Types of Social Media Analytics

Diagnostic Analytics

Descriptive Analytics

Prescriptive Analytics

Predictive Analytics

Eg: Action analytics, text analytics

Accounts for the majority of social media analytics

Reports, visualization and clustering formats

"What is happening?"

Gathering and describing social media data

Focuses on the numbers

Eg: Number of likes, followers, shares, pageviews, etc.

Reactive in nature

Searches the connections between an event and the social media reactions

"Why something happened?"

Compares performance of various campaigns, trends, etc.

Reactive in nature

Eg: Optimize offering to different groups based on patterns of buying behavior

"What is the solution?"

Analyzes patterns of behavior

Requires a lot of data

Proactive in Nature

Using data to determine an optimal course of action

Uses historical data

Eg: Analyzing reach of previous posts to decide what is the best time to upload

Can be conducted manually or using machine-learning algorithms

“What will happen?"

Analyzing large amount of data to predict future events

Proactive in Nature