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over 4 years ago by Kate Khom

How to Use Social Data to Launch a Successful Social Media Campaign

Social Media Accounts

And, collecting and analyzing all this information isn’t always stressful.

Although social media platforms provide you with a lot of data that, on top of all, is constantly updated, putting it to use is not overwhelming at all. With all the social analytics tools at hand, you can keep up with the updated data to maintain the relevance of your social media campaign.

Relevance is what makes a social media campaign successful. Relevant content that your target audience can relate to is what will help you achieve success in social media marketing. And social data gives you all the answers because it’s always relevant and up-to-date. So don’t miss out on the benefits it brings you.

Since major social media platforms were launched, they’ve acquired a lot of different functions rather than just sharing thoughts, experiences, and personal pictures.

The main change, however, came when social media platforms became strong marketing tools. As of now, according to the stats by CoSchedule,

  • Social media ads are the top-performing type of content. Social media marketing has beat the traditional email marketing, getting to the first place of the popularity charts.
  • Organic social media posts are also among the most preferred content for marketing purposes.
  • As a result, 73% of companies invest in social media marketing.

As if that’s not enough, CoSchedule stats claim that 42% of the population now actively use various social media platforms.

Amazing, isn’t it?

This fact makes social media marketing the best strategy to help you maximize the outreach of your marketing campaign.

Just take a look at the numbers, put together by Statista, that show the number of people using the most popular social media platforms (as of 2019):

Image credit: Statista

As you can see, Facebook alone can already be a powerful tool for a social media marketing campaign. Altogether, according to Statista, the global social media population is almost 3 billion.

So, your benefits are obvious.

There’s no other marketing strategy that can help you reach so many people.

What’s Behind the Scenes of Social Media Marketing?

There’s more to social media than just sharing content and collecting feedback. Each social media platform has tools for the performance analysis of your content, estimating engagement, click-through rates, and the overall outreach.

So, if you take a look behind the scenes of social media marketing, you’ll face a lot of social data – big data that is a collective of several indexes that altogether describe your social media activity.

Too complicated?

Simply put, social data unites all the information shared via social media, including:

  • likes and shares;
  • comments and feedback;
  • geodata (location);
  • language and other info.

Social data has some limitations, namely, because social media users can partly share the above-mentioned information or may not share it at all. Thus, the data that you receive is raw and requires additional analysis.

Nevertheless, there is a lot in social data that your business can benefit from. Reportedly, 56% of companies agree that social analytics makes their social media campaigns more successful. And this is despite the fact that estimating ROI is the biggest issue that companies face during their social media campaigns.

So now it is time to find out, how to bring your social media campaign closer to success with the use of social data.

The Application of Social Data

1. Target Audience Odyssey: Figuring Out Your Audience Personas

Every marketing campaign starts with determining a target audience. It is a rather time-consuming process that requires you to take a look at who follows you on each platform and how this data fits the requirements of your social media campaign.

Take a look at who your typical follower is. For analysis, select a platform and a number of followers that are the most active on your profile. Then, using the data from their feedback and their geolocation data, make a draft of your target audience persona on this social media platform.

To determine the audience personas, I use a strategy that I call ‘The Incredible 4”, which describes the four aspects that identify an audience persona:

Let’s take a look at an example.

For instance, your Instagram following base is predominantly female. So, your target audience persona on Instagram would be of the female gender.

After analyzing the activity of your followers on your Instagram account, you can figure out their gender. Let’s say that it’s a female millennial, around 25-30 years old.

What language are they using? At what time did they post their last comment or liked your post? This also gives you an understanding of where they are located and the time of their activity helps you identify the optimal time to create your future posts.

Background, challenges, and solutions require taking a closer look at the accounts of your followers. This seems like a lot of work, but you can simplify this process by using analytics tools that keep track of the traffic, where it’s coming from and at what time. They also do a keyword analysis to update you on the feedback from your followers.

2. Finding Nemo the Right Social Platform

All social media platforms also provide users with general social data that describes the overall demographics and activity on each of these platforms.

What’s in it for you?

This information can be very helpful when choosing the right social platform for a social media campaign. I don’t say that social media campaign comes down to using only one social media platform. Rather, the choice of predominant social platforms depends on target audience persona.

Let’s say, you would like to use Instagram and Facebook to promote your new clothing line. Your target audience is mostly teenage girls.

Now, let’s take a look at the demographics of each social media platform. According to different statistics,

In terms of age,

Thus, after the analysis of this social data, it is clear that for your hypothetical target audience Facebook is not the best choice to use for a social media campaign.

Nevertheless, there are other social platforms, like Snapchat, that can fit your social media marketing needs. So, before you launch your campaign, take a look at the general social data that describes the overall demographics on each social platform you’re interested in.

3. Operation Content: Seek Help from Followers and Hashtag Analysis

Although posting on social media has become a fairly automated process, with all the scheduling tools available at hand, there’s still content to create.

I feel like today it has become significantly harder to impress social media users with content, so you have to be very creative with what you plan to show them.

However, it doesn’t have to be a guessing game. There are a lot of strategies that can help you figure out what your audience wants to see.

First of all, hashtag analysis.

International real estate company Flatfy figured out their social media strategy after looking at the stats that show how their followers found them on Instagram. Turned out, the hashtag #statistics brought them the majority of their Instagram followers (who were looking for the real estate statistics under this hashtag):

Image credit: Hashtagify.me

Since they received social data from hashtag performance, they made statistic posts their priority, regularly providing their followers with this type of content. As a result, since the launch of their Instagram account, they’ve managed to double the number of their followers.

You can also analyze hashtags that you’ve been using for your previous social media campaigns. If they are in line with what you want to promote and they performed well in terms of brand exposure, you can reuse them, why not?

Another way to avoid content guessing game is to ask your followers for feedback directly.

Social media platforms provide you with tools to survey your followers. For instance, on Instagram you can do it in many various ways:


 

Ask your followers, what type of content they would like to see more on your platform, whether it’s videos, pictures, stories or something else. Launch such surveys only after you select the platforms for marketing purposes.

There’s one important thing to remember.

There is a chance that your followers will come up with something out-of-the-box. In any case, you should credit your followers for making a contribution to launching your social media campaign. Campaigns where a company collaborates with the followers gain a lot of positive attention.

Social Data Is Your Superpower

And, collecting and analyzing all this information isn’t always stressful.

Although social media platforms provide you with a lot of data that, on top of all, is constantly updated, putting it to use is not overwhelming at all. With all the social analytics tools at hand, you can keep up with the updated data to maintain the relevance of your social media campaign.

Relevance is what makes a social media campaign successful. Relevant content that your target audience can relate to is what will help you achieve success in social media marketing. And social data gives you all the answers because it’s always relevant and up-to-date. So don’t miss out on the benefits it brings you.

Kate is a passionate writer who likes sharing her thoughts and experience with the readers. Currently, she works as content editor and internet researcher, you can check her website https://flatfy.ro. She likes everything related to traveling and new countries.