4 Main Types of Social Media Analytics

2 min readJan 27, 2021

In our last section, we talked about different uses of social media analytics.
In this section, we will be covering the 4 main types of social media analytics and how to use them to make important business decisions or achieve an analysis goal.

Descriptive Analytics
Predictive Analytics
Prescriptive Analytics
Diagnostic Analytics

1. Descriptive Analytics

This mostly focuses on gathering and describing the social media data in other to understand a problem or situation. At this stage, we include visualizations, reports.

These can be used to draw a quick conclusion to any business-related question.

2. Diagnostic analysis

Diagnostic analysis emphasizes on the numbers: like views, follower numbers, shares, likes, retweets etc.

This type of analytics can help us rate performance of posts and campaigns and find out the factors responsible for their outcome.

3. Predictive Analytics

This requires analyzing a large volume of social media data in order to predict future actions and trends.

For example, running sentiment analysis using comments and text will be able to predict users’ reactions to a particular brand or event.

4. Prescriptive Analytics

This type of analytics suggests the best steps or actions to take based on the analysis of previously extracted social media data.

An example of this is studying responses to various social media crisis to determine what type of communication is best suited to handle a current crisis.
Another example is using Google analytics user patterns to recommend steps to shorten the customer conversion path.

Conclusion

Descriptive and Diagnostic analytics are reactive — that is, they are only concerned with events that have already happened while Predictive and Prescriptive analytics are proactive — that is, they allow us make changes and take decisions to influence/improve a particular outcome.

In my next article. I will be discussing Social Media Analytics Cycle which will also be showing you my personal process of analyzing social media data.