Understanding YOUR Social Media Analytics?

Social Media Analytics

Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from social media websites and analyzing that data using social media analytics tools to make business decisions.

Related Article: Applying YOUR 2018 Marketing Data Science?

The most common use of social media analytics is to mine customer sentiment to support marketing and customer service activities.

The first step in a social media intelligence initiative is to determine which business goals the data that is gathered and analyzed will benefit. Typical objectives include increasing revenues, reducing customer service costs, getting feedback on products and services, and improving public opinion of a particular product or business division.

Once the business goals have been identified, businesses should define key performance indicators (KPIs) to objectively evaluate the business analytics data.

Related Article: Why Study YOUR Social Media Analytics?

Metrics To Track

Business metrics derived from social media analytics may include customer engagement, which could be measured by the number of followers for a Twitter account and number of retweets and mentions of a company's name. With social media monitoring, businesses can also look at how many people follow their presence on Facebook and the number of times people interact with their social profile by sharing or liking their posts.

More advanced types of social media analysis involve sentiment analytics. This practice involves sophisticated natural-language-processing machine learning algorithms parsing the text in a person's social media post about a company to understand the meaning behind that person's statement. These algorithms can create a quantified score of the public's feelings toward a company based on social media interactions and give reports to management on how well the company interacts with customers.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Listening Power?

Popular Tools

There are a number of types of social media analytics tools for analyzing unstructured data found in tweets and Facebook posts. In addition to text analysis, many enterprise-level social media analytics tools will harvest and store the data.

Some of these tools come from niche players, while more traditional enterprise analytics software vendors offer packages dedicated to social media intelligence.

As more social media analytics rely on machine learning, popular open platforms like R, Python and TensorFlow serve as social media analytics tools.

Related Article: Shut Up And Listen Social Media?

Importance of Social Media Analytics

There is a tremendous amount of information in social media data. In decades past, enterprises paid market research companies to poll consumers and conduct focus groups to get the kind of information that consumers now willingly post to public social media platforms.

The problem is this information is in the form of free text and natural language, the kind of unstructured data that analytics algorithms have traditionally. But as machine learning and artificial intelligence have advanced, it's become easier for businesses to quantify in a scalable way the information in social media posts.

This allows enterprises to extract information about how the public perceives their brand, what kind of products consumers like and dislike and generally where markets are going. Social media analytics makes it possible for businesses to quantify all this without using less reliable polling and focus groups.

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Guest Authored By Margaret Rouse. Margaret Rouse writes for and manages WhatIs.com, TechTarget’s IT encyclopedia and learning center. She is responsible for building content that helps IT professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

WhatIs.com has won many awards over the years and has been cited as an authority in major publications such as the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, The Washington Times, the Miami Herald, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine. Before joining TechTarget in 2000 when they acquired WhatIs.com, Margaret worked for New York State Model Schools, teaching computer science and technology integration. Follow Margaret Rouse on Twitter.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Brand Engagement Data Science?

"There is a tremendous amount of information in social media data.

In decades past, enterprises paid market research companies to poll consumers and conduct focus groups to get the kind of information that consumers now willingly post to public social media platforms.." -MargaretRouse

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  Post Crafted By:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Applying YOUR 2018 Marketing Data Science?

Complex relationship patterns and groupings can become clearer through visualizations..

Harvard Business Review famously described data science as the “Sexiest Job of the 21st Century” in 2012, causing a massive explosion in opportunities in this space.

Related Article: Why Study YOUR Social Media Analytics?

Today, data science has spread its hold over the digital marketing landscape.

Particularly for social media marketing, data science promises a lot. From advanced analysis of social media activity on branded content campaigns to create insightful user personas via social media listening, to complex data patterns made easy to understand via visualizations, to overcoming the perennial problem of ad fraud in advertising ecosystems, data science has potential applications that significantly improve social media for brands.

In this article, I’ll cover four ways in which brands can leverage data science for better social media marketing results in 2018.

It's disappointingly common for people to use data science when they actually mean data analysis or analytics, and that's not exactly right. Data science is not even business intelligence. It's way broader in scope, and it involves exploration of multisource data to understand unseen underlying pattern that bring out important insights and relationships, which can be expressed through visualizations.

Related Article: YOUR Brand In The Age Of Social Media?

Moving Beyond Word Clouds with Data-Science-Powered Tools

Word clouds have been trusted tools for social media marketers to analyze social conversations and understand what's being discussed.

Although brands could often stumble upon an important pattern, word clouds are, in reality, pretty blunt tools. Unless you have a high volume of activity, word clouds can be misrepresentative, requiring marketers to carefully guard against irrelevant words.

Thankfully, marketers have access to tools that leverage the power of data science along with natural language processing algorithms in order to contextualize word usage and deliver meaningful insights.

BuzzGraphs, for instance, show you how words are linked, and which words are most frequently used. Entity analysis also helps, associating words and small word groups with their semantic types, such as a brand, a person, a website, etc. Deep diving into BuzzGraphs and entity analysis is possible in order to gather more insight.

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Data Science for Community Groupings

Social media marketing campaign results need to be measured and improved continually. Targeting strongly connected groups, naturally, amplifies campaign effectiveness.

First, identify topic areas that receive good responses as a starting point for your community grouping campaign.

Data science has tremendous applications here. Based on the frequency of keywords observed, marketers can identify the most commonly discussed topics in social conversations. The topics can then be analyzed across social platforms to classify them.

In 2015, research journals published a lot of content about the use of machine learning in social media message classification. Today, marketers can use tools to execute the same.

Next, leverage cluster analysis to identify how people participating, for instance, in a Twitter conversation are associated with each other. Such analysis can then group people together, separating weakly connected groups.

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Visualizations for Greater Insights

Social media explosion has been one of the reasons why the volume of global data is surging every year. Each regular social media user's timeline is potentially the story of his or her life. Visualizations make it practical for marketers to understand these stories and generate insights that can massively improve social media marketing.

Social graph visualizations, for instance, showcase the social dynamics playing out around us. SociLab, for example, lets you visualize your LinkedIn network and evaluate its “quality.”

Complex relationship patterns and social groupings can become clearer than ever through visualizations. Data-science-powered social media tools help you by creating visualizations such as scatter plots to present correlations, pie charts to show proportions, line graphs to show trends and tables to show exact values. Hootsuite Analytics, for instance, can take your social media metrics and transform them into visualizations that make them much more insightful.

Related Article: Redesigning YOUR 2018 Social Media Presence?

Advanced Persona Research Backed by Social Media Listening

Customer personas are much more effective than broad demographic descriptors. Personas are meant to humanize, although they’ve traditionally been filled with marketing jargon that eventually kills the effectiveness of targeting campaigns.

Data-science-backed tools can transform how brands conduct market research using social media data. Social media listening platforms can allow marketers access to global conversations, bringing together large data volumes, capturing customer opinions and trends and feeding the data to a brand's specific market research campaign:

--Begin with social media listening for researching a central topic.

--From the general data, build maps of the most crucial consumer conversations.

--Export the data to a spreadsheet and clean it.

--Develop a listening dashboard to monitor discussions.

--Study the natural language of the market and build it into your customer personas, helping copywriters create social content that converts more often.

Guest Authored By Guy Sheetrit. Guy is CEO of digital marketing agency Over the Top SEO. Follow Guy on Twitter.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Listening Power?

"Data is being called the fuel of the present and future.

Your social media analytics need to hit overdrive, powered by data science.

Trust the methods explained in this guide to get started.." -GuySheetrit

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  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBr@nd.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, CO  where I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)

Social Media Mistakes YOUR Company Makes?

Over 90% of medium and large businesses have used social media in their marketing for five years or longer. Yet the CMO Survey reveals that nearly half of marketers are unable to show the impact of their social media investments..

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Brand Engagement Data Science?

That’s why, no matter what your social media strategy is, it’s always a good idea to go back and make sure you have the basics covered. Your company may discover that it needs a strategic do-over.

Philip Kotler once said, “You should never go to battle before you’ve won the war on paper.” But countless businesses have done just that with social media. Although 97% of Fortune 500 corporations are on LinkedIn, 84% are on Facebook, and 86% are on Twitter, many brands entered the social media front lines without a clear strategy. Social was an add-on to existing plans —- another outlet to deliver the marketing message. Later, marketers found themselves working backward to connect their social strategy to business strategy, as managers demanded greater proof of ROI.

There are a few common mistakes that marketers make with social media. The first is to start with social media objectives. Marketers take a channel such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, and then set goals for raising their numbers of likes, comments, and shares. This approach sounds like it makes sense, but it can trap you in a social media–only perspective. After all, how much is that like, comment, or share actually worth to your business? Unless you connect your social media actions to broader business goals from the beginning, ROI can be elusive, and social media becomes an end unto itself.

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The second mistake is to limit your brand presence to the most popular social media channels.

Success often depends on having a multichannel social media strategy. Yet only two-thirds of the Fortune 500 (66%) are using YouTube, under half are on Instagram (45%), just over one-third (36%) have corporate blogs, and one-third (33%) are on Pinterest. If you are not using these or other platforms, you could be missing out on valuable business opportunities.

For example, research has found that 93% of Pinterest users plan purchases on the platform and 87% have made a purchase after seeing a product they liked. Other platforms, such as Snapchat, may be the ideal place to reach certain demographics (say, Millennials). Instagram has played an integral role in helping to lift sales for brands including Gatorade. And businesses that have prioritized blogging are 13 times more likely to receive positive ROI.

So how do you ensure that your social media efforts are aligned with what matters to your company — and that you are positively contributing to the bottom line? Start by basing your social strategy on business objectives, then follow that by thinking about target market, social media platforms, tools, and metrics.

Related Article: Social Media Secrets To Going Viral?

Different organizational objectives and target markets may require very different channels and tools.

Don’t simply set goals for higher follower or engagement metrics in the brand’s current social media accounts. Those platforms may be wrong for your business objectives; channels you aren’t on may be better for what you’re trying to accomplish.

To identify the most meaningful business objectives, ask some questions: What numbers must you hit? How will you know you are successful? How does your boss judge success? What has changed recently that is challenging you? What do stakeholders care about most? Business objectives can vary wildly, from increasing sales, generating leads, or improving customer satisfaction to raising awareness, soliciting donations, or gaining volunteers. Thus your objectives should not be social media–focused, such as “Within six months, we should grow our number of fans and increase engagement on Facebook by posting a minimum of five times a week.” That’s a tactic, not a clear goal. A good objective could be “Increase awareness of the brand by 20% for people ages 18–24 within six months.” Hootsuite suggests that real business goals often come from business conversions, brand awareness, and customer experience.

Related Article: YOUR Social Media Sales Targets?

When considering platforms, think carefully about which you should be on — and which you shouldn’t.

Remember that simply increasing your activity on current platforms may not bring you closer to meeting business objectives. Achieving a better ROI may require closing social accounts that are not aligned with business objectives, or even decreasing social action to focus on posts of more substance. Buffer Social, for example, recently got better results by posting less, not more, on Facebook.

Once you’ve identified your objectives and selected the right platforms, you have to create content that the audience will value. Solve a problem they’re facing, deliver a timely message, or just put a smile on their face. Stories that evoke emotion tend to perform better than straight sales messages. Even paid social media posts merely buy reach; the content itself must be engaging enough to draw action beyond a view. Plus, valuable content often gets shared, increasing your reach even further. And don’t simply post the same content to all your social accounts — customizing the content and scheduling for each channel will get better results.

Related Article: Creating A Powerful Social Network?

Yet content only gets you so far. Much of social media ROI is earned in responding to customers.

Sprout Social has found that brands reply to only one in 10 social messages that require a response. This is a huge missed opportunity, since helpful replies to even negative comments can improve your brand image, reach new customers, and increase the likelihood that customers will buy again. Depending on your industry, you may need the customer service department to get involved. Don’t forget, social is a two-way medium.

Next, ensure you have the right tools in place to manage your social media efforts. To measure success, brands need tools that can monitor, publish, and track the appropriate analytics. They also need to integrate social media across departments, since it is an increasingly important part of the strategies of many areas of the business. F

or efficiency, you may need tools that can bring together multidisciplinary social teams across department silos.

Related Article: Social Media Tools YOU Really Need?

It’s worth considering tools like Google Analytics, which can break down social traffic to see which efforts are working, ranging from website conversions from a direct sale to email subscription, event registration, or quote requests. Setting up goals with dollar values per conversion can help determine where to focus your time and money beyond followers and likes — connecting social media to the bottom line. Monitoring tools can also track analytics such as sentiment. Too many corporations have seen crisis situations where negative comments in social media led to sales declines and drops in stock price. There are numerous social media analytics software options. Spend some time researching which ones are right for your organization.

Once the right tools are in place, identify and track the metrics that will show the returns on your social media investment. Only when you have done the hard work ahead of time — connecting social action to business objectives — do vanity metrics such as likes and followers become more meaningful. Obviously, you can’t directly connect every social action to a business objective, such as an in-store sale. But you can get close by estimating values. For example, if you know that a percentage of customers who request information on your website purchase a certain product, you can trace the connections by looking at related social media posts and the number of visitors being driven to that call to action page.

Guest Authored By Keith A. Quesenberry. Keith is Assistant Professor at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, PA. An expert in social media and digital marketing, he is author of Social Media Strategy: Marketing and Advertising in the Consumer Revolution. Follow Keith on Twitter.

Related Article: Why Study YOUR Social Media Analytics?

“If you are struggling to link your company’s social media presence to business goals, you are not alone.

But it is never too late to (re)start at the beginning. Take a step back to ensure you are considering broader business goals and the target market.

Check that you are using the right platforms and are engaging in the right ways. Then make sure you have the necessary tools and metrics in place. It is a lot easier to prove ROI when you have a clear plan for meeting the business’s objectives — and are not simply increasing social action as an end in itself.." -Keith A. Quesenberry

• 

  Authored by:

  Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBr@nd.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends.  My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)