Monitoring how many likes, friends and followers you have isn’t social analytics. Luke Moore, European sales director at Crimson Hexagon, reveals what should go into your social success metrics
Chances are you’ve noticed by now, social media has become the single largest source of unsolicited consumer opinions the world has ever seen. It’s an incredibly powerful channel for any marketers able to capture and distil this data for the benefit of their business. In many ways this is market research turned on its head – you need never ask anyone a question, and yet they will continue to offer opinions, insights and perspectives about you, your products, your competitors and their products – by the billion. And what’s more, it’s a mostly untapped resource.
As marketers, it is vital you learn to listen to these social media insights in the most strategic way possible to better understand customer opinions online. You can then help your own business to use that data to better inform marketing, tactics and overall business strategy. Here are some tips to help your business realise the full potential of social media analysis:
Don’t just scratch the surface
Businesses like yours live and die by word-of-mouth reputation. But too many organisations still choose to only dip their toes into social media analysis and go no further than looking at basic sentiment drivers and demographics. Only by going beyond basic analysis will your business reveal the hidden secrets over on the dark side of social media, and unmask who is really talking about you and what else resonates with them. Tracking and analysing social media certainly provides huge leaps forward in itself by taking some of the guesswork out of media and campaign planning. But in order to reach the next level you’ll need to step it up a notch. Engaging with customers and prospects on their own terms requires attentive listening to a vast unsolicited source of opinion, and then using that data intelligently to do the right things. So it’s important to dive deep to detect the drivers of sentiment, to understand the nuance of conversations and to monitor how those change over time.
Discover the who and the why
Rich information about your brand and your competitors will inform more targeted business and media planning. Many businesses are already using a new breed of social analysis tools to make correlations between audiences and interests and help plan and execute better marketing campaigns. It’s no longer enough just to know what is being said; to gain real, actionable insights, marketers also need to know who is talking about them and why. Sure, you can look at the demographics of your audience, but again that will only take you so far. But what if you could reach into the minds of the people actually doing the talking and quantify what they like, what else they’re engaging with and what resonates with them? And what if you could do all this without compromising audience privacy? As a modern marketer you must look for new social analysis tools that will help your teams understand the passions of the people talking about your brand, products and services on social media.
Be smart and practical
Social media analysis isn’t some flash new marketing channel – it is a serious, valuable and practical discipline. Well-founded analytical results hold the power to completely transform your messaging and marketing strategies. That means the insights you gain through analysis don’t just make attractive marketing presentations – they are actionable and business-changing. By digging into fresh audiences and uncovering new market opportunities, you will be able to target business and media planning far more strategically, backing up big-money marketing decisions with genuine big data intelligence that delivers solid, measurable returns. In this way, you will be able to use social sources to activate and recalibrate marketing, customer service, competitive insights, fruitful prospecting and new business programmes.
Don’t undervalue the science
Modern social media monitoring and analysis demands a disciplined, scientific approach, rather than a non-scalable, miscategorised overview of online opinions. Social media is now sufficiently mature and pervasive that the only sensible approach is to develop quantitative analysis methods with teams of mathematicians, social scientists and statisticians; applying statistical theories and unique algorithms to analyse huge volumes of unstructured text. You’ll benefit most from systematically implementing a scientific methodology that moves from mere social listening to social intelligence. This means analysing the content of the social landscape, respectfully extracting meaning from public conversations, and making actionable sense of what is being said.
Don’t arrive too late
The beauty of social media is that every second of every day, customers are telling you precisely what they want, why they want it and how they want to get it. You just have to listen. The only problem is they are telling your competitors too, and if you’re not careful those rival marketers might just start paying attention before you do. From a strategic level, the quicker your business starts to really listen to your customers (and those of your rivals) effectively and use those insights gained from social media analysis, the more likely you are to adopt and follow a clear and successful roadmap for the foreseeable future.
