Hello dear SEMrush blog readers!

This month we talked a lot about social media: I hope you had a chance to check out our recent Twitter chat guide and participate one of our webinars during Social Media Week.

This information flow is not about to end! Check out this insightful Twitter chat recap about data driven social media. Our special guests Lee Smallwood @leesmallwood, nod3x @nod3x and John Dietrich ‏@John_Dietrich1!

Social media metrics

This is always a tricky question. Whenever we ask our participants to point out the five most important metrics, we receive dozens of different answers. This question was no exception. Before we can talk about measuring success, we need to understand which goals were set for the campaign.

Here is a list of metrics marketers can measure. Choose the ones that match your campaign goals. Top social media metrics

Thanks to following participants for their tweets. Bill Slawski ‏@bill_slawski ,Chris Desadoy ‏@EliteYouTubePro, GML Team ‏@GMLConsulting, John Dietrich ‏@John_Dietrich1, Liz Da Ponte ‏@lizdaponte, Ryan Johnson ‏@rsj8000and Stephen'Bern' Banham ‏@Berngaming.Google Analytics for social media First of all, it is essential to know your main sources of traffic. This will give you an understanding of which social media platforms work better and therefore deserve more attention. “Check the Acquisition-> Channels report to see what social networks bring you traffic,” as Olga Andrienko ‏@OlgaSEMrush suggests.

Apart from knowing how many visitors are driven to your website via social media and which particular platforms show the best results, you may want to know how many visitors from your overall flow are converting.

John Dietrich ‏advises the following strategy.

Using your UTM code, you can track your traffic from certain campaigns and measure those campaigns’ effectiveness.

Another useful Google Analytics report is the Audience report, which offers in-depth information about users who visit your website – their age and gender, which countries they’re from, which type of device they’re using to access your website and so on. Audience reports “can help tailor your social campaigns to the right people,” according to Provoke Marketing ‏@ProvokeOnline.

Buyer persona creation with social media data

Buyer persona identification is a core marketing issue that a lot of marketers fail to care about. “It’s crazy how many companies conduct social media marketing (or marketing in general) without developing personas first” - Thomas J. Armitage ‏@ThomasJArmitage.

So if you don’t want to be among these unhappy companies, take a look at your social media data when creating and identifying your buyer persona. First of all, be sure that you use a variety of channels for comprehensive analysis.

Start with the basics, such as demographic and geographic data. These data can be taken from various channels and social media, of course.

Also, social media is a good source of direct data on your audience itself. Feedback from your users will not only help you identify your buyer persona, but adjust your strategy and approach.

The most important thing that marketers should focus on would be engagement...

...also important is source of traffic and conversion rates; pay attention to pages that convert, and for pages that don’t work so well, keep an eye on bounce rates and time spent on page.

How to analyze their social media networks and leverage that information to improve? Now let’s find out how you can get the most out of the data you receive from different social media platforms. Pay attention to where you see the most engagement and the highest conversion, as Liz Da Ponte ‏@lizdaponte advises. Define which social media platforms your targeted audience uses the most, and focus your efforts on these particular networks.

Find out what type of content and which topics drive the most engagement. Do your followers prefer written content or infographics? Are they more willing to share in-depth technical posts or case studies? You can easily learn this information by simply counting your number of shares and likes.

Knowing where you failed is as essential as knowing where you’ve succeeded. Analyze your statistics, ask your audience, identify your problems, and then fix them!

Analyze your visitors’ behavior by paying attention to bounce rates and repeat visits:

Define which followers are most active on your social media networks and collaborate with them. Social media is all about communication and building relationships

There’s no universal strategy; the only way to discover your own path to success is to try new techniques and analyze your results. And never miss the chance to use a good idea from your successful competitors.

How to measure the ROI of social media marketing?Measuring social media ROI can be the one of the toughest marketing metrics, as well as measuring the ROI of public relations. Although this is tough, it’s not impossible. When you use social media as part of a marketing campaign, don’t just measure social media results alone, consider the whole picture. “Always include social media in your marketing campaigns, and measure the effectiveness of the whole campaign” - Olga Andrienko.

A great way to get correct results for a campaign is to use a unique hashtag, which will help you in a future data analysis.

Always look at your referral traffic from social media. Carrie Morgan ‏@morgancarrie - "One of my favorite metrics are website referrer traffic - which social channel is driving traffic? Is it converting?" Remember that your entire audience will not convert.

And that's why it’s still important pay attention to engagement.

Social media tools

The list of must-have toolkits proposed by our chat participants is headed by Google Analytics. Apart from providing information on traffic and its sources, this tool provides conversion data.

Here are some other toolkits that our participants consider worth using for social media analysis.

Every social media marketer can combine different tools and create their own perfect toolkit, depending on which features they find useful and the kinds of reports they want.

Thom Craver provides more useful advice concerning the best tools: 

Tools are indispensable for collecting and visualizing data, but no tool can analyze results and draw conclusions like a human can. So first use tools to get information, then use your brain to make the most of it.

This is it for today. We hope to see you this Wednesday as usual. Use #semrushchat to join!

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Elena TerentevaElena Terenteva, Product Marketing Manager at SEMrush. Elena has eight years public relations and journalism experience, working as a broadcasting journalist, PR/Content manager for IT and finance companies. Bookworm, poker player, good swimmer.
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