How to Leverage Social Media Analytics for Influencer Marketing Success

By Business OutstandersPUBLISHED: November 29, 16:44UPDATED: November 29, 16:47

How businesses approach marketing is different now. Consumers reject generic ads that just try to force the product onto them, preferring something more authentic and down-to-earth instead. And the one place you can find it at is social media. This is where influencer marketing comes in.

Whether you want to persuade viewers to buy VPS hosting or a new lipstick, influencer marketing can be what you need as long as you choose the right people to work with and leverage social media analytics to evaluate the progress of collaboration. In this article, we will focus on just that.

About Social Media Analytics

Social media holds huge amounts of data: from texts, pictures, and videos to user interactions with content. This data can provide valuable insights into the needs and preferences of your target audience.

Social media analytics represents a set of tools that make sense of this data to help people and businesses make informed decisions. It measures how the content is performing and gives you insights into what can be improved. Ultimately, it provides answers to the question of how well a marketing strategy or campaign is performing.

Thus, when entering the niche of influencer marketing, it’s important to have the tools ready to analyze how your target audience responds to the campaign. You need data before you launch a social media campaign and after to extract insights for future promotions and possibly make changes to your marketing strategy.

Why Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is powerful because it increases brand visibility by using the credibility of influencers to promote the product or services to a specific target audience or fan base. It is a form of word-of-mouth marketing that can potentially increase brand awareness and possibly lead to conversions.

The exposure that your product gets as a result of influencer marketing can be profound and can facilitate interest in your brand among potential customers. Moreover, this type of marketing can change the perception of your brand by drawing attention to the specific characteristics of your product.

In short, influencer marketing is one of the “nonchalant” forms of product promotion and is proven to be very effective.

Why Use Social Media Analytics for Influencer Marketing

Social media analytics can help improve influencer marketing strategy since it offers multiple benefits, including:

Better understanding of the target audience. Social media analytics provides information about the demographics, preferences, and behaviors of the target audience.
Campaign performance monitoring. Tools for social media analytics can track the campaign performance in real-time by monitoring specific key performance indicators (KPIs) such as engagement, reach, etc.
Comprehensive competitor analysis. You can compare your performance with your competitors in detail using social media analytics.
Identification of trends. Since trends are fleeting, it’s hard to manually track them; social media analytics can help you spot emerging trends, and identify current ones.
Opportunities to improve the content strategy. Analytics tools can help you determine which content resonates with your audience the most so that you can then incorporate insights into your content strategy.

How to Measure the Success of an Influencer Marketing Campaign?

You can use social media analytics to measure the success of your influencer marketing campaign by evaluating the following:

The number of followers. We recommend always keeping track of followers gained during the influencer marketing campaign. It’s best to start tracking the number of followers a week before your campaign launches — this way you evaluate how many followers you gained during the campaign.
Reach and impressions. Reach refers to the number of times a promotion post is shown on the social media feed and impressions refers to how actively an audience responded to it. This metric shows the extent of the brand’s visibility reached as a result of an influencer marketing campaign.
Click-through rate (CTR). CTR shows how many users clicked on the link in the promoted post. Since each link is a unique URL, this metric can be traced using common analytics tools like Google Analytics.
Conversions. The conversion rate shows you how many people completed the action intended by a promotion, such as making a purchase from an influencer page.
Affiliate links and discount codes. Affiliation programs are a widespread form of collaborating with influencers. It basically implies that an influencer is given an exclusive discount deal on the product or services, which they then pass on to their followers in the form of a discount code. You can see how many purchases were made using an influencer discount code, and evaluate the efficiency of the campaign from there.

Understanding such metrics is important since you have to know what to look for and pay attention to when you get a report from a social media analytics tool.

Speaking of those, you can use the following tools for a more convenient assessment of an influencer marketing campaign: