What is it and why does your practice need it?
As a practice owner, you’ve been told how crucial social media is when it comes to connecting with current and prospective patients. You’ve read our blog and followed the steps to set up your Facebook and Instagram accounts.
But how do you know if your efforts are yielding the results you desire? An analysis of your social media accounts can help you learn if you’re meeting your social media goals and can show you where you may need to adjust your strategy.
What is social media analytics?
According to Techopedia, Social media analytics (SMA) refers to the approach of collecting data from social media sites and blogs and evaluating that data to make business decisions. This process goes beyond the usual monitoring or a basic analysis of retweets or ‘likes’ to develop an in-depth idea of the social consumer, or in your case, patient.
Social media analytics can help users to simplify data from dozens of networks and can discover and communicate meaningful patterns.
Why is social media analytics important?
Using social media analytics to guide your strategy can benefit your social media marketing in so many ways. For example, social media analytics can:
- Help you to understand your audience better.
- Show which platforms are best for your social media goals.
- Guide you when creating content.
- Help you to understand what your competitors are doing.
- Help you to see how your current social media posts and campaigns are performing.
- Help you to build a better strategy.
How to conduct a social media analysis?
There are many ways to conduct an analysis of your social media accounts and campaign strategy, but we’re going to show you the simplest way to perform one.
- Create a spreadsheet
Begin preparing your social media analysis report by creating a spreadsheet and adding which profiles you’re going to assess.
- Pull reports from each of the platforms you’re assessing
Facebook, Instagram and other social media platforms already have their own analytics built right in where you can view metrics like actions on the page, page views, page previews, and more.
- Input your data for each platform into your spreadsheet
Create tabs for each month you want to analyze. Create data metrics columns that correspond with the most important metrics. These columns should replicate the categories that came directly from your social media platform reports. Fill in data from the reports into your spreadsheet.
- Carefully review the data
After you’ve input your data, you’ll want to determine positive or negative trends. Highlight improved metrics in one color and metrics that have gotten worse in another. This will provide a great overall vision of how your channels perform. These metrics will enable you to better sort out the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign.
- Create a social media action plan based on your analysis
Look at the metrics in your social media analysis that are always down. From there, you can make a list of the metrics that are most often decreasing or staying stagnant and consider what steps you can take to improve your numbers in that area. This could mean changing your content or the times in which you post or trying a new social media platform.
Social media analysis is more than looking at engagement and reach. It checks all your social media marketing efforts. Social media analysis should be performed on a quarterly basis. This will ensure you have enough useful data to make important decisions and the bandwidth to make any adjustments to your social media campaign as you move into the next quarter.