40 of the Best Ways To Use Social Media Data That You Might Have Overlooked

Social media is constantly surfacing new business, competitive and customer intelligence that has the potential to influence your entire company. And yet, marketers are still leaving a lot of that data on the table. According to the Sprout Social Index™, 56% of marketers use social data to understand their target audience, but additional uses dwindle from there. Only 23% of marketers use their social data to measure ROI and 16% use it for competitive insights.

The thing is, data can help social marketers solve their biggest challenges, from reaching your target audience and measuring ROI, to creating more engaging content and securing buy-in for more resources. Data visualization can make this information more engaging and uncover hidden trends.

Perhaps the idea of doing data analysis comes across as scientific and complex, like you need to be a numbers-person to do it right. Maybe you do report on social data but feel like you only squeeze so much insight out of what you have. Or it’s possible that you have the data, but you’re not quite sure how to use it to your brand’s advantage.

Time to level up! Here are 40 of the best ways to use social data and open up a world of possibilities for your brand.

1. Conduct a social media audit

Before you can truly understand your audience and the way they interact with your brand on social, know thyself. A social media audit of your data is a great way to set a baseline for performance and strategic plans. Review your engagement and publishing metrics, audience demographics, referral traffic and more to assess growth, opportunities and what you can do to improve your social presence.

2. Track your follower growth

Follower growth doesn’t automatically translate to business growth; however, it’s an important metric to track, especially when you consider that 89% of consumers will buy from brands they follow on social.

Follower count can also contextualize your data. If you’re a small business, you may not have the same following as a household-name brand. But instead of comparing your brand to others, focus on your own social data. Hone in on the rate at which your following is changing, rather than the total number alone, and use data visualization to identify major surges of interest that align with specific campaigns.

3. Dig into demographic data

Boomers, Millennials, Gen Zers—they all have different interests, cultural references, needs, experiences with social media and more. The same is true for people from different locations and genders. Using a social media analytics tool like Sprout Social will provide you with reports to get into this information. Sprout’s audience demographics report gives you a full breakdown of your fans across each social platform. With this type of data, you can better understand your audience, craft more effective messaging and improve your content strategy.

4. Evaluate where your audience is spending their time on social and why

Each social media platform has its own unique user experience, features, content and audiences. If you’re not leveraging data to learn which platform your audience is most engaged on, your strategy is like throwing a dart while blindfolded. You have a general idea of the direction in which you want to aim, but the chances of hitting the bullseye are slim.

Use analytics to identify which of those platforms your audience is most engaged on. Then, you can more accurately target and reach the people that matter most.

Benefit Cosmetics, for example, caters to fans across all social channels, but their social data clearly shows that their audience loves engaging with colorful visuals, soaking up product tips and tricks and shopping on Instagram.

5. Cater to your audience’s interests

Demographic data and performance across platforms will help you understand your audience, but to paint an even clearer picture of who they are, investigate their interests, needs and intent.

Identify top-performing posts and take note of patterns that you can use to influence content creation. So, if for example, posts focused on product updates consistently get the most link clicks, or thought leadership content gets the most shares and expands your reach, you might consider how you can expand your efforts in those areas.

6. Look beyond your owned data

Social media platforms have unparalleled access to audience insights. Fortunately for marketers, many of them are more than willing to share. Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube all have resources that are chock-full of business insights and audience data that marketers in all industries can apply to their strategies.

7. Set or adjust your publishing cadence

Wondering whether increasing your publishing cadence will increase traffic? Or, do you want to scale back on publishing, but are worried you’ll lose momentum? Test it. Try a new cadence for a week and then compare your results against a control week or your average weekly benchmarks.

8. Show people what they want to see

Don’t work off a hunch or make assumptions about the kind of creative content your audience likes. Social testing gives marketers powerful insights to support creative decisions.

Identify the variables you want to test, like still images vs. video. Then, as you create your content calendar, tag your posts with those variables. Once your test has run its course, a tool like Sprout’s Tag Report can help you analyze your results based on the metrics that ladder up to your goals. In the report, you can view the performance of each Tag by platform, as well as see detailed metrics including volume, impressions, engagements and link clicks.

9. Fine-tune your voice, tone and copy choices

Every brand has an established identity marked by its tone and voice. Social data and testing can help you further refine that voice for social. Make decisions about long captions vs. short, emojis vs. plain text, questions vs. statements, formal tone vs. casual and more based on your results.

10. Know when to pull back

Social testing can validate certain assumptions, but it can also show where you’re wasting time and resources. Video content, for instance, can be great but it also takes quite a bit of time and resources. So if you’re doing it, you want to make sure you’re doing it right. Data can clue you into whether it’s time to discontinue a strategy and explore new options.

11. Get answers to your most burning questions directly from your audience

If you’re struggling to understand your audience, create new content, evaluate customer experiences or gauge sentiment around your brand, ask your community questions. When we think data, we often think of numbers, but the qualitative data and direction you can get from your audience just by posing a question can be incredibly valuable. It also can bring your audience directly into decision making for your brand and build loyalty.

12. Poll your audience

Leverage social media polls, a feature that’s baked into most social platforms today. These are a simple way to secure audience data without doing a ton of work. Polls generate intrigue, engage your audience and show them that their opinions are important, all while providing quick-turn data for marketers.

13. Let your followers crown the winner of a contest

Create a fan-driven contest and use a combination of social polls, hashtags and mentions data to track results and crown a winner.

Adweek recently did this to determine the Readers’ Choice Marketing Moment of the Year. Using poll results to decide the winner of each round, Adweek eventually narrowed down their bracketed tournament to a final champion: Oreo’s Doomsday Vault.

14. Give your audience a pop quiz

Want to see how familiar audiences are with your industry, products, services or brand? Try quizzing them. This may reveal education gaps that you can fill with your content.

15. See who’s checking-in

Location check-ins on platforms like Facebook are like a personal referral that can increase your brand awareness and reach. Encouraging your customers to check-in at your locations will give you demographic data that can help you select more accurate ad targeting options.

16. Determine which products to promote

MVMT, a watch company, has been advertising their products on Pinterest for years, and when the brand expanded its product line, they turned to past campaign data to create an advertising strategy. They had found that ads with images of people wearing their MVMT while on-the-go had historically outperformed product-only shots.

Using historical data and insights, they determined which of their new products to promote on Pinterest going forward and ultimately lowered MVMT’s cost per acquisition by 4x compared to their own internal benchmark.

17. Establish benchmarks and set social campaign goals

Pair big picture objectives with SMART goals and KPIs. Use historical content and campaign performance data to establish your baselines for success.

18. Use organic performance data to determine which content deserves a boost

If you’ve got a budget for boosting your content, use organic performance data to establish which content resonates with your audience on its own. “If you have an organic post that’s working really well, you don’t even need to create a new ad. You can just put $50 behind it and see how reaching a wider audience impacts your goals and hypotheses,” says Shelby Cunningham, Digital Marketing Lead at Sprout Social.

Even if you have a big budget, before you shell it all out, boosting can give early insight into performance and inform whether you should invest more or pull back.

19. Add another layer of specificity to your data

As you deploy your campaign on social, add campaign UTM parameters to your links. That way, when it comes time to report, you can use Google Analytics to follow the user trail from social to your brand’s website, gathering data on referral traffic, conversions and more.

20. Tags aren’t just for testing

Campaigns are a huge learning opportunity. Tagging your content using a platform like Sprout ensures that every detail you want to gather data for or gain more insight on is accounted for.

21. Evaluate the success of your campaign hashtags

Hashtags and campaigns often go hand-in-hand. Hashtag analytics can help you capture fan engagement and demonstrate the reach of your campaign hashtag.

In 2002, the NHL, like most sports leagues, was disrupted by the pandemic, but they still managed to give fans special moments to connect with their favorite players. That’s when #NHLWarmUps was born.

Fans would create signs cheering for their teams and then Tweet them out with the hashtag #NHLWarmUps and participating teams would display them on the jumbotrons. With analytics, they found that fans Tweeted their signs and the hashtag over 2,000 times in the first round of the playoffs alone, showing just how engaged and excited fans were about the campaign.

22. Understand when new users are coming from social

Building brand awareness and increasing web traffic are marketers’ top two goals for social. In addition to analyzing impressions, reach and follower growth, look at your Google Analytics data. Hone in on traffic referrals and new users coming from social, and show your colleagues the real impact your social efforts are making.

23. Use customer feedback to inform products and services

As a social media marketer, you have unparalleled knowledge about your brand’s audience and customers. Bring the feedback you receive on social media about product pain points, favorite features, suggestions and more to your product and development teams. Using Sprout’s Smart Inbox, you can email messages directly to the necessary people, even if they don’t have their own Sprout account.

24. Contribute to sales pushes

We all love a good discount, and 40% of consumers follow brands on social media to learn about them. Share engagement data, link clicks and click-through rates on promotional posts with your sales team to demonstrate how social contributes to top-line goals and lead generation.

25. Help sales teams understand what channels buyers are more likely to come from

By the same token, social marketers can help sales teams find out where they can most effectively target customers. Leverage UTM metrics and social referral data to find the channels and platforms that convert, and then share with your sales team. This is a great way to encourage your sales team to use the most effective social channels for their own brand-building and social selling as well.

26. Make positive change within your org

If your brand has taken a stance, people will turn to social to learn about how your brand is upholding commitments and making progress.

Pay special attention to your inbound social messages and collect customer feedback, sentiment and other qualitative data. Use that data to show the public reaction, encourage ongoing action and get buy-in to share your progress on social.

27. Show your colleagues the impact of their own social networks

Leverage and learn from your brand’s best asset—your people. With an employee advocacy program in place, your colleagues can extend the reach and impact of your content by sharing it across their social networks. Sprout Social’s employee advocacy tool makes it simple to curate content for your team to share, collect metrics and report on the impact.

28. Inform design and creative decisions with data

Bring data to designers and creative teams to balance changing user needs and tastes with your own evolving brand identity and strategy.

“It’s incredibly valuable to have creative and marketing teams aligned around data. For creatives, such quantitative data gives us a bit more insight into what resonates with our audiences at scale on different platforms and channels. That helps us work on designs that can best perform with the different audience segments we are targeting,” says Sprout Social UX Designer, George Mathew.

29. Influence other marketing disciplines and decisions beyond social

Social insights about your audience are valuable to your entire marketing org. The social team for River Island, a UK-based fashion retailer, knows this well. With Sprout’s Tag Report, they identify which types of creative assets and content their audience likes most.

“The use of influencer or UGC imagery across our email marketing and site has increased. The images and the data that informed that decision come directly from social,” said Chloe Bebbington, River Island’s Social & Community Lead. “Because we’ve been able to show how content performs, dig up key insights and prove real social value, now, for the first time, we’re starting to work as a full 360 platform.”

Learn more about how River Island uses Sprout to optimize their content and social strategies.

30. Monitor and manage brand reviews

Online reviews are a critical part of your brand’s reputation. They’re filled with consumer insight and opinions that your brand needs to be privy to. Leverage that qualitative data to make change from within, create a better customer experience and focus on customer care where it’s needed most.

31. Make your company a standout on Glassdoor

While Glassdoor might be outside the realm of traditional social media, it’s incredibly important to your employer brand. Star ratings and reviews influence candidates’ decisions to apply for a position at your company. Sprout’s Glassdoor integration unifies review management and makes it easy to relay important feedback to human resources and leadership so that they can improve the employee experience.

32. Improve your employer brand strategy

Sprout’s Glassdoor integration also lets marketers apply Tags to reviews. Then, using the Tag Report, they can evaluate review trends, gauge employee sentiment and apply insights to your employer branding marketing strategy.

33. Build a compelling response strategy for FAQs

Similarly to how you might tag reviews, tag inbound messages to track recurring themes, questions or comments. Use reporting to evaluate if certain Tags are ballooning and use that data to build a powerful response strategy for FAQs.

34. Measure and improve the efficiency of customer service

These days, quick responses contribute to a positive customer service reputation. The majority of consumers (79%) expect a response from brands in the first 24 hours, but 40% expect a response within the first hour.

You could manually calculate the average time it takes your team to send out the first reply to an inbound message. Or, you could use a tool like Sprout to calculate it for you. Use that data to set your response time benchmark, encourage more efficiency on your team’s part and evaluate change over time.

35. Measure the elusive social media ROI

Establishing the return on your investments on social media continues to be a major challenge for marketers, year after year. Spoiler alert: you can’t measure ROI without metrics.

Set goals based on defined actions and use Google Analytics to track them. You can even set specific dollar values and conversion goals in GA to simplify measuring the return.

36. Make sure your paid strategy is paying off

Advertising campaigns can help you break through organic algorithms, but if you invest money in ads, you need to know if they paid off. Paid performance reports show you exactly how far your ad dollars went and can help you reevaluate if you need to invest more or if you should scale back.

37. Build a business case to secure executive buy-in for social resources

To make a greater business impact, social media marketers say they need more resources including budget, bandwidth, buy-in from leadership and more. Data can help you make a case for those additional resources. Use analytics tools to identify performance gaps and build a data-backed business case that excites executives.

38. Track team performance and productivity

Looking beyond content, campaigns and customer data. Sprout Social offers internal reports that help you evaluate how your social team is performing. Assign Tasks in Sprout and then use Sprout’s Task Performance Report to analyze productivity and understand how long things are taking.

39. Focus on rates, not just raw numbers

Instead of measuring metrics solely by quantity, evaluate the quality by focusing on rates. Engagement rate, click-through rate, video completion rate and growth trends contextualize those raw numbers and ensure that you’re evaluating your metrics fairly.

40. Build stronger partnerships with stakeholders

Keeping social data to yourself is a major mistake. With Sprout’s Premium Analytics, Indiana University’s (IU) social team is able to clearly demonstrate the value of their work to their partners.

IU’s Social Media and Digital Marketing Specialist Emily Campbell and the rest of her team work closely with the IU newsroom to share their content. “Giving them Sprout reports with link clicks to show how many people are continuing on to the newsroom from our posts, has really solidified our relationship as partners,” says Campbell.

Earn influence with data, build better relationships and show the power of social media by creating your own reporting system.

This list is nowhere near exhaustive. What’s outlined here only skims the surface of what you can do with the data at your disposal, and we didn’t even get into all the ways to use social listening data. Dig deeper, think bigger and do more with data—getting comfortable and confident with data is an opportunity to take your career and brand to the next level.

Sprout Social’s analytics tools can help every social marketer become a stronger data analyst. If you’re ready to try out some of these ideas, start a free, 30-day trial now!