Bridging the gaps in social media before going back to business as usual

Social media volumes between January and March of 2020 surged by fifty times in India, a Nielsen report says. Globally, this figure could be even higher. For businesses, that’s not a number they can ignore.

Nabil Sabio, an Iranian-New Zealand artist said, “When fishermen cannot go to sea, they repair their nets.” This describes the current global business environment. With many business activities running at a minimum across the globe, now’s the time to “repair your nets,” or identify and bridge the gaps in your social media efforts. However, the big question is, “how do I do this?”

The Social Media Gap Matrix can help businesses identify gaps across their social media efforts by breaking down their activities into 4 blocks. We can draw powerful insights that can bridge these gaps by analyzing the voluminous amounts of data produced by ad platforms every day.

As a prerequisite to this, it’s important to integrate your ad platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, with a BI/analytics software, like Zoho Analytics. 

Audience

A detailed understanding of your audience demography can enable organizations to spot gaps in their portfolio of offerings, customize promotional offers, fine-tune marketing communication, and a lot more.

Teams can brainstorm, talk to senior staff and consultants, or put their sixth sense to work to ascertain their audiences. But in today’s data-driven world, teams should be harnessing the power of analytics to learn more about their audience.

Below you’ll find an analytics dashboard that gives a 360 degree view of your audience. A sound understanding of age, gender, language, and location can help marketers assess if they’re targeting the right mix of people. Some findings can feed insights for offline marketing initiatives, as well. For example, the city with the highest number of followers can be a possible location for you to pilot an offline campaign.

This dashboard is a better way to ascertain who your audience is and if you’re targeting the right set of people.

Content

Content is king, as they say. It helps organizations engage with their audience to create the desired business impact. It tells the world who they are, what they stand for, and a lot more. And it’s one of the key drivers of brand perception.

If marketers stick to content that they think or feel works well for their audience, they’re probably shooting in the dark. Analytics can allow marketers to understand if their content is doing its job, or needs to be adjusted.

With this dashboard, marketers get a holistic overview of their KPIs, such as tweets, engagements, mentions, and a lot more. This granular analysis enables them to understand time periods with the most engagement, most engaged media types, the virality factor for realigning upcoming content for better engagement, and a lot more.

These insights can empower marketers to assess if their content is serving its purpose or not.

Impact

It’s crucial for marketers to monitor the impact of their content and campaigns, which helps them optimize their strategies and spends.

The easiest way to assess this impact is to compare results to targets set against traditional metrics. This may not suffice in hypercompetitive business environments, though. And that’s where analytics comes in—helping marketers look beyond these metrics to better assess impact.

Widgets reduce your time-to-insights by closely tracking your KPIs. At a glance, you can see the impressions, clicks, CPC, CPM, and a lot more. Plus, it’s a good way to keep a tab on how metrics have performed in the past.

However, marketers are more keen on knowing how they’ll perform in the future. Using the powerful forecasting feature, they can make estimates for the next few months, to realign their content, campaigns, investments, and more. Marketers can even analyze the performance of their video campaigns to hone their video content further.

An in-depth analysis of your ad campaigns helps you understand the impact of their content across social media platforms.

Competition

Cutthroat business environments demand a close eye on the competition. It’s vital to know how you stack up against the heavy hitters in your industry, and it can help you spot the gaps in your strategy to realign your efforts, if needed.

Rather than waiting for a moment of truth to wake up and learn what competitors are up to, it’s better to proactively track your competitors’ activities on social media. Analytics can be the enabler for marketers to keep a tab on the competition.

You can also use analytics to better understand the best practices in your industry. A comparative analysis can help you assess your efforts against your competitors. It can provide insights on the mix of media and content used by other companies to engage their audiences. It can also help marketers understand your competitors’ most engaged time frame, and track other social media KPIs across your industry.

For many businesses, this kind of analysis can be a reality check to assess if their social media strategy is on the right track.

Summary

They say that if you’re not on social media you don’t exist, and this applies to businesses as well! Today, social media ad platforms have evolved and emerged as a major business driver.

On the surface, they help businesses reach out to potentially billions of people. However, to be successful, it’s imperative for organizations to continuously identify and bridge the gaps in their social media efforts.

A powerful BI application can be a great tool for marketers who want to stay ahead of the curve. But the platform needs to be able to ingest data from multiple sources and analyze them, to then feed marketers with powerful insights that can bridge the gaps (like how Zoho Analytics helps in tracking Linkedln analytics)

As one of the forerunners in offering robust integrations, Zoho Analytics currently integrates with several popular ad platforms. You can learn more about our integrations here.

Sign up to explore how Zoho Analytics can help you in your social media efforts before getting your business back to normal—or check out our webinar on “Bridging the 4 gaps in social media before business as usual.”