Every conference and Google Adwords can be recorded, analyzed, and measured to boost up marketing for businesses. Yet, leaders struggle to evaluate the effectiveness of social media channels when it comes to analyzing their ROI. 

How much revenue was generated by LinkedIn last month? Did those engaging tweets get more customers?

Social media is an integral part of the marketing mix. Therefore, CMOs should be able to quantify patterns of marketing to drive broader organization goals. Even though it seems challenging, it is not impossible. 

In the end, social media- the marketing channel or discipline can be proven by the improved ROI- The question still stands- where to begin?

Understand the basics before approaching using the right set of tools and KPIs- what is social media data, how and why to use it, and where to collect it? Let’s explore more on social media data!

What is Social Media Data?

Social Data or social media data refers to insights and information collected from the various 360-degree marketing strategies. It tracks how individuals engage on social media channels via LinkedIn. The data entails metrics like numbers and percentages and statistics to infer the concussions on the social media strategy adopted. 

Companies should view social media data as raw data including the following metrics:

• Likes
• Shares
• Conversions
• Comments
• Impressions
• Mentions
• Clicks

Why the need for Social Media Data?

Considering social media databases as your ingredients, social media analytics becomes your recipes. And, with the involvement of analytics, questions on the performance or success of social media activities can be analyzed and evaluated such as:

• What kind of content brings more engagement like clicks, convert, and share?
• What are the top-converting creatives?
• Which network contributes more lead generation?

Acquiring answers to these questions, businesses are actually receiving insights and social media intelligence and bringing information on future actions and decisions. One can say that the raw ingredients can be converted into ready-to-eat meals. And if you want this meal to taste good, you would need high-quality ingredients, instead of simple ones. 

Focusing on points like shares, likes, comments, and mentions can make the meal tasteless or meaningless insights. These insights make appear healthy and good theoretically, but they bring no assistance to promote social media to generate results. 

However, in the end, the best way to streamline social media marketing activities along with relevant and growing business outcomes is by tracking lead generation. The marketers get the full picture of the consumers’ buyer journey- from the moment a user clicks on the post at some time which finally converts to customers. 

How to Leverage Social Media Channels?

Before reading further on the social media data, note that “social media data shouldn’t live in a silo”.

Engaged in Google Analytics or Facebook Insights or other social media management platforms, the most crucial thing is to collect the social media data to leverage it across the other channels, platforms, and campaigns.

Social data goes beyond the scope of existing tools to benefit diverse departments in the organization. Here are how to improve your current capabilities for social media data:

Deep Audience Segmentation

With the approaching digital age, there is nothing called “one-size-fits-all”. Every individual entity deserves and enjoys a custom-fit experience. 

For instance, focus on email promoting a new e-Book. Also, the nature of the email includes tone, phrasing, and content that sharply differs amongst recipients. The email written for a C-level executive is extensively professional compared to a junior-level employee writing the same email.

Therefore, audience segmentation sounds more relevant today in this era. The audience platforms place the audiences into several segments. These are segmented based on parameters like language preferences, and business units. All the customers in the segments receive relevant content to the respective segment.

Improves Lead Nurturing, Scoring, and Attribution

B2B marketers prefer marketing automation to govern leads, nurture them with relevant content, and generate more revenue. While relying on marketing automation, the focus lies on three major data sources- website visits, email opens, and email clicks. Further, the data remains synced with the CRM platform of respective businesses.

However, the social media data is missing from the marketing automation cycle approached by the B2B marketers. Get a 360-degree view of all your lead journeys. 

Personalized Sales Outreach

Social media is not limited to B2B marketers, even sales teams can enjoy benefits by having access to the database. Integrating social media with marketing automation platforms allows salespeople to craft highly personalized communication with prospects. 

For instance, when a prospect is clicking on a company’s LinkedIn post, the sales reps leverage the moment to reach the customers via other approaches. B2B marketers can engage in one side conversion via LinkedIn InMails, and Twitter Direct Messages. 

More Engaging Content Experiences

Content experience presents an environment where content lives and stays long where the audience reads, watches, or listens to the content posted. This ensures a better connection between the businesses and target audience, the better the content can be customized to deliver an enriched customer experience.

Social media shines a light on the interests, needs, and pain points for every entity to interact with the content and the company profile. The behavioral insights assist in building experiences to customize for every prospect or customer.

How to Collect Social Media Data?

Social media data informs more than mere shares and likes. It brings a deeper insight into the audience and learns their engagement pattern with the organization. And, mentioned so far, acquiring social media data is crucial to make confident company decisions and improve the processes in other departments in the company. 

Collecting social media data not only enables the marketers to tie social media to ROI but also allows a space for integrating the data with the extensive marketing ecosystem that includes the CRM, BI platforms, and marketing automation. Further, this allows the freedom to connect the dots in the buyer’s journey, so that the marketers deliver more interesting experiences across social media channels.

How MarketBeam Helps

MarketBeam helps to drive actionable insights against vital KPIs in a single dashboard. Track engagement, shares, and click-throughs while identifying the most engaging social channels for your business. Distinguish top-performing influencers and traffic generated by them. Access, monitor, and measure engagement driven from employees and corporate pages and also compare top-performing pages. The varied integrated insights create a feedback loop, providing agile inputs to optimize your content and social media marketing strategy. Learn more here.