February 27, 2025
Author: Elliot Park, Brookville Chamber Intern
Continuing to highlight the importance of using social media (SM) as an effective tool this article will focus on utilizing SM analytics to further one’s business. With a shift of focus from traditional marketing tools to digital tools, consumers are spending more time on SM. As businesses recognize this they are making the shift to use social media as an effective marketing tool. More and more organizations are establishing a presence on a variety of different SM applications, utilizing it as an effective promotional tool, but there is so much more to SM. Specifically, each SM application keeps track of a variety of analytics, allowing business profiles to easily access and use this information. The analytics provide a wealth of knowledge surrounding your customers, market, and even industry. Using this information can help you understand your customers, improve your strategy, and most importantly identify new opportunities for growth.
The Better Business Bureau (BBB) has established four ways they recommend for identify opportunities for growth using social media analytics:
- Identify Opportunities for Targeted Marketing – using analytics can help you identify recent topics and trends that your audience and potential audience is interested in. Using this information, you can tailor your content to these topics and trends providing a more effective way to reach your audience. Targeting specific audiences with tailored content has tremendous potential to boost your sales and improve your business.
- Gather Vital Feedback from Your Audience – SM provides the opportunity to gain feedback directly from your audience, helping to evolve your business strategy. This feedback does not necessarily have to be related to your SM profiles or content as customers have the ability to leave feedback on products or services as well. This provides valuable information on your customers preferences, desires, and needs that can be used to shape future products or marketing campaigns.
- Track Your Current Strategy’s Success – Analytics are a great way to track performance and highlight success and failure of a current strategy. By using real-time insights and benchmarks analytics can help monitor progress and allow businesses to make data-driven adjustments and decisions. Using analytics to track current success involves setting or establishing specific key metrics to highlight the impact. Some key metrics recommended by the BBB include:
- Leads Generated
- Revenue
- Overall ROI
- Website Referral Traffic
- Most Engaged Demographic
- Top-Performing Content
- Predicting Future Trends – Some applications are also equipped with predictive analytics making it easy to determine future trends. Using the historical data you can generate predictions about market demand, potential growth, and potential leads to help shape not only your content but also your business strategy.
Overall, there is an abundant of information that can be gathered and analyzed using SM, especially when looking at the analytics that applications provide. Whether trying to understand your customers or improve your strategy it is important to identify new ways for growth to accomplish your organizational goals. As SM continues to become an integral part of our society, and thus the business world, using SM and its analytics can be a great way to expand your reach & audience, attract new customers, increase sales, and improve the overall business.
Source: Better Business Bureau. (2025, January 23). BBB Business Tip: How to Use Social Media Analytics to Find Opportunities for Growth. https://www.bbb.org/article/business/26583-bbb-business-tip-how-to-use-social-media-analytics-to-find-opportunities-for-growth