In 2019, if you’re not on any social media, you’re nearly invisible. According to the most recent stats, there are 3.48 billion people today using social media, which account for 45% of the world population. The number keeps growing every day: during 2018, 366 million people started using social media, and that means more than a million users daily.
Social media is getting increasingly influential, and apart from spreading the word about your brand, there’s a number of ways in which you can harness its full potential. Most importantly, social media channels generate immense amounts of user-related data, which helps you know your customers and their preferences and develop precisely targeted marketing campaigns.
A number of social media analytic tools is available on a free basis. Below, is an overview of some free web-based solutions your e-commerce business could use to its benefit.
In-built analytic tools
There are lots of external analytic tools out there, and here in this article, we will focus primarily on them. But before we do, let us dwell briefly on internal analytic tools available to users of every social media platform: although they do have limitations, they should by no means be neglected. Facebook insights, Pinterest analytics, Twitter analytics, Youtube analytics, and Instagram insights are great to start with. Using Google analytics can be insightful as well: intended mostly for website traffic analysis, it shows which social networks are driving the most traffic and can help you tweak your SMM strategy.
This free cross-platform tool searches and analyzes social media in the real-time and uses two main metrics: Mentions (including top keywords, mentions and websites) and Influence measured by Strength, Sentiment, Passion and Reach. Social Mention searches across a large number of websites, including Twitter and Reddit and allows you to set up alerts to monitor changes. Its main downsides are the small number of features and lack of any dashboard whatsoever for visualizing data.
As of today, Facebook remains the most popular social networking website favored by 97% of social advertisers, and BuzzSumo is a tool targeted specifically at analyzing Facebook engagement. You can also use it to analyze your website for social performance, for example, to see which articles have been shared and how often specific keywords were mentioned. BuzzSumo is available on a freemium basis, which means some of its features are free and some are only available, once you pay for it.
SumAll is another cross-platform tool perfect for analyzing the correlation between social media channels. Easily integrated with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, the tool produces visual charts and delivers them straight to your inbox on a daily basis. This allows you to always keep an eye on your most essential metrics. This tool is also free and is great for doing quick reviews. Apart from metrics analysis, SumAll also automatically generates content for your social media channels to keep your audience engaged.
This isn’t exactly a free tool, but it does offer a free plan for 3 Facebook pages delivering follower and engagement statistics. Its paid version works with Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube, and comes with a standard customizable dashboard which lets you track your most important metrics. Quintly has a 14-day trial and starts at €129/month.
Although free tools will not offer you the extensive set of features for comprehensive social media data analysis, they will surely let you see the big picture. Depending on your budget, you can choose from commercial SaaS platforms like Brandwatch analytics, Brand24 (with basic package starting at $49), data visualization suite Vizia, Cyfe business dashboard and more.
But what’s really attention-worthy is the technology behind these solutions. Text mining is advanced analysis technique used to filter large amounts of data and extract valuable and relevant info. This is more than just a search tool; its algorithms can understand complex concepts and identify patterns across millions of social network posts to provide relevant info. Text mining involves (and is often confused with) natural language processing (NLP), a rapidly evolving segment of today’s emerging tech often referred to as AI. Natural language processing uses a variety of techniques to understand the complexities of human speech, as well as the sentiments behind the natural text.
Yes, by leveraging AI you can learn how customers actually feel about your brand. This brings us to advanced form of social media analysis, also known as opinion mining, capable of assigning positive, negative or neutral value to the text. NLP algorithms can now identify basic human emotions: happy, angry, sad, and the technology itself is now used to search influencers and indicate key advocates for the brand.
Needless to say, such solutions are often custom built. Retailers across the world are hiring development companies to build sentiment analysis tools for their brand by harnessing NLP and text mining and create precise and actionable marketing strategies, increase customer loyalty by improving services, drive innovations and boost revenue. Having incorporated big data into business processes and developed analytical tools, at VARTEQ we can create powerful software tailored to your needs. With data collected and analyzed, customer engagement is sure to grow helping your e-commerce business stay ahead of the curve.