5 reasons why businesses should make social media analytics a priority in 2024

By Veerakumar Natrajan, Country Head – Kenya, Zoho Corp.

Statistics show that Kenya leads East Africa when it comes to mobile connections and social media users, sitting at 63.94 million connections and 10.55 million users respectively. This alone requires every business to have a strong social media presence in order to tap a wider audience for their products and services. That said, being active on social media without measuring the impact is like painting a picture with your eyes closed. It won’t give you good results, and whatever minimal benefits you get out of it are purely by luck.

If you’re managing a social media account, it’s crucial to analyse and understand your followers. Below are five top reasons why you need to start analysing the data from your business’ social media campaigns and even consider adopting business intelligence platforms like Zoho Analytics, which offer direct integration with top social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, YouTube, and more.

1) It will help you understand your audience better. Understanding your audience will help you create content that resonates better with them. Knowing which age group and industry your audience belongs to will go a long way towards creating targeted content.

2) You can measure the impact of your ad campaigns. Are you measuring the reach and impact of your social media ad campaigns? Are your ads leading people to your landing pages? Are you getting sufficient conversions from these campaigns? Which ads are performing well? These are some of the questions you might want to ask once you launch a new ad campaign on Instagram, TikTok, X, Facebook, or YouTube.

3) It will assist you in identifying content that works. Creating the right content keeps your audience engaged and increases your brand awareness. This will help you plan and create tailor-made content that will strike the right chord with your followers. This will also significantly reduce the time you might otherwise spend on guesswork and iterations.

4) It is a way to analyse your competitors’ strategies. While you plan, execute, and experiment with your social media strategy, you can also learn a lot from your competitors. You can instantly track key metrics on post frequency, engagement, and even the keywords used—among many other options. Using this knowledge, you can make necessary changes and evolve your social strategy to increase your reach and outperform your competition.

5) Finally, it will provide a boost to your ROI. At the end of the day, it all comes down to having a good return on investment from all your marketing efforts and money spent. This return could be things like increased conversions or sales, better brand awareness, a reduced load on technical support teams, or boosted website traffic and customer engagement.