Social Media Analysis: How To Better Play With Cross-Channel Data When Doing Your Social Media Reporting

Social media marketing is an essential part of any marketing campaign, and brands need to always be on their feet and find ways to stay ahead of the game.

This means they need to adjust and readjust strategies and messages, to keep the audience engaged.

Best way to do that?🤔

Look closely at what the data is telling you. By going through your social media platforms' data and comparing your stats, you can find everything you need to know about your audience.

This article will show how to use cross-channel analysis in your social media reports and why this is important.

The benefits of using cross-channel data in your social media analysis

1. What is Social Media cross-channel data analysis?
   • The benefits of a social media analysis containing cross-channel data
2. What does your social media analysis report consist of?
3. How to enrich your social media analysis: competitive cross-channel report
4. How to best analyze your social media accounts and what analytics tools can do for you?
   • Look at individual posts as well as campaigns
   • What metrics should you look at when doing your social media analysis?
5. How to do your social media analysis with Socialinsider?

1. What is Social Media cross-channel data analysis?

Just like cross-channel marketing, where you use different types of channels, both digital and print, to best deliver a message and an idea to your target audience, it is essential to do so when it comes to the different social media platforms.

All social platforms work together to create context and reach as many people as possible.

But to see how well your overall strategy performs, you need to access cross-channel data.

This social media analysis will show you which platform works best, which campaign is more successful and which post has brought in the most engagement.

The benefits of a social media analysis containing cross-channel data

A well-rounded brand analysis report will keep your clients happy.

Including a cross-channel overview of your social media analysis will come with many actionable insights, like:

• Get a clear overview of how your social media efforts are performing.
• See if your initial estimations were on point.
• Conclude how well your posts across all social media platforms perform.
• Adjust your strategy across the platforms.
• Help your clients decide where they need to invest more and where they can afford to cut down and adjust budgets accordingly.
• Help your clients better understand where the audience engages more.
• Help your client understand what messages ring true to the audience so that they can apply that across all marketing strategies, both on and offline.
• Define specific industry benchmarks

2. What does your social media analysis report consist of?

Whether you want a short stand-alone report or need to add a few more important ideas to your regular social media report, turning to social media analysis that has cross-channel data will lead you towards key conclusions.

Gathering all of the insights from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, you will see which KPIs you've accomplished.

These are the metrics that will help you do so:

• post ranks across all channels
• number of posts
• post engagement and engagement rate
• all campaigns
• total campaign engagement
• number of posts per campaign
• posts volumes by campaign (numerically and percentage wise)
• total engagement by platform

3. How to enrich your social media analysis: competitive cross-channel report

It’s not always enough to look at your own social media insights. While social KPIs such as impressions, reach or engagement are pretty telling, the true value lies in how they compare to your competitor’s stats.

To get a complete picture of the competitive landscape your brand is trying to succeed in, you need to understand what the competitors are doing - the dos and don't of the industry. And, of course, how your brand does by comparison.

Using Socialinsider, you'll be able to benchmark against your top competitors in your industry.

4. How to best analyze your social media accounts and what analytics tools can do for you?

Before starting any social media analysis and reporting process, you should make a plan that clearly outlines your expectations: what do you want to find out?

• Do you want to know how your posts are performing?
• Are you interested in finding out your strengths and weaknesses on a specific platform?
• Would you like to understand how the audience is engaging with particular campaigns?

Set clear social KPIs that give you the answers you need, and then look at what social analytics tools tell you.

• Look at individual posts as well as campaigns

There are two ways to go when analyzing cross-channel data:

1. Individual posts

You can take a look at how all of your posts are ranking up against each other: what are your best posts, what is the best performing platform

2. Campaigns

Label each post with the designated campaign name. This way you can have precise data of how much effort you’ve put into each campaign (by looking into the number of posts and their overall percentage) and what engagement has each of these generated, both in total and by channel.

• What metrics should you look at when doing your social media analysis?

You can look at the social media data as puzzle pieces. Each number helps you create a well-rounded picture of how your future strategies should look.

Here are a few things you will learn:

• The platform that gives you the most engagement is where most of the core audience can be found. Increase the campaign and number of posts for even better results.
• If you've invested more in Facebook posts and strategies, but your engagement is not as significant compared to Instagram, Twitter, or Youtube, it might be time to reconsider what to prioritize.
• Adjust your strategies and increase/decrease your actions and budget to balance investment and results.
• Certain posts bring in more engagement than others. Look into what you are doing right. Is it a specific type of message, a certain type of image, the hour of posting?
• All posts will perform differently, but specific patterns will immerse between the highest and lowest engagement posts.
• If your engagement is not as good as your competitors, look at what they do differently and try to define clear, actionable insights
• See if there are any differences in the cross-channel performance between you and your competitor. It might be that one platform is more engaging than the others, or it might have something to do with your strategy.
• Apply and test some of your conclusions based on your competitors' top results on your pages.

5. How to do your social media analysis with Socialinsider?

Going through this social media analysis is a simple process. If you’d like to get started but aren’t sure how to do so, simply follow the steps below.

1. Choose the project that contains the accounts you want to look into.

2. Decide if you’d like to look into all posts independently or only focus on certain campaigns. Go to:

• Benchmarks
• Cross-platform

3. Set a timeframe for the results you want to see

4. Analyse individual posts from the "Posts Newsfeed" section

• You can can look at how your posts perform across all channels, but you can also take a look at each social media platform individually.

5. Sort all of your posts depending on what you need to find out: engagement, comments, likes, date.

6. Analyse your campaigns

• You can create Campaigns for your posts, by tagging each post.

Final thoughts

In a competitive field, staying ahead of the curve is essential. That is the most important purpose of every social media analysis.

Doing cross-channel reporting is important to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of each post across all the platforms, but also the real impact of your campaigns across all social networks.

A direct social media cross-channel analysis will show you the rank of each post, the volume of posts for each of the campaigns you want to monitor, the overall engagement as well as the engagement broken down by individual channel.

Are you ready to start your own social media analysis? Don’t worry, we'll be there for you every step of the way!

Related posts:

• Social Media Analytics - A Complete Guide
• How to Find Influencers for Your Brand Using a Social Media Analytics Tool
• Competitor Analysis Tools to Spy on Your Competition in 2021

* This article was originally published here