Social Media Insights: Complete Guide w/ Actionable Examples

16 min readDec 8, 2022

If you’re working in the social media management industry, you’re already familiar with terms like Instagram analytics and engagement rate. Social media insights are everything marketers talk about today.

As a matter of fact, every marketing team action tends to end up in a social media success analytics report. Then, there’s talking about new followers, link clicks, retweets, and multiple valuable insights leading the way to future strategies.

But what are social media insights? Why are they essential? And most importantly, how can you leverage them to boost your business success rates?

Let’s find out!

What Are Social Media Insights?

Social media insights are defined as consumer insights from social media channels only. Generally, a consumer insight is newly found valuable information that helps businesses gain a deeper understanding of their audience.

Tracking and analyzing a brand’s social interactions online provides business owners with customer knowledge, also known as social insights. Companies need to analyze human behaviors in terms of consumer habits, interests, and needs to create effective digital marketing campaigns.

Not all data points are considered insights. In order for that to happen, this piece of information point needs to be new, unforeseen, and relevant to your business. Furthermore, after you’ve tracked and analyzed this dataset, the way you must proceed must be clear for you.

Insights can include key audience demographics, like gender, age, and location. Moreover, they can be more complex KPIs that show how your followers feel or interact with your social media content.

You can gather consumer insights by observing your audience’s behavior on various social media platforms. In detail, platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, and TikTok offer a profound perception of how your audience feels.

All in all, the right insights provide a data roadmap that directs you to improve your social media marketing efforts for impactful results.

Let’s take Instagram Insights as an example.

Social Media Insight Example

In general, social media data can be found on every kind of platform. Whether they’re labeled as Twitter Analytics or Audience Insights for Facebook Pages, they’re filled with graphs and data points.

Source: Oberlo

Instagram Insights, for example, offer a real-time easy-to-use platform for business accounts, where you can review your social media performance. From top posts to follower growth, Instagram is a great example of how social media metrics can help you grow.

For instance, you can find out the age range, gender, location, and active time/day of your audience.

5 Benefits of Leveraging Social Media Insights

Why should you take social media insights seriously?

Here are 5 ways you can use these analytics to help your company grow and improve.

Benefit #1: Measure and analyze your content performance

Due to today’s cross-platform content saturation, It’s certainly not easy to stand out on social networks anymore.

How do you know that your content marketing game is appealing to your target audience? When you want to evaluate your content strategy and performance on various platforms, you first check your social media engagement.

After walking through your likes, comments, and shares, you can turn to a more complex software operating tool. Social media monitoring tools, like Mentionlytics, have cool features, like sentiment analysis and real-time social media reports.

Social media insights can help you understand which social media posts work for your brand and which don’t.

Benefit #2: Get to understand your customers better

Since customers are now exposed to many types of content, it’s not surprising that they expect a more personalized approach.

For example, a teenager probably won’t have the same response to your social media strategy as an older buyer will.

It’s important to understand what your social media audience is like and how they tend to act online. For example, insights like basic audience demographics can help you choose the right time and day to share your content.

Furthermore, knowing your leads can give you an idea of how to plan the best customer journey for your audience.

Benefit #3: Determine which social channels work best for your brand and why

Be careful, because this one is tricky.

Obviously, when you’re designing a brand awareness-focused strategy, you can’t skip posting on a social media platform as well. Each social network is important for your brand and can help introduce you to a new audience.

While this may be true, it’s important to realize that some social channels could be more beneficial for your brand.

For example, according to your brand philosophy, is it better for you to focus on posting tweets or Facebook posts?

Benefit #4: Benchmark your social media performance to your competitors

Whatever you do, there’s no denying that you have to face severe competition.

Especially on social media, everything is usually measured comparatively. Does your Youtube content have more video views than your competitors? Did your tweets create enough buzz compared to the rest of the related industry?

In order for you to benchmark your content marketing to your industry competition, you need to check your social Share of Voice percentage.

How many accounts are talking about you across social media platforms? How does this number compare to the total number of industry-related mentions online?

Lucky for you, there are a ton of social listening tools to help you figure out where you rank among your competitors.

Benefit #5: Improve your social media campaigns and brand image

Lastly, social media insights let you focus on specific social media campaigns and marketing efforts.

Social media monitoring lets you set specific time frames, platforms, and hashtag restrictions. Hence, you can evaluate what went right and wrong on each campaign.

Moreover, by using social media insights business owners get to optimize the overall customer experience of their audience. By tracking mentions with negative sentiment, they can instantly know what’s wrong.

For instance, they can learn about a product problem and improve their production methods next time, leaving customers happy!

Top 5 Social Media Analytics & Metrics You Need to Track

The analytics field is wide and full of options, so sometimes it’s hard to keep track of everything.

Nevertheless, if you’re into social media content marketing, there are certain options that can be labeled as a monitoring necessity.

Let’s go through 5 of the most important types of social media analytics and metrics right now.

Audience analytics

In social media marketing, it’s vital for you to invest in content creation and distribution. However, it’s equally important to know your audience.

At the present time, knowing more about the social media users who’ve been talking about your brand isn’t impossible.

As has been noted above, audience demographics advise you to make better choices for your next marketing efforts. For example, choose the best day and time to share your content with the world, based on your audience’s preferences.

Track your own brand mentions across multiple social media platforms. As a result, you can create insightful social media reports that demonstrate the age, gender, and locations your brand attracts.

Knowing who you’re talking to, makes it easier to come up with what, when, where, and how you’re going to.

Brand adjacent topics

Apart from your core audience and competitors, sometimes it’s important to take a look at your company’s general industry.

Discovering new topics that are related to your brand can help your business improve its content marketing strategy.

Let’s say that you’re owning a clothing store. Perhaps, it’ll be interesting to track keywords and social hashtags that are related to your industry. Follow topics, conversations, and trends for general hashtags, like #mensfashion, but also specific keywords like “shoe trends for winter 2022”.

There are many social listening tools, as well as social monitoring toolkits, that can help you track brand-adjacent topics.

For example, Mentionlytics has a specific mention tracker category labeled as Marketing Leads. You can add keywords about relevant topics in this mention tracker and find out what’s been said about your industry.

In other words, this type of analytics can inspire you to create something that’s desired by the audience. In addition, these mentions can also prevent you from doing the wrong thing or choosing the wrong products.

Awareness metrics

Awareness metrics focus on answering the following question: Do people know about your brand?

There are several individual metrics involved in this category. For example, there’s brand awareness that measures your brand mentions and the times your business is being recognized.

Then there’s the social media reach metric that calculates the number of individual users that come across your social content.

How many social media accounts see the products of your content marketing efforts?

Impressions are an equally important metric to track, as they count the total number of times your content was displayed. By comparing your impressions to your reach, you can understand if your content was interesting enough for your audience.

In other words, if your impression number is higher than your reach number, it means your audience re-visits your content.

Lastly, don’t forget to track your Social Share of Voice (SSoV) percentage. In detail, SSoV is all about your online conversation visibility and relevance compared to your competitors and the overall industry.

Engagement metrics

In general, social media engagement is not an unknown concept for marketing executives.

It’s all about social interactions. In detail, the total number of engagements measures the volume, frequency, and quality of your audience’s interaction with your content.

You can always track the popular mainstream metrics: likes, reactions, comments, shares, and retweets. It’s important to know if your audience likes your content and if they’re willing to promote you.

Furthermore, there are more complex and unknown metrics that focus on how much your audience cares about your online conversations.

For example, the amplification rate is the percentage of social shares per post to the number of overall followers. The virality rate measures the same ratio of social shares per post but compared to the overall post impressions.

Engagement metrics are always important because they offer you a glimpse of your audience’s interest, responsiveness, and active involvement. In reality, how many of your followers are “real”?

Conversion metrics

Finally, there’s the marketing concept of conversion.

Conversions are about “persuading” your audience into taking a desirable action after visiting your website. In fact, these website visitors probably came there from clicking on a link on your social media channels (referrals).

Desirable actions include website sign-ups, email subscriptions, downloads, purchases, video clicks, etc.

Conversion metrics are very important to business owners because they tend to demonstrate actual marketing-to-sales progress. The conversion rate is the number of conversions started by your social content in a specific time frame.

Furthermore, there are other important metrics for you to track, like CPC (Cost-per-click). Cost-per-click (CPC) is about the amount of money you paid for each unique click your social ad ended up getting. This metric lets you understand if your initial investment was really worth it.

There are more social media analytics/insights to keep track of, but we chose some of the most important ones.

5 Ways to Improve Your Social Media Marketing Strategy with the Right Insights

So you have tracked your desired insights.

You’ve even put together a well-structured social media report, highlighting your KPIs and every important data point.

What’s next?

Here are 5 ways in which you can turn those metrics into actionable social media marketing steps:

Fine-tune your audience targeting strategy

As has been noted above, targeting the right audience is everything when it comes to social media marketing.

At this point, not every type of content works for every type of viewer. That’s why you need to limit your audience to ideal segments of types of followers that resemble each other.

This resemblance can be about their age range, gender, country, or even the city they’re from. Moreover, there are deeper limitations that focus on their online behavior.

For example, say that you’re owning a local clothing store for babies. Your ideal target audience, based on simple marketing research, would be young mothers that live close to your store.

You have your desired age range, gender, and location in mind. But how can you improve your Instagram strategy? Perhaps, by checking what time of day most of your followers are active on the platform.

Make sure that your content will be shared when most of your audience will be logged in and ready to see it.

Develop feedback-inspired product features

How to get ahead of the competition when it comes to the actual products or services your business is providing.

To create better product features, you first have to know what would your target audience change in your previous drop. In fact, review monitoring helps with this goal, especially tracking negative critiques that can prove themselves to be constructive.

It’s important to monitor your overall brand reputation and the audience’s thoughts about your products. A social media monitoring tool comes in handy there. As a matter of fact, Mentionlytics offers sentiment analysis in every mention your brand gets.

Not only can you monitor the online conversation about your brand, but also track the general discussion around the industry. Find out about new product trends or specific expectations about the services in your field.

Last but not least, you can always have a peek at what the audience says about your competitor’s products. Is there positive feedback about a technique that you could apply to your own products?

Improve communication with customers

In order for you to deeply understand valuable consumer habits, you need to improve your customer communication first.

For instance, what are the prime topics for user-generated content and consumer conversations online?

Imagine you get to understand what your target audience loves to talk about. Therefore, you can base your communications and offers around these topics and profit from this knowledge.

When Electra Hotels approached Mentionlytics, the goal was maximum data coverage of hotel mentions across all social media platforms.

Electra Hotels wanted to improve response time with customers. In fact, they wanted to know every conversation that entailed their brand to react accordingly.

Reactions could include resolving issues or identifying an opportunity to engage with the customers. For example, what if they were looking for a recommendation at a particular place or guidance about the destination?

Mentionlytics helped them monitor all crucial messages in one place. They managed to stay on top of the conversations, reduce their response time and engage with customers effortlessly.

Boost your influencer marketing strategy

Influencer marketing has become a large part of a brand’s social media strategy.

As a matter of fact, many brands often scan the web and social channels to find the right ambassadors.

What people influence the local community of your industry’s market? Analyzing the correct insights will not only lead you to the right people but also the right social media platform.

In the clothing store example, there must be some local fashion influencers you can contact. Plus, studying your audience can lead you to focus your marketing efforts on Instagram rather than on Twitter.

But how do you find the right influencers for your brand?

A social media monitoring tool, like Mentionlytics, provides users with Top Mentioners reports. Basically, there you can set multiple filters to focus on details like the country and language of each mention’s account.

Hence, you can discover influencers that talk about your brand. Use this data to contact the right people and create successful influencer marketing campaigns. Then, measure specific KPIs to understand if this method worked for your brand.

Optimize your content marketing based on industry insights

To stay on top of the competition you need to constantly upgrade your content marketing strategy.

As a matter of fact, it’s important to track your industry’s latest social media trends and make smart decisions. Will the next big trend benefit your brand image or is it unnecessary to follow it?

For example, through Mentionlytics, the Electra Hotel team created several trackers of competitors to learn what customers say about them. They also focused on what they had to say about their influencers’ activities, market trends, and owned social media campaigns.

The “Top Keywords” feature helped them analyze the keywords and hashtags used by their industry or their competitors. Concurrently, they gathered insights about each mention’s location and channel.

Furthermore, the keyword feature helped the team find posts with the highest level of engagement and social reach. They used all these data to build custom reports and make tactical decisions based on the available information.

Through the “Share of Voice” feature, the Electra Hotels team acquired a clear view of who is leading the market. They used the insights gained about their brand and their industry to stay on top of the competition.

4 Social Media Analytics Tools to Take Your Insights to The Next Level

Gathering analytics isn’t always a piece of cake for business owners.

Luckily, there are many social media analytics tools that can help you track and leverage your social insights.

Let’s take a look at 4 of the most popular ones:

1. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is an all-in-one mention tracking tool that offers social media analytics and insights to help improve your marketing strategy.

Operating with a fast social media monitoring software, Mentionlytics tracks your brand mentions. Find out what’s being said about you on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Youtube, TikTok, Google Reviews, Reddit, and more.

The platform promises quality and quantity of insights about your target audience, mentioners, brand reputation, engagement, and other important metrics.

Mentionlytics offers multiple social media reports, one of them being the Influencer / Top Mentioners Report. In short, the tool scans the web to find every account talking about your brand or industry-relevant keywords. Subsequently, you can rank the results by followers, reach, or engagement to find influencers for future social media campaigns.

Mentionlytics features

Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA), a feature that offers personalized tips to help upgrade your marketing efforts
Advanced Boolean search for result filtering via keywords and hashtag combinations with operators such as AND, NOT, and OR
Free social media report builder for customizable reports that consist of all the metrics and indexes you need
Review, competition, and brand monitoring (with social media analytics)
Intelligent sentiment analysis in 24 languages

Mentionlytics pricing plans

Basic ($49/month)
Essential ($99/month)
Advanced ($199/month)
Pro ($299/month)
Agency ($450+/month)
Enterprise ($950+/month)

2. HubSpot

By all means, HubSpot is an all-included CRM platform. Nonetheless, the platform provides clients with valuable social media management software.

Going into the platform, you’ll find 5 different hubs that focus on marketing, sales, service, CMS, and operations respectively. By gathering all these solutions in one platform, HubSpot makes a marketing team’s job easy, saving their time and money.

Hubspot features

ROI tracking with revenue attribution reporting
Trends monitoring (keyword tracking and analytics)
Contact database and CRM software integration
Unified management of multiple social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn)
Lead generation (via social media) and visitor-into-customer conversion (via marketing automation)

Hubspot pricing plans

Starter (€41/mo)
Professional (€740/mo)
Enterprise (€2,944/mo)

3. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an all-in-one content marketing strategy platform that evaluates your social media presence and offers valuable insights for improvement.

While mostly known for the fast speed and effortless nature of small-scale results, BuzzSumo is great with social media insights. As a matter of fact, the platform specializes in analyzing the social engagement of social media content across multiple platforms.

Moreover, the BuzzSumo app offers an insightful content analyzer, as well as a creative content ideas generator.

BuzzSumo features

Influencer identification
High-performing content research
Advanced brand monitoring
Competitor intelligence
Data research for marketing strategy improvement

BuzzSumo pricing plans

Pro ($99/month)
Plus ($179/month)
Large ($299/month)

4. Google Analytics

Are you starting your marketing efforts right now? Do you own a small-sized business and can’t afford a professional analytics tool? Check out Google Analytics.

Source: google-analytics.ie

Google Analytics is a free analytics platform that offers users insights about their websites and visitors. When it comes to social media insights, you can use Google Analytics to track the following metrics:

Website traffic and where it’s coming from (for example, social media platforms)
ROI of your social media campaigns
Top-performing and low-performing pages by conversions
Audience demographics for custom segments
Mobile and desktop traffic
Length of the website navigation session

Which social media channels work best for your website traffic?

What type of content creates more conversion results?

Answering these questions will help you take your social media strategy to the next level.

In order for you to discover Google Insights, you need to have a Google Account linked to your Business Profile.

Now Over to You

All in all, this is all you need to know about social media insights to start monitoring your social channels.

If you’re new to the social media industry, we hope this article helped you with your social media performance evaluation.

After all, social media analytics tools, like Mentionlytics, help marketers get the job done fast and effortlessly. You’ll be surprised to find out more cool features as you’re using it.

So, start your free trial at Mentionlytics today!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q1. Why are social media insights important?

The importance of social media insights resides in helping you understand if your social media strategy is on the right path.

Furthermore, social insights lead you to make the correct choices for future marketing efforts.

Q2. How do you analyze social media?

To perform a social media analysis, you have to:

Create a spreadsheet about your social networks (for example, use an Excel spreadsheet)
Track analytics reports from all social channels and import data into the spreadsheet
Understand what metrics stay steady and what metrics typically decrease.
Develop an actionable social media marketing plan based on your analysis

Q3. Why use social media insights?

Social media insights help marketing professionals answer important questions. For example: What does my brand’s target audience want to see in their social media feed? What type of content should I post on each social media platform?

Originally posted on Mentionlytics: https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/social-media-insights