Social data can significantly improve your audience engagement, improve your targeting, and decrease your cost-per-click. Here’s why you should be using it.
In this day and age, it’s impossible to not include social media platforms in your digital marketing campaign.
After all, how could you miss the opportunity to expose your business to the enormous audience base that uses these platforms on a day-to-day basis?
According to Statista, the collective number of social media users today is over 3.6 billion, with Facebook being the most ‘populated’ platform.
Photo credit: Statista
Besides being able to reach massive audiences with diverse demographics, businesses can reap a few other significant benefits by integrating social media into their various marketing campaigns:
• drive traffic by creating organic content
• make your brand more accessible to your customers
• increase brand awareness and boost engagement
And, the reason as to why all these benefits are even possible is: social data. It is the source of information from which you can use to learn which strategies will work for your brand and contribute to the success of your marketing campaign.
Social data describes all the information received from your followers on a given social media platform. This data includes but is not limited to biographical data, different kinds of feedback (likes, shares, comments), as well as some demographic data (age, gender, language, location).
All this data can play an important role in launching and optimising your marketing campaign.
So, let’s take a look at how you can use social data for your benefits.
1. Finding Your Audience
Social data helps to define your ideal customer profile (ICP). It can give you an insight into who is already following your brand on social media. And, through the analysis of different audience segments, you can better understand who your target audience is.
Where can you find this data?
The demographics of your social media following can be found in the Analytics section of the respective platform. Here’s how this data is presented on Facebook:
In the image above, you can find general demographic data, including gender, age, location, and language. You can also see that some audience segments are more present and active than others, indicating which one could be the target audience for your next marketing campaign.
As a result, social data can help you define a more niche audience with specific needs and goals, making your marketing campaign more targeted and successful.
2. Developing Engaging Content
The analytics section on your social media platforms doesn’t just tell you about who your target audience is, but what content these people like as well. As such, you can use social data to help develop a winning content strategy for your marketing campaign.
You can start by analysing the interests of your followers on certain social media platforms. Here’s how this data looks on Twitter, for example:
These interests are generated by the content that the audience has liked, shared, or responded to, giving you an idea as to what type of content they would like to see more of from you.
You can also take a look at how your followers responded to your previous content. You can do so by looking at the data on engagement and reach, which is generated by the social media platform. Here’s how this social data is presented on Facebook:
Using this data, you can:
• Study general content preferences of your followers
• Find top-performing content types to be used in your marketing campaign
• Monitor the performance of your content during the campaign
If you need more insights on which content you should be using in order to engage your audience, you can also do polls and surveys on a social media platform of your choice. The feedback that you get can play a crucial role in developing the content strategy for your marketing campaign.
3. Making Your Content More Targeted
Likes and shares are not the only sources of social data. A hashtag also carries a lot of information, which you can benefit from.
Brands often use hashtags to make their content more discoverable. However, if you randomly choose hashtags for your marketing campaign, there is no guarantee that your content will be easier to find.
If you want hashtags to work, you need to do a quick analysis. Every hashtag has performance data, which changes weekly and monthly. Take a look at the performance of #brand:
As you can see, the general popularity and recent popularity of the hashtag is good, and its monthly trend has increased by 2%. However, the hashtag’s weekly performance is 10% lower, which means that not as many people are following it right now.
So, to make sure that you’ve chosen the right hashtags, be sure to monitor the data and hashtag popularity on a weekly basis. It will help you to adjust your marketing campaign accordingly, and target more or the right people with your content.
Next Steps
Launching a marketing campaign is not an easy job to do. It’s all about the process of learning what works for your brand and what doesn’t.
To help you figure it out, social data can come to the rescue.
With it, you can make your ideal customer persona more detailed, develop the content strategy, and get more people interested in your campaign. As a result, you’ll get satisfied customers, more sales, and a successful marketing campaign.
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