The art of analytics

I am by no means a mathematics genius. Alongside French, maths was my worse GCSE grade, I much preferred English and History (Shocking, I know).

However, here I am extolling the virtues of statistics and analytical data to anybody who’ll listen. Why? Well it’s due to the fact there is a wealth of knowledge and information in those massive piles of numbers, graphs and charts.

We get asked a lot by clients and partners what value there is in social media and the answer in truth is too complex for a single blog, but this is where the power of analytics really comes in.

Instead of trying to judge a platform’s success just on the sales it generates, you need to look at the massive benefits it creates elsewhere – brand awareness, community building, engagement opportunities and of course lead generation. Judging a campaign or platform against a single number will almost always yield a disappointing outcome.

Instead we need to widen our vision and look at things a little more broadly, as this is where the numbers can really start to shine.

The campaign

Take a recent campaign we ran for one of our clients, their aim is ultimately to generate more sales, after all, what business doesn’t want that?

We listened to their objectives, developed the copy, planned for the best times to post, and launched the campaign. Everything ran smoothly, it all went well, and we were all happy with how it looked.

Now here comes the interesting bit – the data! While we can’t attribute any one sale to the campaign directly what we can attribute is the growth in the company’s audience.

When I say audience, I don’t just mean the number of followers, I’m talking about impressions, engagements, link clicks and yes also followers. With the right campaign and targeting you can see huge results in your overall audience.

On the back of one small, paid social media campaign we saw a huge spike in followers. Alongside this, there has been consistent growth in engagement (the number of shares, likes, comments) which has happened together with a steady growth in impressions and a regular increase in followers.

It’s all about the audience

What we can see when we look deeper at the analytics is the point at which our clients account started to grow beyond its already established audience and start to reach new users. Those users then engaged and followed the account spreading its reach even further. We can see this not only be looking at the top level stats relating to impressions and engagement, but the follower demographics as well.

Tracking follower demographics allows you to see how well you’re diversifying and also how well you’re hitting your key targets. All of this information can be fed back to sales and marketing teams to help with more targeted content creation and assist in their more traditional? sales efforts.

This all helps to establish your brand even more and makes the sales team’s job easier, in that they’re able to approach potential customers who are already aware of the business thanks to social media.

As I said earlier, justifying the value of social media is going to take a lot more than one blog, but it is clear that there is much to value in a well-run and maintained social media account; to find its worth, you just need to know where to look and that’s where we can help.

At Nielsen McAllister we provide a range of social media support packages, if you would like to find out more about our services or read some of our case studies please click the links. Otherwise, get in touch with us on our contact page we’re always happy to have a chat.