Social Media Analytics Guide for Brands and Marketing Teams

Social media analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing data from social networks to gain insights into your campaign performances and make well-informed decisions. The data can be collected from social platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and Facebook to improve audience engagement and conversions. 

Social media analytics tools are essential for social media managers, marketing agencies, and media houses. By effectively utilizing these tools, you’ll get valuable insights to measure your social media campaigns, transform your marketing strategies, and increase your ROI. You’ll understand what social media content resonates with your audience and adjust accordingly.

Tracking social media analytics is important to marketers for many reasons. Below is a deep dive into why you should invest in social media analytics to improve your brand’s online presence.

Understand Your Results

Social media analytics gives you an in-depth look into your campaign performance, such as engagement rate, follower trend, profile impressions, and post reach. Depending on your campaign goals, you can determine what information you want to track and use the data to achieve these goals. Social media metrics typically include engagement, awareness, and conversion. 

• Engagement tracks how your audience interacts with your content. 
• Awareness shows you your current and potential audience. 
• Conversion gives insights into what content generates leads by converting your audience to customers. 

You can use each of these depending on your marketing goals. For instance, if your goal is to increase your follower count, you’ll need to track engagement metrics for follows and likes. This will show you what content has many likes and brings more audience to your page. 

Learn more: 19 Social Media Metrics to Measure Performance

Make Data-Driven Decisions

Social media analytics gives you a deep look into your marketing performance, allowing you to determine what strategies are working and which aren’t. This information lets you see what content resonates with your audience, make data-driven decisions, and adjust your overall social media strategy. These analytics allow you to track your data in real time and spot trends early. You’ll be able to stay ahead of the competition, create content to respond to trends quickly and reduce business risks by working with your performance KPIs. 

Optimization of Your Efforts

Social media analytics can help you achieve your marketing goals and desired results when you focus on relevant data, let insights guide specific actions, regularly review your areas for improvement, and use the data to understand your audience and their interests better. You can optimize your efforts by:

• Defining the goals of your campaigns clearly, such as creating brand awareness, generating leads, or driving website traffic. This helps to determine what metrics to track.
• Focusing on the metrics that align with your goals, like engagement rate, clickthrough rate, or impressions.
• Analyzing audience demographics and creating content that resonates with them.
• Comparing your past and current brand performance and competitor performance to find areas for improvement and improve accordingly.

All these ensure your actions align with your goals and produce satisfactory results.

Getting to Know Your Audience Better 

You can create content that resonates with your audience, boosts post engagement, and increases follower count by knowing your audience better. Social media analytics gives insights into your audience demographics, showing their location, age, interests, language, online behaviors, and how they perceive your brand. For instance, if most of your audience includes Millennials, you can create better content that resonates with their generation. Millennials enjoy video content that is visually appealing, story-driven, and authentic, so you’ll want to create content that aligns with this. This allows you to improve brand awareness, identify growth opportunities, manage your brand reputation, and enhance ROI.

Prove The Value of Your Work To Stakeholders

Your shareholders need evidence that their investment is worth it, and you can prove this through successful social media conversions. You can use social media analytics reports to show them the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. A reliable social media analytics tool tracks your social media revenue, leads, and conversions, allowing you to show the results of specific social media campaigns, thereby proving your value to stakeholders. Semrush’s My Reports is a marketing analytics tool that can help you build reports to track your campaign performance and showcase your results to your stakeholders.

There are various types of social media analytics you can track for high-achieving marketing campaign results. These analytics will help you find valuable insights and create accurate strategies. We’ll take an in-depth look into some of them below:

Tracking Your Own Performance

The first type of social media analytics is tracking the overall performance and effectiveness of your brand’s social media campaigns. You’ll monitor both your social media platforms’ organic and paid ad performance. Organic performance measures your page’s performance without sponsored content and is based on the quality of existing content, while paid ads performance measures how your sponsored ads perform. It includes key metrics like impressions, reach, likes, comments, shares, views, clicks, and sales to determine areas for improvement and create a data-driven marketing strategy. You’ll see if your current performance is good enough or if you need to switch things up.

Competitive Analysis

Competitive analysis assesses your competitors’ performance, content, and strategies across multiple social media channels to see where you stand and set realistic goals. With this data, you can spot areas for improvement, detect your competitors’ weaknesses and strengths, and identify opportunities to improve your social media presence. You should pay attention to metrics like their follower count/growth, engagement rate, active audience, content type, posting frequency, and customer sentiment. 

Learn more: How to Perform a Social Media Competitor Analysis in 6 Steps

Social Listening

Social listening involves actively monitoring and analyzing online conversations about your brand and industry across multiple social media platforms. It gives you insights into customer sentiment and public perception, allowing you to identify trends and make data-driven decisions on your strategy based on audience feedback. This social media analytic enables you to: 

• Spot potential brand influencers
• Improve customer service
• Identify customer needs 
• Develop targeted campaigns
• Monitor competitor activity

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis in social media analytics involves collecting, measuring, and understanding your customers’ perceptions of your brand, service, or product based on their posts, comments, and tweets. You calculate it using advanced algorithms and natural language processing to gauge the emotions behind social interactions. This allows you to monitor your brand reputation and gain insight into their perception of your brand for better reaction to customer feedback. By utilizing this analytic, you’ll:

• Understand your customers better. 
• Gain actionable data
• Improve your brand reputation management
• Gain a competitive edge by analyzing competitor sentiment
• Identify potential issues early.

Influencer Performance

Influencer performance refers to how a brand’s influencer performs on their social media platforms to assess the effectiveness of influencer marketing campaigns and make data-driven decisions on future collaborations. You measure influencer performance by tracking key metrics like reach, engagement, follower demographics, content performance, and conversions. In modern marketing, influencer performance is an important social media analytic as influencers on social media platforms bridge the gap between brands and consumers. Some of the benefits of influencer performance analytics include:
 

• Improving content strategy by gaining insights into what content resonates most with your audience
• Identifying high-performing influencers to prepare for future collaboration based on their impact on consumers
• Ensuring campaigns are reaching the right audience by tracking follower demographics
• Tracking key performance indicators to evaluate the ROI from influencer collaborations
• Make well-informed decisions and adjust marketing strategies accordingly

Industry Benchmarking

Industry benchmarking allows you to track the social media performance of industry competitors and measure the average or best performance against your brand. With this analysis, you can compare your marketing strategy with those of your competitors and identify areas for improvement against the industry standards. You’ll compare key metrics like reach, follower growth, engagement rate, impressions, clickthrough rates, and post frequency. When you see how well others in your industry are performing, you can set ambitious and realistic goals and increase your ROI. Monitoring and analyzing these key metrics allows businesses to improve their social media marketing strategy and achieve their goals.

Top SMM Platforms & How Analytics Helps

Social media analytics is essential for tracking your brand’s online presence and optimizing your marketing strategies. While numerous platforms offer SMM opportunities, some of the most popular include Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and YouTube. Each platform has its own analytics tools that provide valuable insights into audience behavior, content performance, and engagement trends.

Facebook Analytics

Facebook provides in-depth insights into audience demographics, post engagement, and ad performance. With Facebook Insights and Meta Business Suite, marketers can track key metrics like reach, impressions, and interactions to adjust their campaigns for better engagement and conversions.

Instagram Analytics

Instagram’s analytics tools offer valuable insights into user engagement, follower growth, and content performance. Metrics such as story views, profile visits, and engagement rates help businesses tailor their content strategies to maximize reach and impact.

Learn more: Guide to Instagram Analytics: Definition, Metrics + Tips

LinkedIn Analytics

LinkedIn is a powerful platform for B2B marketing, and its analytics tool allows businesses to track visitor demographics, engagement rates, and lead conversions. By monitoring these metrics, brands can refine their professional content and networking strategies.

Learn more: A Complete Guide to LinkedIn Analytics in 2025

X (formerly Twitter) Analytics

X provides real-time insights into tweet performance, audience demographics, and engagement metrics. Marketers can use this data to refine their posting strategies and create content that resonates with their audience.

TikTok Analytics

TikTok’s analytics tool provides data on follower demographics, video views, engagement rates, and trending content. Brands can leverage these insights to create viral content and enhance their marketing campaigns.

YouTube Analytics

YouTube offers detailed video analytics, including watch time, audience retention, and engagement metrics. By analyzing these insights, content creators and businesses can optimize their video marketing strategies for better performance.

A social media analytics report shows you a detailed breakdown of the performance of your brand’s social media platforms and marketing campaigns to help you make well-informed decisions. The content included in your SMM analytics report will depend on the content you want to report and how much info you want to have. Generally, it should consist of KPIs like follower demographics, impressions, reach, conversions, and follower count. 

Reporting social media analytics allows you to monitor the progress and effectiveness of your marketing efforts. You’ll gain insights into your audience behavior, measure your ROI, and identify areas for improvement to make better decisions. For instance, if your LinkedIn campaign generates more leads, you’ll know to put more effort into your LinkedIn or improve your other social media campaigns.

Some important details to include in your SMM analytics report are:

• KPIs from all your social media platforms, including key metrics like engagement, traffic, clicks, video views, new followers, reach, and conversions
• Graphs, charts, and sections 
• Executive summary
• Comments
• Conversions
• Recommendations

Creating a social media analytics report can be overwhelming, especially if your brand uses various digital platforms and you’ll have more info to work with. However, there are numerous social media analytics designed solely to help you track your performance and create a detailed report to showcase to your clients or team. You can use GA4 (Google Analytics 4) or a 3rd-party marketing and analytics tools like Semrush My Reports.

Streamline Your Reporting with Semrush My Reports

Semrush My Reports helps marketing teams and agencies track brands’ social media performance and create reports to showcase to clients or team members. You can connect it to social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Snapchat, Pinterest, and more to collect all your tracking results in one report.

While major social media platforms offer analytics tools, gathering reports from each one separately can be time-consuming. Semrush My Reports simplifies this process by integrating data from multiple platforms into a single, easy-to-analyze report, making it ideal for agencies and marketing teams managing multiple clients or campaigns.

Key Benefits of My Reports:

• Multi-Platform Data Integration – Connect data from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Snapchat, Pinterest, and over 30 other PPC and marketing tools.

• Automated and Customizable Reports – Start with a ready-to-use template, drag and drop widgets to build reports quickly, and set up automated updates on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

• 100% White-Label Customization – Align reports with your brand both in content and visual presentation.

• Easy Sharing Options – Generate interactive online dashboards and share them with clients or stakeholders via a simple link.

• AI-Powered Insights – Receive AI-generated report summaries that explain key data points and provide actionable recommendations.

Semrush My Reports is a powerful solution for streamlining social media analytics and reporting, allowing you to track, create, and share detailed reports efficiently. Save time and enhance your marketing performance with this all-in-one reporting tool.