Social media marketing is an essential part of any marketing campaign, bringing in the big bucks to your company or agency’s ROI.
Today, 91% of brands in the United States use social media marketing, from just over 86% in 2013, according to Statistica.
It’s no surprise that the competition is fierce, which is why brands need to always be on their feet and find ways to stay ahead of the game. This means they need to adjust and readjust strategies and messages, to keep the audience engaged.
Best way to do that?🤔
Look closely at what the data is telling you. By going through all of your social media data and comparing your stats, you can find out everything you need to know about your audience.
Find out more⇣
Use cross-channel analysis in Social Media Reports
- What is Social Media cross-channel data analysis?
- What does your Social Media cross-channel analysis report consist of?
- How to enrich your analysis report: competitive cross-channel analysis
- How to best analyze your Social Media accounts and what analytics tools can do for you?
- 10 steps to your Social Media cross-channel analysis with Socialinsider
- Final thoughts
1. What is Social Media cross-channel data analysis?
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 important to do so when it comes to the different social media platforms as well.
All of the social platforms work together in a coherent way, to create context and reach as many people as possible. But in order to see how well your strategy performs, you need to be able to access cross channel analysis easily.
This is where we come in to help, by creating a special cross-channel section that shows you which platform works best, which campaign is more successful and which post has brought in the most engagement.
❗Tip: To have a clear overall image about the best social media strategies across all platform, it’s also essential to also use cross-channel analysis to take a look at what your competitors are doing.
Test the cross-channel analysis with a free trial!
The benefits of a cross-channel Social Media report
A well-rounded brand analysis report will keep your clients happy. Including a cross-channel overview of your social media report will come with a lot of actionable insights.
This information will allow you to:
- Get a clear overview of how your social media efforts are performing, but remember to keep in mind the affinities of each channel
- See if your initial estimations were on point
- Draw conclusions on how well your posts across all social media platforms interlock
- 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
It will not only help you in sending out complete reports with actionable next steps, but by checking the stats from time to time, it also allows you to improve ongoing campaigns to reach the best possible end result.
2. What does your Social Media cross-channel analysis report consist of?
Whether you want a short stand-alone report, or just need to add a few more important ideas to your regular social media report, using your cross-channel analysis will lead you towards key conclusions.
Gathering all of the data from Facebook analytics, Instagram analytics, Twitter analytics, YouTube analytics, you will see which KPIs you’ve accomplished.
These are the metrics that will help you do so:
- 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 analysis report: competitive cross-channel analysis
It’s not always enough to look at your own data. While metrics such as impressions, reach or engagement are pretty telling, the true value lies in how they compare to your competitor’s stats.
For a better understanding of what is a social media competitive analysis, take a quick look at our video:
To get a full picture of the competitive landscape in which your brand is trying to succeed, you need to understand what the competitors are doing - the dos and don’t of the industry. And, of course, how your brand does by comparison.
Still have doubts? Check out a step by step rundown of a social media competitive analysis.
4. How to best analyze your Social Media accounts and what analytics tools can do for you?
Before starting any analysis and report, you should make a plan that clearly outlines your expectations: what do you want to find out?
Do you want to know how your posts are performing? Are you interested in finding out your strengths and weaknesses on a specific platform? Or would you simply want to understand how the audience is engaging with certain campaigns?
Set clear KPIs that give you the answers you need and then take a look at what analytics tools tell you.
To get you started, find out how to get social media stats and data with Socialinsider.
Look at individual posts as well as campaigns
There are two ways to go about a cross-channel analysis:
1. Individual post.
- Firstly, 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
- Then, start to filter the posts by engagement, platform, or campaign.
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.
Listen to the story your Social Media brand key metrics tell you
You can look at the data as puzzle pieces. Each number helps you create a well-rounded picture of how your future strategies should look.
Here are a few things you will learn:
- The platform that gives you the most engagement is where most of the core audience can be found. Increase the campaign and number of posts for even better results.
- 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 time to reconsider what to prioritize.
- Adjust your strategies and increase/decrease your actions and budget to improve the balance between investment and results.
- Certain posts bring in more engagement than others. Look into what you are doing right. Is it a certain type of message, a certain type of image, the hour of posting?
- All posts will perform differently, but certain patterns will immerse between the posts with the highest and the lowest engagement.
- If your engagement is not as good as your competitors’, look at what they do differently and try to define clear actionable insights
- 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 on your own pages some of your conclusions based on your competitors’ top results.
5. 10 steps to your Social Media cross-Channel analysis with Socialinsider
Going through this analysis is a smooth and simple process. If you’d like to get started but aren’t sure how to do so, simply follow the steps below.
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Choose the project that contains the accounts you want to look into.
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Decide if you’d like to look into all posts independently or only focus on certain campaigns. Go to:
👉 Page Newsfeed 👉 Cross-channel
👉 Campaigns -
Set a timeframe for the results you want to see
- Analyse individual posts from the "Page Newsfeed" section
- You can 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, Followers count, newest or oldest posts
- Filter all of your posts if you’d like an overview of something more specific: Facebook posts, Instagram posts, Twitter posts, Youtube posts, or posts from the created campaigns.
- Choose how many posts you want to look into: Go through the pages if you’d like to see stats and ranks from as many posts as necessary
- Analyse your campaigns
- You can create Campaigns for your posts, by tagging each post. You can do that from your "Page Newsfeed" but also directile from the each profile you've uploaded.
- If, by any chance, you find this confusing, the app will guide you through with these 3 easy steps: Create campaigns, Tag posts, Start analysing
- See how your created campaigns stack up against each other by selecting the “Campaigns” section or see how individual campaigns are doing by selecting them from the dropbox.
- Decide what cross channel metrics to use add the stats to your report. You can download reports directly from the platform, but the cross-channel data can be added afterward.
Final thoughts
In a competitive field, staying ahead of the curve is essential. An overview is important to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of each post across all channels, but also the real impact of your campaigns across all platforms.
A direct social media cross-channel analysis will show you the rank of each post, the volume of posts for each of the campaigns you want to monitor, the overall engagement as well as the engagement broken down by individual channel.
Are you ready for your social media cross-channel analysis? Don’t worry, the first one is on us!
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