and weaknesses on a specific platform?
- Would you like to understand how the audience is engaging with particular campaigns?
Set clear goals and look for the most important KPIs that give you the answers you need, and then look at what social analytics tools tell you.
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Look at individual posts as well as campaigns
There are two ways to go when analyzing cross-channel data:
1. Individual posts
You can take a look at how all of your posts are ranking up against each other: what are your best posts, what is the best performing platform
2. Campaigns
Label each post with the designated campaign name. This way you can have precise data of how much effort you’ve put into each campaign (by looking into the number of posts and their overall percentage) and what engagement has each of these generated, both in total and by channel.
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What metrics should you look at when doing your social media analysis?
You can look at the social media data as puzzle pieces. Each number helps you create a well-rounded picture of how your future strategies should look like.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- The platform that has the highest engagement is where most of the core audience can be found. Empower that campaign and number of posts for even better results in your social media analysis.
- If you've invested more in Facebook posts and strategies, but your engagement is not as significant compared to Instagram, Twitter, or Youtube, it might be the time to reconsider what platform to prioritize.
- Change your strategies and adjust your actions and budget to balance investment and results for your social media analysis.
- Certain posts bring in more engagement than others. Look into what you are doing right. Is it a specific type of message, a certain type of image, the hour of posting? Figure it out and solve the problem.
- All posts will perform differently, but specific patterns will immerse between the highest and lowest engagement posts.
- If your engagement is not as good as your competitors’, look at what they do differently and try to define clear, actionable insights for your social media analysis.
- See if there are any differences in the cross-channel performance between you and your competitor. It might be that one platform is more engaging than the others, or it might have something to do with your strategy.
- Apply and test some of your conclusions based on your competitors' top results on your pages.
5. Best social media analytics tools
When developing a social media analysis report using cross-channel data, you know you cannot do it manually.
To closely look at all the data behind your social media posts, you need a social media analytics tool. Luckily for you, we have comprised a list of the most useful social media analytics tools to ease your work.
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Socialinsider
Socialinsider is a social media analytics tool which offers you the possibility to look into cross-platform posts and benchmarks to compare several marketing campaigns.
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Brandwatch
To develop a social media analysis, you can also use Brandwatch. This app splits the analysis into 6 areas, like crisis management, competitor analysis, brand strategy, content management, customer experience and influencer marketing.
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Sendible
Sendible is another tool which comes in handy for a social media analysis. It also helps you design and plan your content strategy.
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Brand24
Another tool for social media analysis is Brand24. This app helps you empower your social media strategy with sentiment analysis based on mentions and influence scores.
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AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse is a social media analytics tool, but also a scheduling tool. Based on past content performance, you will find out when it’s the right time to publish content.
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Digimind
Digimind is a tool that will help you develop a social media analysis in no time. By using this analytics tool, you can monitor apps to engage, listen and report everything about your services and products.
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Mention
Mention is a social media listening tool which proves to be very efficient. Mention helps you identify brand sentiment and track keywords.
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Keyhole
Keyhole really comes in handy when it comes to developing a social media analysis. This analytics tool helps you monitor your brand, monitor campaigns, events and conduct market research.
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Tailwind
Tailwind helps businesses evaluate their performance on picture-first platforms, like Instagram and Pinterest.
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Iconosquare
When it comes to Iconosquare, this social media analytics tool is more than that. Marketers also use it a scheduling and management tool, since you can track all the metrics and customize your dashboard.
6. How to do your social media analysis with Socialinsider
Going through this social media analysis is a simple process. If you’d like to get started, but you aren’t so sure how to do it, simply follow the steps below.
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Choose the project that contains the accounts you want to include in your social media analysis.
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Decide if you’d like to look into all posts independently or only focus on certain campaigns. Go to:
- Benchmarks
- Cross-platform
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Set a timeframe for the results you want to see in your social media analysis
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Evaluate individual posts from the "Posts Newsfeed" section
- You can look at how your posts perform across all channels, but you can also take a look at each social media platform individually.
- Sort all of your posts depending on what you need to find out: engagement, comments, likes, etc.
- Analyze your campaigns
- You can create Campaigns for your posts, by tagging each post.
Final Thoughts
In a competitive field like digital marketing, staying ahead of the curve is essential. That is the most important purpose of every social media analysis.
Doing cross-channel reporting helps you understand the strengths and weaknesses of each post across all the platforms, but also the real impact of your campaigns across all social networks.
A direct social media cross-channel analysis will show you everything you need to know about your posts on all social media platforms or individually.
Are you ready to start your own social media analysis? Don’t worry, we'll be here for you every step of the way!
