Social media analytics continue to evolve as companies attempt to learn from and act on behaviors and sentiments shared by consumers in web and social media channels.
In a perfect world, social media analytics would help inform corporate leaders about possible product problems that are bubbling to the surface. Social media analytics would also help them identify other market signals that can prompt actions to address anticipated shifts in buying patterns and other actions by customers.
However, it’s tough for many companies to obtain meaningful results from their uses of social media analytics.
This is partly because business leaders struggle to articulate what success looks like, notes author and analyst Marshall Sponder. Plus, most social data is unstructured, thus adding to the complexity for organizations to obtain valuable business insights.
A big part of the challenge for business leaders is understanding the relationship between social media and business and, more specifically, how to monetize social media analytics.
Many business leaders expect social media analytics to help them spot trends and even identify emerging trends before they’re fully formulated. Some analytics tools can do this.
But it’s helpful to have analytical tools that are smart enough “to tell you what there is to know, but that you don’t know to ask for,” as Dion Hinchcliffe notes in a blog on the topic,
Meanwhile, visual analytics tools can also help business leaders gain rich insights from vast pools of unstructured data sets.
For instance, geospatial visualization tools can help decision makers draw on social media data to help identify a potential product issue that may need to be resolved. These tools can also tell decision makers whether affected customers are geographically clustered in the same area. And such tools can also help business leaders determine where new customers or prospects are likely to be, notes Mike Liebhold of the Institute for the Future.
Of course, it’s also important for business leaders to set goals and objectives for their uses of social media data. For example, companies can track and rank the levels of social media engagement they have with customers relative to their competitors to help determine whether a shift in strategy is needed.
Companies can also use social media analytics to determine which content they’re posting in social channels is generating the most interest and why. This should be an important consideration for marketing leaders.
Relevant content can help companies increase customer engagement, which can improve customer satisfaction and strengthen loyalty. Plus, the viral nature of social media can help companies attract new followers, which can ultimately translate into incremental revenues.
Business leaders can use social media analytics to identify when and why certain keywords about their companies, their brands, or their competitors are trending. They can use this approach to view the positive and negative sentiments that are attached to tweets or Facebook posts.
This type of information can provide decision makers with valuable insights about customer and market trends that they can then act on quickly.
