Having spent years in the communications trenches, I can’t stress enough how crucial media analysis is, especially in social media. But far too many businesses and writers ignore this valuable practice.
Think about brands that faced major PR crises. With better media analysis, they could have spotted issues earlier and shaped their messaging.
Simply put, media analysis lets you measure brand sentiment, campaign results, and your share of voice versus competitors. It also allows you to rapidly respond to conversations. However, the question is, how do you go about integrating this into your business process?
This guide will cover everything you need to know about media analysis. You’ll learn analysis methods, get tooltips, and follow a customizable template.
Key Points
- Value perception can be gauged through social listening technologies and data observation from other digital marketing dashboards, including Google Analytics
- Establishing a benchmark facilitates the process of identifying areas for improvement and evaluating oneself against competition
- You can also measure and optimize the return on investment from your influencer marketing and social media marketing campaigns by using Tagger by Sprout Social
- Businesses can obtain a leading indicator of client loyalty and churn by integrating effort score capabilities, which measure how challenging it is to do business with you
- Determine the purpose of your messaging, the audience you are attempting to attract, and the reaction you hope they will have to your company
What is Media Analysis?
Media analysis I will say, is collecting and interpreting data regarding your brand’s media coverage. It combines quantitative and qualitative analysis, providing helpful information on your brand’s media presence, reputation, and influence. An important application of media analysis is in social media and we will cover that in detail in the course of this article.
What Makes Social Media Analytics Necessary?
Social media research is more than just tallying shares and likes. It is insufficient even to tally responses, remarks, and link hits. While these KPIs are significant, in-depth social media analysis reveals the reasons behind high levels of engagement on particular Facebook posts or the topics that people are continuously tweeting about.
It provides an insight into the true opinions of your clients on your business, goods, and services. Understanding social media data can help with product strategy, customer journey mapping, and online brand reputation analysis. The significance lies not only in the figures but also in the factors that influence them.
Furthermore, social media analytics are becoming essential for gauging how successfully you provide customer care, as social channels are being used more and more for customer support (social customer service). For your customer service agents’ contacts with customers via social media and messaging, you can look at response times, first contact resolution times, the average handle time, the effectiveness of bots in addressing issues, and team performance on KPIs. Given that over half of the world’s population uses social media, it is imperative to leverage social media to comprehend your brand’s relationship with its clients.
Benefits of Social Media Analytics?
In my company, marketers use social media analytics to plan campaigns, generate ideas for new content, and inform their strategy, among other things. Monitoring social analytics offers the following five main advantages:
#1. Sentiment Towards the Brand
Brand sentiment shows you how consumers feel about your company. It encompasses any emotions mentioned online, whether pleasant, neutral, or negative. Using sentiment analysis software, you may assess and gauge the sentiment surrounding your business by checking through your social media data.
This ensures that your target market is content with your company and helps you find ways to apologise to disgruntled clients. Additionally, you can find ways to enhance your company.
Sentiment analysis, for example, may reveal to you which product features your customers are most interested in, allowing you to update your FAQ or support centre with answers to frequently asked questions.
#2. Demonstrating Return on Investment
The ROI of my company’s social media marketing initiatives was used to demonstrate using my social media statistics. I will advise that anytime you launch a new campaign, keep an eye on your social media analytics to check how the material is doing, whether users are visiting your website, and whether you are bringing in any new business. By doing this, teams can gain more support and funding by demonstrating the social media ROI. UTM tracking and URL shortening are two techniques that simplify demonstrating ROI through analytics. In this manner, you can link your social media efforts to particular pipelines and transactions.
#3. Recognizing Trends
The process of identifying emerging trends before they become popular is known as trendspotting. You may achieve that by closely monitoring your social media metrics. Your social media analytics can assist you in identifying the following trends:
- Which platforms are becoming more and less well-known
- Interest-related subjects that your target market is discussing (as well as brand mentions in dialogue)
- Ad formats that appeal to your target audience
- Emerging goods and influencers in your sector or speciality
- Content types that your audience interacts with the most
When correctly examined, your social media analytics data can be a great resource for learning what material you should be posting, what kinds of content are trending, and what your audience wants to hear more about in the upcoming quarter or year.
Checklist on Best Media Analysis.pdf
#4. Perception of Value
Value perception, also known as perceived value, is the general view that customers have about the product or service offered by your brand and its suitability for their needs. Customers won’t pay much for your product, for instance, if they don’t think it’s worth that much.
Value perception can be gauged through social listening technologies and data observation from other digital marketing dashboards, including Google Analytics. This can assist in directing the material you produce to enhance value perception and guarantee that you’re highlighting the main pain issues that your good or service can address.
#5. Establishing Objectives for Social Media
You may set realistic, actionable social media goals and objectives using social media analytics to determine which content and channels are doing successfully.
Here, “realistic” is crucial. Even with a revised posting strategy, it is not practical to aim for 10,000 followers in one quarter if your Instagram account is gaining 10 new followers every week, as revealed by your social media analytics statistics. Alternatively, you could try setting a goal to grow your account by 20 followers every week and then gradually increase it from there.
How to Use Social Media Analytics Tools to Monitor Social Media Performance
#1. Establish Standards
Establishing a benchmark facilitates the process of identifying areas for improvement and evaluating oneself against competition. These benchmarks are used to track the effectiveness of your social media efforts from a business perspective, in addition to social media performance.
#2. Discuss and Reiterate Your Findings
After I completed these actions, I had to conduct frequent measurements and produce reports to make sure I’ve made progress. Also, I ensured I can share social media insights and replicate my study for the larger organization since social media trends can serve as leading indicators of client demands and wants.
#3. Compile Operational Data, Social Media Analytics, and Other information
The first thing my company did was to ensure the social media analytics tool we choose was gathering information from all relevant and accessible sources.
#4. Produce a Report on Social Media Analytics
With the social media analytics platform of your choice, creating a social media analytics report ought to be a straightforward procedure. On a configurable dashboard with adaptable reporting options, you should ideally have options for one-time reporting for certain campaigns, regular reporting, and real-time insights. By doing this, you’ll have the best opportunity to gain valuable insights from the data you’ve gathered.
#5. Take Steps to Enhance Your Performance on Social Media
The ideal social media analytics platform should be able to provide you with useful insights or, in certain cases, take over and automate these tasks for you. You must act to make improvements using the information you now possess, whether that means improving the customer experience on your social media platforms, lowering the effort required by customers to go from social media to your website, or making sure you answer consumer inquiries.
#6. Look for Patterns and Consumer Behavior
Your social media analytics report is an invaluable resource for figuring out where to put money to get the best returns. Social media data ought to provide you with insights into consumer behaviour and new trends. Following your clients’ path from your social media platforms to the purchase process needs to be done.
Best Social Media Analytics Tools
There are many social media analytics tools available; the key is to select the one that best meets the particular requirements of your company. Check out the top three recommendations:
#1. Sprout Social
Sprout provides cross-channel social media analytics so you may analyze your performance on one network in-depth or compare outcomes simultaneously on many networks.
Utilizing Sprout’s automatic, presentation-ready reports makes it simple to improve your content or business plan. With specialized reports tailored to the key performance indicators (KPIs) of your company, expand the scope of your investigation.
However, that just represents a small portion of my social media statistics. You may perform sentiment analysis and find information about your audience, share of voice, and pertinent issues with Sprout’s Advanced Listening tool. You can also measure and optimize the return on investment from your influencer marketing and social media marketing campaigns by using Tagger by Sprout Social.
#2. The IQ of Rivals
An additional resource providing personalized social media analytics reports is Rival IQ. Brands can use the platform to monitor their progress on various social media platforms, such as YouTube. In addition, Rival IQ offers social listening, influencer tracking, competition research, hashtag analytics, and social media audits. Rival IQ is an excellent choice for companies that operate numerous social media platforms or agencies that serve a variety of clientele.
#3. AdWords
Although it’s not just for social analytics, Google Analytics is a must-have tool for social media managers and practitioners. Reports can be made to track:
- How to use social media to generate leads and increase website traffic
- What social media platforms get the most traffic
- Demographics of the audience
- Return on Investment for your Social Media Campaigns
Features Your Social Media Analytics should have
While there are numerous social media analytics solutions available, there are a few important factors to consider before choosing one.
#1. Analyzing Emotions and Calculating Effort
Businesses can obtain a leading indicator of client loyalty and churn by integrating effort score capabilities, which measure how challenging it is to do business with you. Gaining additional understanding of customers’ sentiments regarding their experience is possible with the ability to score hundreds of emotions. Businesses can use sentiment, effort grading, and granular emotion analysis to get a range of leading indicators about how consumers view their brands and companies.
#2. Examination of Several Social Networking Platforms
Ideally, your analysis will convey how customers feel about and engage with your brand, providing valuable insight into how this affects your brand. What would happen, for instance, if your customers started complaining on Twitter? Would you lose them as a client and could you influence others instead? What impact does that have on your business goals and brand identity?
#3. Visualization and Dashboards
Teams across your company should be able to easily grasp the data that your social media analytics platform examines. Your tool should be simple to use and alter so that sharing your insights is straightforward and effortless.
#4. Divided Data
Through segmentation, your social analytics platform ought to be able to delve further into your social media following. To increase sales, your social media strategy and entire brand or product strategy can be guided by understanding how and where your customers connect with and feel about your businesses.
#5. Information Overlaying Between Business Domains
Your social media analytics solution should be able to gather all the pertinent data from across your company, whether you’re utilizing several platforms to analyze social media metrics or Google Analytics to track website traffic.
#6. Data Operations
You should be able to see how your social data links to other operational indicators, including sales, site traffic, and more, using a social media analytics tool that can bring in your own data. Your operational data must be able to be included by your social media analytics platform in order to have a better insight into your target audience’s behaviours.
#7. Sentiment Analysis
Can your data undergo intricate sentiment analysis using your social media analytics tool? You can gain a deeper understanding of your target audience’s sentiments about your brand by using sentiment analysis. It is not limited to using social media data points like likes and shares; it can also look for customer sentiments in comments.
By identifying the connections between your social media activity and consumers’ past or present behavior, social media analytics solutions with built-in machine learning and natural language understanding allow you to obtain important insights into the customer journey. Since unstructured data makes up a large portion of social media content, it’s essential to have a tool that can automatically interpret this data and derive meaningful insights.
Selecting a Media Analysis Service: Essential Guidelines
Make sure your organization will benefit from the media analysis solution and that you are getting value for your money when setting its parameters. When you commission a media analysis solution, concentrating on these seven components will increase its efficacy and guarantee that it is fulfilling your requirements.
#1. Employ Reliable Measurements
You need a reliable method of measurement to show the worth of the communications team’s efforts. Metrics that have meaning must be both intuitive and statistically sound. They could consist of audience engagement metrics for important messaging, sentiment analytics, share of voice, and content volume. They shouldn’t contain Opportunities to See or Advertising Value Equivalent, as both have been extensively debunked by media studies and have contributed significantly to the erosion of communications reporting’s credibility over time.
#2. Connect to Your Company’s Objectives
You have a better chance of success if you align your media analysis procedure with your particular communications objectives or business requirements. Determine the purpose of your messaging, the audience you are attempting to attract, and the reaction you hope they will have to your company. This will establish whether volume, reader recall rate, spokesperson penetration, success of the main message, sentiment, source split, or any combination of these will be the most important KPIs.
#3. Move Quickly
As everyone knows, in today’s digital, hyperconnected world, speed is crucial, and analysis is no exception. Periodic reporting is highly helpful in identifying changes in performance and new trends, but it really needs to be provided within a few hours of the conclusion of the analysis period. Similar to this, any periodic study needs to be enhanced with a platform that offers real-time, on-demand media analytics capabilities.
#4. Make Use of Technology and Human Analysts
The ability to process massive amounts of content has never been greater for media analysis solutions because to new technologies, but human interaction is still essential. Artificial intelligence solutions guarantee more consistent and dependable trend data as well as vast amounts of data that may be analyzed by eliminating human imperfections. The qualitative viewpoint is then applied by humans, who use the facts to tell the narrative. The integration of technology and human skills, as well as quantitative and qualitative methods, is what enables this kind of study to yield significant and practical outcomes.
#5. Examine Every Source
Every channel that your target consumers access and where your company, rivals, and industry are referenced should be included in the media evaluation process. Make sure you’re having a rational discussion about which media kinds are necessary, and connected to your business and communication goals, as traditional print, online, social, and broadcast media may all have an impact on how people perceive you.
What are the methods of media analysis?
Media analysis can be done in two ways: quantitatively and qualitatively. While the latter relies on storytelling, the former is based on statistics.
How do you write a media analysis?
When composing the analysis, start with an executive summary that comprises the analysis’s main results, goal, and introduction. The methodology, issue analysis, framing analysis, spokesperson analysis, conclusions, and recommendations come after the executive summary.
How do you analyze media content?
Asking questions and providing answers based on the data you uncover in your sources constitutes a significant portion of the analysis process. As you go over the resources you’ve acquired, you might want to think about the following questions: How is this topic framed in the media? Who are the subject matter experts and how are they portrayed?
What is the goal of media analysis?
An overview of your media relations can be obtained through media analysis. It can inform you about whether and when your main points are being understood, as well as the frequency, location, and media representation of that information.
Conclusion
Not to mention, don’t forget to wrap up your media analysis essay with a statement. Your essay’s conclusion should restate your thesis statement and provide a succinct summary of its key ideas. It’s a good idea to encourage your readers to continue thinking about the issue you’ve covered by ending with a call to action or some food for thought.
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