Social Media Data Collection – Part 1: Why Compiling Data Should Be a Priority

March 1, 2022 by Lauren Zylyk

As a business owner, you can't afford to underestimate the importance of data in all aspects of marketing, particularly social media. Although social media data collection may seem like a chore, it can play a major role in helping your business achieve greater success.

Here's why…

Why Social Media Data Collection Is Essential

Marketing decisions need to be backed by data on consumers, their behavior, and conversions—and that is where social media analytics comes in! With social media analytics, businesses can essentially bring more than just instinct into marketing. Specifically, businesses become better informed on prospects' interactions with the brand and its products. These metrics place the business at an advantage, so they are better equipped to make strategic changes. That's why social media data collection from different platforms is crucial.

With popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we are looking for engagement rates, impressions, and link clicks (if applicable). This information is essentially raw data and insights into your online consumer behavior. 

Compiling these becomes an essential step to begin doing the following: 

• Measuring engagement
• Tracking market trends
• Drawing insights to inform your social media strategy

What Are the Benefits of Collecting Social Media Data?

From a marketing perspective, social media data collection should be a priority because it offers a wide range of benefits. 

Here are just a few examples…

1. It Helps with Optimizing Your Social Media Content

Social media has set itself up as a direct channel to a broad pool of prospective customers. To get a significant chunk of this pool, you need to tailor your content in a manner that attracts this audience. You must personalize your content based on your audience's needs and values.

With social media analytics, you can first determine which of the platforms is effective for your business (as not every platform will work for every business). Further, you can correctly measure what type of social posts perform better and which time of the day your target audience hangs out on the platform. This can help you optimize your social media content. The different metrics you could collect from social media analytics will help you create and publish your social media content for maximum reach.

2. It Informs the Content Strategy across Platforms

Social media data has the potential to help you identify what your target audience is sharing and posting about. As you aim to deliver value, you want your content to provide solutions for the problems they're experiencing. And by using social media data to your advantage, you can get a better sense of their pain points and tackle them accordingly.

These data sets unearth the kind of content your customers respond to as well. For instance, if customers show more of an interest in how-to reels or graphics, it means you need to share more how-tos and branch off from there. Or, if your customers engage more with caroursels or story stickers over static graphic posts, you should aim to post more of the former. 

You can also tell if your audience responds better to professional or friendly tones. This will inform your marketing team on what tone to use.

Overall, social data collection from multiple platforms can help you come up with a content marketing strategy that best ties into the customer's needs. Social data gives direct feedback on what approaches work and which ones need to be tweaked.

3. It Assists in Monitoring Your Brand's Image

In most cases, social media is the first place where prospects research a new business. In light of this, you want to create a brand image that connects with the target audience. You want this image to come off as both authentic and trustworthy. To succeed in today's market, you want to create a brand that consumers can relate to and feel comfortable approaching.

Using social media, you can keep tabs on how this target audience feels about your brand, its image, and business decisions. You will be particularly keeping tabs on information spread through comments, shares, retweets, and messages. If you hit all the right spots, you should have greater engagement.

4. It Allows You to Improve Your SEO Strategy

Social media data collection is also helpful for improving your SEO strategy. With social data, it becomes easy to identify the demographic that is your target market. That way, your marketing team can move from general industry keywords to those that your target market is searching for across their social networks. 

Knowing what keywords your target market is searching for and using them to inform your content is essential to driving traffic to your website and standing out on social. In addition to optimizing blogs and pages for these keywords, you can include them in the following areas of posts:

• Captions
• Hashtags
• Alt text

Doing this helps draw more attention to posts sharing content from your site, encouraging people to visit your site to learn more. It also allows you to build authority in the eyes of your target market over time. 

You can reference your post insights to see how your posts performed and direct your strategy based on that data, adjusting as necessary.

Ultimately, social media plays an integral role in your company's efforts to rank well in search results. This applies to not only social search engines but also traditional search engines like Google. Though social media won’t directly help your rankings on the latter, having positive signals could come in handy in how your business ranks organically.

5. It Identifies Influential Customers

In today's e-commerce ecosystem, a weapon your business has in its arsenal is social media influencers. These individuals have significant reach and could influence their followers to buy into your business. These personalities can be invaluable assets within your overall marketing strategy. This is because their followers trust their messaging more than they would trust yours.

When reaching out to influencers, you must ensure the following:

• Their target audience matches yours
• Their engagement rates are high
• They have an active community
• Their rate fits your budget

Advice on Smart Social Media Data Collection

You should always predetermine the goals and KPIs before embarking on social media data collection. Without these, the data you compile will end up lacking context, which defeats the purpose.

In most instances, marketing will involve a cross-platform social media strategy. You should segment the data from all platforms even as you compile. In doing so, it becomes possible to build a customer's persona across the different platforms. This helps with creating audience-specific content.

Takeaway

If you want your business to be successful, you have to invest in social media data collection. Monitoring and collecting your social media data should be a top priority. You should focus on analyzing the data to glean insights that you can apply to all aspects of your marketing and share with your team to foster a data-driven culture.

At Viral Solutions, we are committed to seeing your business benefit from social media analytics. We have the expertise and time-tested strategies to help your business grow. Learn about our social media marketing services and get started with a FREE audit of your social media today.

Filed Under: Analytics, Social Media Tagged With: Data collection, social media, Social media Data, social media optimization

About Lauren Zylyk

During her time working for Walt Disney World, Lauren quickly grew a social media presence on platforms, mainly through Instagram. With a Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing paired with her passion for marketing, Lauren grew her audience even more by creating a blog and through use of other social media platforms. She loves the impact that social media has and how quickly it can get information around worldwide.
When she is not busy keeping up with the latest trends online, she can be found baking cookies in the kitchen, watching hockey, or at the gym. She loves hot yoga and trying out any new dessert recipe. She can’t cook, but she can sure bake!