For any business social media holds a very important place in deciding advertising or marketing strategy. Companies have separate departments dedicated to social media marketing because it serves as a sales hub for products.

The sales only happen on social media when you have established your authority in the industry with competitors and a trustworthy relationship with your customer. All the content posted on social media is created with objectives like

• Reaching target audience
• Getting audience to engage with the content
• Using that content to get users on the website, and
• Turning those visitors into customers

When as a marketer, you build social media campaign strategy or a Facebook Ad, how can you make sure that it will resonate with audience and you will be able to achieve the above mentioned goals? The answer to that is called ‘analytics’.

The two ways through which marketers and advertisers do business on the social media are:

• Direct- Facebook ads, posts, pictures etc. which encourage audience to buy the product directly from the newly introduced ‘buy’ button on platform or by visiting website, as done in past.
• Indirect- Building content and promoting it through landing pages, Facebook tabs and plain posts based on the data collected from analytics, feedback of audience and social media intelligence. This helps in building brand awareness and getting people to notice you.

If social media intelligence and analytics are so important, one finds themselves asking the question- what are they and why they have such crucial importance in business promotion.

Social Media Intelligence

The technical definition of intelligence is “The ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations.” If we add the social media part it converts into “The ability to learn or understand things or to deal with new or difficult situations- on social media during an advertising campaign.

However, that is not quite it. Social media intelligence has completely different meaning and yes it is directly related with analytics and data collected from the multiple channels. When a marketer uses the data like Google analytics or Facebook analytics and use it to modify, change or improve their campaign strategy, only then it becomes intelligence.

This might include looking at a graph that shows the ratio between male and female followers. If you see that more male users have liked your page but the campaign strategy was built keeping in mind female customers, you would want to know the reason behind this spike in male users and using that reason you would be able to change the campaign and focus on male customers and their needs.

Intelligence can be added to other analytics as well. These would include data such as comparing the engagements on a text update to a live stream video or seeing the which format is more shared- images and visuals or embedded links with one-line description.

Analytics and How Are They Different from Social Media Intelligence

Tons of data is generated on Facebook and other social media platforms every second for every page and profile. Most of this data is highly valuable like looking at the sentiments of customers and users about your brand or the mentions about it and it also is being monitored by social media managers. All this data falls under the category of analytics.

The thing that makes analytics different from intelligence is that a piece of data that has intelligence has the ability to translate into further information. Let’s say, you found out that for this particular week your followers increased by 20%. Now this is an information that will serve as a great data point but it will not have any further meaning. On the other hand, if your data shows that in this 20 percent increase, only 5 percent users were between the age range of 15-25 years (more than half the users of social media falls under this category, which is let say. your primary target audience as well) while, 15% followers are in the category of 35-45 years’ age.

This type of information has further meaning and you can find the reasons of skewness in graph. You can look at the content or ads posted recently an study the differences from usual. This will help you understand the content that is preferred by older audience and hence you will be able to create campaigns accordingly in future.

Using Analytics and Intelligence for Brand Promotion

Your business can achieve great things once you learn to use all this data for future business promotions. These uses include,

• Predict the networks where most of the target audience exist and actively participate.
• Recognize the format type that gets more shares, like and interactions.
• Understand the behavior of followers to see what leads them into becoming your customers.
• Figure out the customers that are more beneficial in terms of sales and which ones are not because of their debts or slow payments.
• Track campaigns and compare them to see which ones are most profitable.
• Based on sales of products, decide the inventory that should go into production.

Gathering Data, Analytics and Social Media Intelligence

Collecting analytics and monitoring social media through tools and apps is a common practice for marketers and business owners. One of these tools is TabFu. The seamless analytics feature in TabFu is a big help in deciding the way you should be shaping your social media strategy. Marketers and beginners sometimes waste their time in creating campaigns that do not bring ROI and that costs not only money but time and effort as well.

With TabFu’s analytics feature, you will be able to see which posts are getting the most shares, likes, comments etc. so you can follow the same strategy in future.

With the new information map created by the social media campaigns, marketers have options to not only build competitor’s analysis more efficiently but identifying users, their behaviors and dispositions of conversations in social spaces has also become easier. Professionals no longer need to look in traditional databases and extensive research methods to find out information about users, in order to curate the content that will resonate and shape the path towards building conversations.

The data on social media is as authentic as any other, collected from various advertising channels. Infect, it plays a more crucial part in marketing the brand and ignoring it might result in substantial damage to the company.

With the demand and use of social intelligence in competitive analysis and overall decision for finalizing camping strategy, it is time for all businesses to create profiles of the intelligence analysts in their departments.