Social Media Analytics For Digital Publishers

Written by: Rashmi

Social media is here to stay. It engages and will keep engaging hundreds of millions of people every day. If you are a digital publisher, you probably already know that. What you might not know is the power of social media analytics for your publishing business.

Most digital publishers measure the success of their social media marketing campaigns on the basis of the number of likes and shares on their posts. Social media analytics can take you one step ahead of that. Along with ‘what is working’, it can give you insights on ‘how to make it work.’

If this has aroused your interest, keep reading. Down below is a beginner’s guide on social media analytics for digital publishers.

What Is Social Media Analytics?

Social media analytics is gathering and analyzing data from various social media channels. It includes determining audience size, getting audience profile, monitoring reach, analyzing the engagement of the audience with different types of content.

Every social media platform gives you at least a surface-level overview of your audience and engagement. But extracting actionable insights from this is hard. Social media analytics, on the other hand, is much more powerful and gives you insights on how to publish and promote content for maximum engagement.

Social Media Analytics Uses

It is clear that social media analytics gives richer data on your social media account. But how can a digital publisher use that data in his business? Here is a list of the potential uses of social media analytics:

See The Bigger Picture: Engaging with followers on social media on a daily basis often makes social media managers ignore the bigger picture. But when you use social media analytics, you get a sneak peek into the bigger picture. For example, publishers who were using social media analytics got the hint early on that Facebook is slowly killing the reach of personal profiles and business pages.

Monitoring Your Competitor: The inbuilt tools of social media platforms rarely give insights on other people’s accounts (such as your competitor). This need can be easily met by using social media analytics. A robust social media analytics tool can predict the digital growth or fall of your competitor so that you can stay one step ahead.

Monitoring Trends: Everyone is looking at the trending section of Twitter. So, if you want to keep your digital publishing apart from the crowd, you will have to go beyond the hashtags. Social media analytics tools can deploy Artificial Intelligence to monitor trends. If you detect a big trend early and ride it, your digital publishing business can attract hundreds of thousands, if not millions of readers.

How To Choose The Right Social Media Analytics Tool

Thanks to the omnipotence of social media platforms, there are a lot of analytics tools available in the market. Though it might seem that having extensive options is a good thing, digital publishers often get confused about finding the right tool.

Here is a list of things to keep in mind while selecting the best social media analytics tool:

Platforms: Whether you want to be present on all social media platforms or only on a few, it is your choice. Just make sure that you are choosing a tool that works not only with your current social media platforms but also with the channels that are in your marketing pipeline.

Data Points: The number of likes is one data point, number of shares is another. As a digital publisher, you are going to need at least 10-15 data points to analyze your social media marketing campaign correctly. Here is a list of the most basic data points that should be present in a social media analytics tool:

• Audience Activity

• Unique daily and monthly visitors

• Distribution of various types of content

• Most engaging content post type

• Post virality

• Results over time

• Demographics

• Trending speed

Pricing: Try to first make a list of the social media analytics features that you need and then look up the prices of different social media analytics tools that offer your required features. Some tools offer different tiers at different prices. While you shouldn’t go out of the budget, you should also not refrain from spending money because the reach and engagement will cover your spending in no time.

At Quintype, we offer a complete suite of digital publishing solutions that cater to the needs of digital publishers. Schedule a free demo today and we will be happy to be your partner.