Why You Need to Rely on Data Instead of Guesswork for Your Social Media Strategy

Today’s social media digital space offers you an audience of 4.62 billion people and counting; the ideal business environment, and even the tools to pinpoint what your target audience wants — you just need to craft a killer social media strategy to convert a small fraction of those 4.62 billion people into your loyal audience. 

We believe that a successful social media marketing strategy relies on data instead of guesswork. As long as you know how to use the data that you actually have at your fingertip — you know where you’re going, what you want, and how to take what’s yours.

Keep reading if you want to learn what is a data-driven social media strategy, why you need it, and how to build one that will get your business to the next level.

What Is a Data-Driven Social Media Strategy?

A data-driven social media strategy is a marketing practice that relies on social media analytics to identify who your target audience is, what they want, and what type of content they consume. 

This data can be used to craft creative and personalized content to increase awareness about your services and products, which ultimately result in better customer engagement and retention, quantifying leads, and increased conversion.

In essence, a social media strategy based on data means founding your marketing efforts on real numbers and statistics — not assumptions and instinct.

Why Do You Need a Data-Driven Social Media Strategy?

Building your social media strategies based on data analytics is effective. It helps you get to the right audience and generate quality content that makes them stop scrolling and engage with what you have to say. But more than that, using data helps you get specific. 

‍Here is why you need a data-driven social media strategy:

• Find the right audience for your business
• Choose social media platforms that work for your brand
• Create effective social media campaigns that provide profitable results
• Overpower your competitors 

A. Find the Right Audience For Your Business 

This is crucial: you don’t want to sell apples to someone who needs pears. If you approach the right folks, the chance to convert them into followers and engage with your product is bigger and smarter. 

With platforms like Google Analytics, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, as well as social media management tools you can extract relevant data about your audience, such as age, gender, nationality, location, financial status, pain points, interests, and shopping habits.

Then, with all this consumer insight, you can come up with data-driven personas, so you don’t have to rely on guesswork anymore. Once you put every piece into place, you will know what message will be the most relevant to your audience. 

B. Choose Social Media Channels That Work For Your Brand

Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Twitter…and the list goes on and on. Do you need to ace it on each social network or focus on just one of them?

By collecting data from analytics reports you can identify where your audience spends their time, and thus, where you should concentrate your social media marketing efforts.

The point of social media marketing is to connect you with your audience, so clearly you should adjust your social media content strategy accordingly and choose a platform where your audience is present. 

C. Create Effective Social media Campaigns That Provide Profitable Results

Thanks to your data-driven strategy, you know what your target audience cares about; what influences their purchasing decisions; when they are active on social media, and even when they prefer to read that content. 

With these valuable insights, you can identify the best publishing time for your posts and schedule your content accordingly to make sure you reach your audience. But most importantly, you can craft more personalized, effective, and relevant social media campaigns because you know for a fact that those are the right thing to do. 

D. Overpower Your Competitors

A social media strategy based on data will help you stand out from the crowd because it can show exactly what’s working, and what’s not. It proves invaluable for gauging your brand health, optimizing your campaigns, and measuring client satisfaction. As a result, it makes it possible to outperform your competitors by connecting better with your target audience.

How to Build a Social Media Strategy Based on Data

By applying a data-driven approach when creating your social media marketing plan and setting your business goals, you ensure your social media success. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Research Your Target Audience

First things first, you have to identify your audience. Who are you trying to reach? 

Try to find out as much as possible about your ideal customer because the more you know, the better your social media strategy will be. Take time to understand your consumers’ behaviours and attitudes to know how to engage with them.

‍What to look for?

If you’re building a business-to-consumer (B2C) strategy, look for:

• buyer persona background (job title, education); 
• demographic specifics (age, gender, location); 
• interests (design, fashion, food, reading, etc.); 
• what is their preferred social platform. 

If your social media strategy follows the Business-to-Business (B2B) profile, look for:

• the size of the companies (SME, enterprises);
• the decision makers;
• the department that requires your product or service.

As long as you know who you are trying to reach, what and who they want to become, and what is their urgent need that needs to be fixed immediately, you have a better chance to achieve your goal — whether it’s quantifying leads, increasing engagement and retention, or increasing conversion.   

2. Keep an Eye on Your Close Competitors

Knowing how your competitors work is similar to understanding your clients. While you cannot control what your competitors do, it’s possible to minimize their impact on your business. 

This is how you can do a competitor analysis:

• Step 1: Research your top three-five competitors — the major players in your niche. Then split them into categories: organic competitors, those that compete with you on paid advertising, and those competing on local SEO (if applicable).
• Step 2: Once you have the list, establish where they have social media accounts and what platform they use most.
• Step 3:  Analyze their social media presence, most importantly how they position their products, and how they present themselves and communicate on social media channels. 
• Step 4: Identify their tone of voice (TOV). Is it friendly and fun? Do they use emojis? Do they address their followers more formally?
• Step 5: Analyze engagements on their posts (how many comments, what people say) and observe the frequency at which they post (per day, week, month, and what time).‍
• Step 6: Note the use of hashtags, especially on Twitter and Instagram (what hashtags, how many, how frequent).

This is your chance to pay attention to what is working and what’s not working for your competitors. Identify their strengths and weaknesses and use them to your advantage. Don’t imitate them, but mark what they do best, and do better.

3. Set S.M.A.R.T. Objectives & KPIs You Can Monitor

When setting social media marketing goals and KPIs of your social media plan, the SMART framework is the most effective. It helps you build a strategy based on realistic and specific goals, focus on what’s important rather than unnecessary work, and clears out any ambiguities.

This is how to apply the S.M.A.R.T. framework to your social media strategy:

• Specific: Get granular with your social media strategy. Your goals should be as clear as possible. This could be increasing brand awareness, boosting engagement, driving more traffic to your website, growing your following, generating more leads and sales, increasing conversion, and so on. Be as specific as you can with what you want — apart from what you want to achieve, determine how you plan to do it.
• Measurable: Quantify and monitor this goal. For example, if you want to increase brand awareness on Facebook, make sure to set a measurable value of your desired growth. For example, reaching 2000 people per post by the end of the month with paid advertising on Facebook is measurable enough. 
• Attainable: Keep your goals realistic, otherwise you might get disappointed. For example, reaching 2,000 people in a month is more achievable than 10,000.
• Relevant: Make sure your goal is relevant to your company and helps solve an immediate problem. 
• Time-bound: Establish a deadline for your goal. For example, reaching 2,000 people per post by the end of the month is more accurate than reaching that number in the future. A deadline gives your goal more urgency. 

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Here are the main social media KPIs you should track to measure your progress:

• Reach: The number of followers, impressions, traffic growth rate, the social share of voice (mentions)
• Social media engagement: Likes, comments, clicks, shares
• Conversions: Clicks on your social media CTA, click-through rate (how many clicked on your post’ CTAs); bounce rate (how many clicked on the CTA, but quickly left the page); ​​Cost per Click or CPC (the amount you pay social media platforms for a post)
• Customer loyalty: recommendations, reviews, testimonials

4. Track Your Social Media Analytics Constantly

Once you defined your objectives accordingly, use a social media management tool to keep track of your analytics and identify what works and what needs improvement. 

SocialBee, for example, doesn’t only allow you to create, schedule, and share your social media posts, but also makes it easy for you to evaluate your content performance on all social channels.

With SocialBee, you can monitor your social media posts by paying attention to reach, engagement rate, likes, shares, comments, and impressions. Also, you can identify your top three best-performing posts, topics, and post structure (images, videos, text, etc).

For profile metrics, look at your follower growth and demographics, overall engagement rate, and the time intervals during which your audience is the most active. 

From SocialBee, you can also download social media reports with insightful data that will help you communicate your results to your team, clients, and stakeholders and build a data-driven strategy with ease.

5. Use a Social Media Listening Tool

To further upgrade your data-driven social media strategy make sure you know what people talk about your brand. For this, you can use social media listening tools to monitor your brand perception, track hashtags, find relevant content topics, and keep track of your brand mentions. 

Here are the three best social listening tools that will provide a solid foundation for your social media strategy:

• Brandwatch gives you a clear image of what’s happening in your industry and the involved audience. It can help identify popular topics and hashtags, and keep an eye on conversations and mentions around your brand and products. Additionally, you can filter data by keyword, source, demographics, and content type and generate reports. 
• Brandmentions monitors every mention or conversation around your company and products on every channel, whether it’s the web or social media networks.‍
• Determ provides real-time data about every article, hashtag, or comment mentioning your business and creates media reports.

Eliminate the Guesswork For Your Social Media Strategy 

With a social media strategy based on data, you eliminate the guesswork. 

Data lets you connect with your audience by learning what they like, how they engage with your company, and what makes them choose you instead of your competitors. You know exactly what works and what’s not because the numbers show it too.

You’re not crossing the tunnel with a blindfold anymore, and hope that you’ll reach the light; you know exactly what you do because your knowledge is based on factual data.