Now you know why a strong network is very important to the success of your restaurant. Henceforth, it’s time to understand how to analyze the outcome of your content on social media.
It is essential to always keep in touch with your audience and analyze if the content you are publishing is appropriate for them and whether they are in line with their expectations.
We will first explain what social media analysis is, then we will detail several useful tools to perform this analysis on your various social media platforms.
Finally, we will give you tips to ensure that your content is seen by your audience, including figuring out the secrecy of algorithms.
1. What is Social Network Analysis?
Before you embark on the wonderful adventure of creating your network, we will try to explain in a clear and concise way, what social network analysis is. Our goal is to make you understand why it is interesting for you to use it for your restaurant.
Weiguo Fan and Michael Gordon in “The Power of Social Media Analytics” (2014) claim that social media analytics is concerned with developing informatics tools and frameworks to collect, monitor, analyze, summarize and visualize social media data to facilitate conversations and interactions to extract useful patterns and intelligence. Social media analytics can help businesses as yours. The number of users on social media are increasing and so is the need for companies to monitor and use the sites for their own benefit.
The process of social media analytics consists of three stages: “capture”, “understand” and “present” (W.Fan, M.Gordon, 2014). The first one, “ capture” consists in obtaining data by monitoring various social media sources, archiving and extracting information. It means that you can collect, for instance with monitoring tools, information such as the amount of likes, shares and comments a specific publication has or how many people have joined your social networks last week. The “understand” stage consists on selecting the relevant data and employs advanced data analytic method to analyze data retained and gain insights from it. In your case, you can analyze the data collected and try, via an Excel tab and statistics for example, to make sense of them. The third stage, “ capture” deals with presenting findings from the second stage in a meaningful way. For instance, you can use an infographic to present your data clearly. To sum up, you can use social network analysis to model your networks ( Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc..) dynamics and growth. As a restaurant starter, it can help you to monitor your business activity.
Luigi word “I use social media analytics to see how many people I reach across my various networks and how much react to my publications. Thanks to this I’m able to organize a competitive intelligence to understand how my competing restaurants communicate.”
In “Framework for Categorizing Social Posts” (2017) Wondwesen Tafasse and Anders Wien, describe social media as “the collective of online communications channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration.” As a restaurant, you need to have a brand page on social media, such as Facebook. On your page, you will post content. Each content is strategical. Brand pages are an essential component of social media marketing, they represent an interactive platform established by brands on social media to connect with their consumers and fans. Brand posts represent a frequent, concise updated posts by brands that are meant for consumers and fans on a daily basis. Message strategy determines the content domain of a branded content, it can be a piece of advertisement or a brand post, it aligns the character of the brand with the consumers’ needs, bridging the gap between what you want to say and what your consumers need to hear. Mangold and Faulds (2009) claim that the purpose of Social media is to enable marketers to manage customer relationships, promote their brands, entertain and influence consumers decisions of purchase. That’s why the use of Social Media Analysis is so relevant for you, as a restaurant starter.
2- How can you use Social Network Analysis to improve your online strategy?
Now, you know what Social Network Analysis is, it is time to explain more in depth the modalities of it, through tools adapted to your needs and your platforms. Social network analysis can be used to optimize the content you post on your social media. It enables you to better understand your target audience, see what they want and need.
As a restaurant, getting insight into your customers’ needs is really important. You have to know what works for them and what does not. By using social network analysis, you can see if a particular content you have posted attracts the audience, and of course also if it hasn’t. You will be able to see which posts work best, especially thanks to the engagement rate. According to the blog “marketing management”: “The average engagement rate per publication is defined, for a given publication, as the ratio of the sum of the interactions generated by the publication, on the number of users having seen the publication”. To make it simpler, you simply sum the likes, shares and comments of a publication, then divide by the number of followers of your page. You can then multiply the result by 100 in order to have the commitment rate of the publication. You can then compare several publications to see the best performers and to re-calibrate your content strategy if needed. To give you an idea, marketing experts recommend a commitment rate of at least 5%. A good engagement rate is synonymous with an active community, driven by a real desire to interact with your brand or your company, but also sharing quality content.
It's important for you to see which posts have the most likes, comments and shares so you can write more content like it. It is also interesting to analyze the timing of the publication, to see which moments of the day and of the week work best. This will allow you to best meet the expectations of your audience and publish content at the right time and with topics interesting to your community. With the Social Network Analysis, you can analyze and improve your strategy. The University of Cologne has developed the “Brand Network Analysis” method which consists of a network otopics that show what your target audience on the Web associate with your brand. To further read about this method you can visit their website (Brand Network Analysis).
EXAMPLES OF MONITORING TOOLS
We will now introduce various tools that you can use to analyze social networks. The following tools are all free. Four examples of free monitoring tools that could be useful for you are Hootsuite, Klout, and also Google and Facebook tools. According to Technopedia, Social media monitoring is “a process of using social media channels to track, gather and mine the information and data of certain individuals or groups, usually companies or organizations, to assess their reputation and discern how they are perceived online.” Businesses engage in social media monitoring for several reasons, such as to connect with their customers, to provide customer support, to measure their social media reach, or to understand social media trends.
Come discover your future best friends!
Hootsuite is one of the best free tool that can be used for multiple social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. If you want to go further, you can also work with professional plans, which start at $19 a month. The tool can provide you weekly reports, measures of your brand sentiment and of the effectiveness of your posts. You can also save time by planning your content. It lets you see a clear content calendar and can automatically schedule posts (Hootsuite, 2017).
Iconosquare is one of the most popular Instagram analytics and management platforms. Besides its robust analytics and management features, Iconosquare offers you custom feeds, which you can use to monitor specific Instagram content. For each feed, you can add up to 50 users and 20 hashtags.
Google also provides a few useful free tools (Bogdan Batrinca, Philip C. Treleaven, 2014). For instance, Google Trends shows how often a particular search-term input compares to the total search volume. Google Alerts is a great tool for beginners. It can monitor interesting new content and mentions of your brand or even yourself after you have provided them with requested keywords. You will receive a message if your restaurant is mentioned (Mindruta, 2016).
Facebook has its own tool in the field of network analyzing. Facebook Analytics provides insight about your audience that only Facebook itself can give you. It can help by improving purchase rates of your brand (Facebook Analytics, 2017). Furthermore, Facebook uses an algorithm, which is called EdgeRank, to analyze and collect all the data in order to provide each single person with a personalized feed (Oremus, 2016).
3- How do you make sure your content is visible for your target audience?
The nuts and bolts of the social media strategy can be introduced by the following sentence: "The goal of News Feed is to show the right content at the right time to the right people so they do not miss anything that might be important to them. The goal is to show people the updates in the order they want. " (Facebook, 2016).
That’s the statement Facebook made about the algorithm they use for showing content to its users. This means your timeline will not be chronological, and you might not see some content at all. Using an algorithm is a way for social media channels to make sure you will stay longer on their platform. By understanding the algorithm, you can adjust your social media content to be more visible to your target audience. Unfortunately, the algorithms of social media platforms are a greater secret than the Coca Cola formula. But don’t worry, we will provide some tips to influence the algorithms, according to your various social networks.
Facebook Algorithm is probably to most complex. It take into account more than 10000 criteria. (Danilo Duchesnes, 2018). However, some have more weight than others.
For example, you must do everything to try to cultivate interaction on your page. The more a user likes one of your content, the more Facebook will show him your page. If someone always likes to share your posts, then the chances are higher that your post will be at the top of that person's timeline (Fueld, 2017). For the algorithm, a comment will have more weight than a like. Our tip: Ask your community questions to comment on your content.
An even more important criterion is sharing. This is a strong signal for Facebook when a user shares your content on his news feed. For example, you can create challenges where you ask your audience to share your page to win a meal or a gift in your restaurant.
It’s also important how well the content has done with the people who have already seen it. Has your post been online for a while but is there little interaction? Then the chances are small that your mail is quickly shown to someone else. (Huberman)
Until 2016 the Instagram algorithm was quite easy, it was in chronological order. If you posted at 9pm and someone else at 9:02 pm, its contents appeared before yours. But because interesting posts disappeared in the amount, Instagram changed the algorithm. (Communicatie, 2018)
The new algorithm is quite unknown but we can say something about it. Just like Facebook your post will also be more visible if there is a lot of interaction with your audience. That’s why it’s important to make your content more personal and give your followers a good feeling. Try to pay attention to the times at which you post. Discover when your target audience is most likely to be found on Instagram and use this information. Don’t forget to refer people to your Instagram profile (for instance in your website or in your Facebook page) and make sure you stay active. To increase the interactions, don’t forget to answer to all the comments
According to a study by Later, an Instagram-based Instagram scheduling platform that analyzed a total of 61,000 posts, the best hours to post a photo are 5pm and 2am. Simply because fewer photos are published at these times, which will allow your content to stand out!
However, the most important tip is to keep your platforms alive. Find the right balance between enough content to keep your audience up-to-date and pleasing them. You do not want to overflow them so it becomes annoying. But when you have not posted an Instagram-post in a month or so, do not be surprised when your audience is not following any more.
Provide good quality content that matches the information needs of your community. Don’t forget that you can find your content well, but it is only your target audience that ultimately determines it.
Website
As a restaurant starter, it is mandatory for you to have your own website. However, be careful, websites algorithms don’t work like social media algorithms. The Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process for a website to be visible on a research engine like Google. With SEO a website can appear on top of the list on the Google search page. Over 99% of the people who use the Google search engine only click on the first page and most click on the top three results. (Bluehost, 2012) .
The SEO method works with keywords. This means that you must take great care of the vocabulary you use. For instance, if you want to be visible in the category "Vegetarian Restaurant in Rotterdam" make sure that the words "vegetables" "vegetarian" "rotterdam" "restaurant" "healthy food" appear very regularly on your site. Thus, the search engine will put you at the top of the page.
Moreover, your website has to be very easy to use. People don’t have time to figure out how a complicated website works. You need to make sure that the buttons to all of the information are clear and easy to find. In that way people are more comfortable and they will stay on your website to check out the information.
You now understand why Social Networks Analytics is important to you. It may seem a bit technical, but thanks to monitoring tools or tips to understand the different algorithms, you will be able to provide to your food addict audience adequate content and thus be as visible as possible on all your platforms.