Dave Evans, vice president of social strategy at Lithium, discusses how to find the perfect social analytics platform
Social technology has moved well beyond media, and businesses priorities on the social web are no longer limited to increasing likes or retweets. Now, it’s about social customer experience, data, and social initiatives that deliver measurable business results.
Top brands have moved past social media marketing: they use social channels to engage with customers from pre-sales and initial support through to after-the-sale service. For them, online engagement is a 24-hour/365 day job, on a global scale. In fact, Emarketer revealed that one in three customers cite the discovery and engagement with new brands via social media as a factor in purchase decisions.
Simple in theory, harder in practice. How can businesses tap in to analytics and convert this new opportunity into measurable business value?
Back to basics
Start with your business objectives as they relate to social customer experience management. Not all technology is applicable to all businesses, and the hype surrounding social makes it worth your while to start with your objectives. Establish up-front how you will determine success, and then identify the data you will need to measure that success.
Once you have your business objectives nailed down, take stock of what your customers are already saying. Your first analytics needs are around listening: gaining insight from your key influencers or target markets that will inform your actions taken to create an effective and influential social customer experience programme. Where are they talking? What problems are they facing?
Measure engagement
With your business objectives in mind, move up from information gathered through listening and into data around basic engagement. Response metrics to posts on Twitter, for example, will assist you in understanding what capabilities are warranted within your social media marketing team. If your objectives are increased sales, then measuring the percentage of sales following engagement through social media is a success indicator. Or, if your objectives are related to service, to cost savings arising out of call deflection, for example, then quantifying how quickly and accurately customers’ issues are being resolved is a key performance indicator.
However, remember that loyalty is tested with every customer experience, no matter how small: if this is part of your objectives then an additional measurement you’ll want to track is customer satisfaction, assessed at every applicable point of engagement.
Focus on brand advocates
Creating and enabling brand advocates is an essential part of a contemporary social media strategy. Brand advocates are willing to put significant time and effort, and often their name into recommending, defending or inspiring a particular business.
Your engagement and analytics platform should harness this data and identify how fast your marketing, sales and customer service teams are responding to customer inquiries. You should be able to see the extent to which suggestions from customers are being reviewed and turned into real improvements at all the degree to which the original contributors are recognised for the value of their contributions. All of this should be measured in the context of the specific product or service, including gathering associated meta-data: source content keywords, geographical location, author demographics and more.
Spot important influencers
To be successful, your advocate strategy needs to enable potential advocates to create and share authentic content. Advocates will invest their time and effort creating content only if they believe in what they are doing, and, if actually doing this is easy. Make it easy to register, easy to upload and easy to share. Measure this activity.
Analytics sources like Klout, use algorithms developed over time to determine how influential specific followers are, which social networks are most applicable to your business, specific topics that are popular, and more. Combined with demographic data-age, location, and gender you can fine tune your user generated content efforts that underlie your influencer and advocacy programmes.
Empower customers
Engagement is typically strongest in a business context when it occurs on a platform you own and control. This means you need to develop an engagement strategy that recognises networks like Facebook and Twitter as sources of customers, from which you can then draw people back to your support forums, communities and innovation tools. Analytics are part of this too: the number of visitors from these networks who subsequently register, who create content, who offer kudos on other’s posts, etc. all matter as indicators of engagement. Your owned social platform knits together vital channels in customer service: the metrics associated with these channels can then be drawn off and organised, to affirm ROI in the context of your business objectives.
The stakes for businesses considering real-time engagement are rising fast: expectations have increased as a result of sharing experiences. Customers in general value trusted content from trusted sources. This means your analytics platform should help you identify sources of trusted content.
Analytics, along with a clear connection to business objectives, is as fundamental to success as any particular piece of technology. Understanding your customers aka, social media monitoring, or listening, is effectively table stakes. You need to get beyond that, to engage, and the draw your customers into your business.
Your analytics platform is an integral part of your social customer experience management toolset. Grounded in your business objectives, proper analytics make it that much easier to know where your priorities are and what customers want from your business. Taken together, that gives you a clear roadmap to business success.
