It’s called INSIGHT-ful, for a reason…
It’s now common knowledge to any serious businessman that social media is starting to play a huge role in the way a business not only builds its presence but in the way they interact with their consumers and clientele. Social media management helps us become better managers by offering more interactive data on how the business is performing with people socially and in reputation. Proper social media management also provides a huge perk that a lot of business owners tend to ignore – it helps us form a better understanding of our consumer demographics.
Understanding your consumer demographics is an important detail that should not be overlooked. The insights from social media one gathers can tell you many pieces of valuable information that can very well make or break your business. You can segment your demographic by fields such as age, location, time spent online during the day, sex, interactions, reactions, and most importantly engagement. If these details are being overlooked when formulating a marketing strategy, chances are you’ll not only be allocating effort into the wrong market, but you could also potentially intake a loss on investment in the form of time, energy, as well as money.
With technology pushing forward at an ever-increasing pace, social media insights are still very difficult to grasp as a concept. Here is some vocabulary to help you better understand the scope of how to interpret your social media insight data.
Social Media Intelligence – Social Media Intelligence represents the stack of technology solutions and methods used to monitor social media, including social conversations and emerging trends. This intelligence is then analyzed and used to create meaningful content and make business decisions across many disciplines.
Social Media Monitoring – Social Media Monitoring is the process of collecting social messages into a single stream and to take a specific action in response to each message (via a like, comment or tasked message).
Social Media Listening – Social Media Listening is when a manager analyzes large volumes of social messages from specific keywords or topics that then requires your brand to reflect and draw analysis from these actions (via sentiment analysis or topic affinity).
So, you have a way to collect your data, great! Now that your data is available, how exactly should you analyze your data? You’re basically analyzing 4 different things:
- Social Competitive Analysis is the process of investigating competitors of your brand and their audience. It’s always good to look at the ideas of your competitors just in case anyone is employing a new marketing technique, trying out a new strategy, or plain just has better ideas.
- Image Analytics helps you analyze your data by identifying scenes, facial expressions, geographical locations, brand logos and more in social images. This is especially useful when a brand is pictured, but not called out in social text.
- Social Media Sentiment Analysis is the strategy that applies to all areas of your insight data. Without it, you don’t have any way of gauging why you’ve suddenly got 500K more “likes” or shares than usual. What if an increase in activity isn’t a good thing? You may have a lot of comments, but what if the bulk of them are bad reviews? The only way to know is through Sentiment Analysis.
- Customer Experience Analytics combines social listening insights with Voice of the Customer (VoC) verbatims like surveys, star ratings, net promoter scores, website feedback, chat messages, market research, and data from internal systems like a call center, help center, and web support collected via CRM tools.
You’ve collected your data, you’ve analyzed your findings and came up with conclusions, super! Why does this process matter?
- It helps you understand your competitors. Your competitors are also creating content and running social media strategies. This will result in their own unique data. If you analyze this data, you will be able to figure out what is working and what isn’t. It will help you avoid the mistakes they are making and only focus on techniques that bring results.
- It shows you what your best social networks are. Not all social networks will work perfectly for you. Just because Facebook has over 2 billion users and Instagram has over 800 million users doesn’t mean they will drive the best results. One needs to invest in the channel that is most optimal for achieving maximum results for customer engagement.
- It helps you understand what people are thinking and saying. Emails, video ads, tv ads, and printables are all great, but they don’t offer any consumer sentiment about whether your business is good, or bad. If your customer service is good or bad, you’d want to know. If you are marketing to men, but your consumers are largely women, you’d want to know why. If pages are using your image in a negative light vs. positive, you’d want to know.
The point is, more attention given to your social media insights translates into more understanding. Once you have a better understanding of your social media position and performance. Social media is largely a game of making your presence known and nurturing your position. Hopefully, through understanding your own unique set of personal social media insight data, you can properly identify what techniques are working for you, what techniques are not, and how that relates to the people you’ll be engaging with online.
Insights – they matter!
V.A. CHRIS