Social Media has become a major component of digital marketing through 2015 and now will play a big role in 2016. It is now a substantial part of the marketing budget, and continues to grow. With the growth of social media as a marketing category comes the need for analytics. This need is not a unique concept. We witnessed the very same situation with the first email marketing campaign and the first business website; companies needed a way to track these mediums and so emerged email analytics and web analytics.

But how does social analytics help?

Let’s start with the basic definition: social analytics is a system that allows for the collection, aggregation, and standardization of social media data to discover and communicate meaningful patterns. Social analytics helps us simplify data from dozens of networks, millions of people and a variety of activities. Social analytics can give you a far deeper understanding of user behavior and demographic data than Google Analytics ever could. And that is why social media analytics are important.

Social media is not just a place to generate back links and build some consumer goodwill, it is one of the most accurate and intuitive sources of information you can gather about your target audience.