Social Media Analysis: How To Play With Cross-Channel Data When Doing Your Social Media Reporting

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 where 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 analysis reports and why this is important.

Social media analysis: the benefits of using cross-channel data in your reports

1. What is a social media cross-channel data analysis?
   • The benefits of a social media analysis containing cross-channel data
   • How to access cross-channel data using Sociaoinsider
2. What should your social media analysis report consist of?
3. How to use cross-channel data to enrich your social media competitive analysis
4. How to best analyze your social media accounts
   • Look at benchmarks as well as campaigns
   • What should you look at when doing your social media data analysis
5. Best social media analytics tools
6. 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 (e.g. digital and print) to best deliver your message to your target audience, it is essential to do so when it comes to the different social media platforms.

Sharing content across multiple social platforms helps reach as many people as possible.

You have to keep your community interested if you want to increase your audience, generate more leads and grow the number of prospective clients.

But to see how well your overall marketing strategy performs, you need to access cross-channel data.

This analysis on social media will show you which platform works best, which campaign is more successful and which post has brought in the most engagement.

How to access cross-channel data with Socialinsider

We completely understand the need to access all the cross-channel data that's relevant to you from one single place.

Thankfully, you can have an advanced social media analytics tool like Socialinsider do all the heavy lifting and bring you accurate data for own channels or for your competitors’ profiles.

To get started, you should add social media profiles for multiple platforms.

Once that’s done, you can choose either of the following 3 methods to get your cross-channel data, depending on your needs.

• Benchmarks

1. Navigate to the Benchmarks section in your dashboard
2. Select “Cross-platform” from the top navigation bar
3. See all cross-channel data for your added profiles, including followers evolution, number of posts, average engagement, engagement rate and reach

• Campaigns

If you’re tracking a social media campaign across multiple platforms and different brands, then I suggest taking a look at the Campaigns feature.

To start, you'll need to:

1. Head to the Posts Newsfeed section to see all posts
2. Search for a keyword or hashtag you want to track (e.g. Oscars)
3. Click on “Auto tag” to tag all relevant posts and create your campaign
4. Navigate to the Campaigns section, then select “Campaign Details” from the top navigation bar
5. Examine cross-channel data for your campaign, counting engagement, reach, impressions and more

• Brands

If you just want to look at cross-channel data for your own brand, then the Brand Overview section is your new best friend. To get there, you need to:

1. From Home, create a brand in your dashboard and assign all relevant channels

2. Then, select the brand you created from the left sidebar

3. You will land in Brand Overview, where you can see all the cross-platform data available for you brand, including breakdowns by engagement, posts and followers and top posts for each platform

The benefits of a social media content analysis based on cross-channel data

A well-rounded brand analysis report will keep your clients happy.

Including a cross-channel overview of your social media analysis provides many actionable insights, enabling you to:

• Get a clear overview of how your social media efforts are paying off.
• See if your initial estimations were on point.
• Help your clients identify which messages ring true to the audience so that they can apply that across all marketing strategies, both on and offline.
• Adjust your strategy across the platform.
• Prioritize top-performing channels based on what your analytics data says.
• 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.
• Define specific industry benchmarks.

2. What should your social media analysis report consist of?

Whether you want a short standalone report or need to add a few more important ideas to your social media report, turning to social media marketing analysis using cross-channel data will lead you towards key conclusions.

By gathering data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube, you will see which KPIs have greater values.

These are the key social media metrics that should not be missing from your social media analysis report:

• follower evolution
• reach & impressions
• engagement (total engagement and engagement rate)
• top performing posts
• audience demographics

3. How to use cross-channel data to enrich your social media competitive analysis

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 competitors' metrics.

To get a full 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.

As I mentioned before, the Benchmarks section should be one of your go-to spot for cross-channel data and competitive insights.

Whether you stick with the Cross-Platform tab to get cross-channel stats for you and your competitors, or you head to the Brands tab to see brand-level aggregated data, with the Benchmarks feature you can supercharge your competitive analysis and enrich your reports.

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.

• Look at benchmarks as well as campaigns

There are two ways to go when analyzing cross-channel data - micro and macro:

1. Benchmarks (macro)

You can take a look at how all of your brand's are ranking up against other brands in your industry

2. Campaigns (micro)

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

• Social media analysis - best practices

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 channel 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, TikTok or Youtube, it might be the time to reconsider what platform to prioritize.
• Adjust your strategies 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 tailor your strategy based on your findings.
• All posts will perform differently, but specific patterns will emerge 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 content analysis.
• Apply and test some of your conclusions based on your competitors' top results on your pages.

5. Best social media analysis tools

When developing a social media analysis report using cross-channel data, you will definitely want to get rid of the manual grind.

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Sendible

Sendible is another tool which comes in handy for a social media analysis. It also helps you design and plan your content strategy.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• Mention

Mention is a social media listening tool which proves to be very efficient. Mention helps you track social media sentiment analysis, as well as keywords.

• 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.

• Tailwind

Tailwind helps businesses evaluate their performance on picture-first platforms, like Instagram and Pinterest.

• 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

In this guide, we've gone over a lot of ways in which you can do your social media analysis and reporting with Socialinsider.

Let's recap:

1. You can get cross-channel data via the Benchmarks, Brands or Campaigns features
2. Your top metrics will depend on your social media goals and the platforms you choose to compare, but the essential KPIs are engagement, reach, impressions and followers growth.
3. The Benchmarks feature offers a macro view of cross-channel data, while the Campaigns feature offers a more focus, micro view of social media performance across multiple channels
   

Final thoughts

In a competitive field like digital marketing, staying ahead of the curve is essential. That is the most important goal 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!