SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS
Ever since with the growing technical sense of virtual spaces and its effect on personal, social and professional aspects, social media has gained its popularity among netizens. The platform has become the necessary element for the daily based activities and has attracted several organizations to utilise its application to increase overall net benefit. Social media analytics represents a virtual platform that helps to track the ongoing social buzz.
It has become an important aspect among the current organizational strategy to track, understand and measure the word of mouth generated at several online platforms like discussion boards, blog sites as well as social networking websites. Therefore with an emergence of internet technology, an enormous opportunity have emerged providing several new channels to reach customers, advertise products and perform business transaction activities. This has resulted in an extension of organization’s focus from company’s own website to several other existing blogs, discussion forums and so on- called social media.
Social media is defined as collection of content generated by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. It thus, represents all the conversation and engagement that happen on networks and sites like Facbook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogspehere, Youtube, Message-board, forums etc. Since these conversations can have a big impact on organization’s product/service image, it becomes critical for a marketer to understand what people are talking about their brand/products etc. Such understandings guide them to take appropriate actions and help in creating and fostering a positive chatter (conversation) about their brand. However, building of such perspective requires the stream of thinking that align with the user generated content within the social media, thereby results in the emergence of social media analytics.
From a technology perspective, social media analytics touches a number of disciplines including social network analysis, machine learning, data mining, information retrieval and natural language processing. Therefore to narrow the stream of discussion, this article will focus on understanding the social media analytics from marketing and market intelligence perspective.
Recently, companies have discovered that social media analytics is crucial, especially for customer feedback and building goodwill. Such social analytics include the listening platforms from companies such as General Sentiment, Attensity, Expert System and Telligent Systems that are used by advertising agencies, corporate marketing departments and call centres to scan popular social media networks. At the same time, individuals have also found platforms such as Empire Avenue, PeerIndex, Swaylo and Klout to be a valuable tool for understanding their personal influence in various social media networks.
The analytics allow marketers to identify sentiment and identify trends in order to accommodate the customer better. There have been significant examples where companies, such as Whirlpool, Royal Bank of Canada and JetBlue have used such analytics tools to engage customers in response to their feedback. Thus, adoption of social media into the mainstream of the business among the organizations is mainly guided by the objectives, motivations and motives that further define the analytical framework among them. These streams of purpose to adopt social media analytics include:
· Market Research and new product development.
· Top pressures driving social media monitoring.
· Need of better consumer insight.
· Need to gain competitive intelligence.
· Need to improve customer satisfaction.
· Need to develop new products and services.
· Need to increase Return on Marketing Investment(ROMI)
· Top strategic actions to maximize social media spend
· Improve ability to respond to customer wants and needs
· Build social media measurement into marketing campaigns and brand promotions
· Maximize marketing campaign and effectiveness
· Align social media monitoring capabilities to overall business objectives
Likewise, academic research projects have tried to investigate the use of this social data stream in analysing and explaining further daily or seasonal emotional patterns arising in a population. A tool titled as Mood of the Nation and developed by researchers at the University of Bristol is an example, where affective norms for the emotions of anger, fear, sadness and joy are extracted based on Twitter content published by users geo-located in the United Kingdom.
Therefore, social media analytics requires a holistic approach which assess the entire environment of ongoing business industry and thereby incorporating the usage of social media analytics in the business objectives. According to Altimeter Group (2010), the alignment of possible business objectives along with social media analytics include:
Business Objectives
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Social media indicators for analysis
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Foster Dialogue
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· Share of Voice
· Audience Engagement
· Conversation Reach
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Promote Advocacy
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· Active Advocates
· Advocate Influence
· Advocacy Impact
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Facilitate Support
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· Resolution Rate
· Resolution Time
· Satisfaction Score
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Spur Innovation
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· Topic Trends
· Sentiment Ratio
· Idea Impact
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Later studies on organizational usage of social media analytics emphasised on both quantitative and qualitative approach for social media analysis, either in combination of two or three or more. These approaches include methods that help the marketers to decipher the information encoded in their discussions and blogs. It identifies the degree of awareness, attention and reach among the consumers with respect to the specific brand or the services. This is later followed with the quantitative analysis wherein the information is measured on the basis of benchmark set by the organizations and results are later incorporated during strategy formulation. The various methods used and are categorised as quantitative and qualitative techniques are:
Qualitative Technique
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Quantitative Technique
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· Tracking fans, followers and subscribers.
· Sharing the conversation with other customers to obtain their viewpoint.
· Identifying and measuring the strength of recommendation and referral that a particular product /service /brand is gaining.
· Following the usage of links.
· Measuring the bookmarking of the content among the social group.
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· Tracking the clicks and website page viewing tendency among the customers.
· Measuring the degree of reaction among the customers in the social media platform on the basis of your action.
· Measuring and tracking the conversation index.
· Measuring the intensity of diffusion of idea posted on the social media platform within a certain time line.
· Measuring the intensity of participation and engagement within the blogs related to product/ service/ brand.
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With the above review of social media analytics and its importance within the organizational strategy and marketing intelligence, it has become evident that social marketing and media monitoring has emerged as key trends among the business giants. However, due to the availability of an enormous database within the social media platform, it has become necessary for the marketers and strategy analysts to define the framework of social media monitoring tool that align with the organization’s goals and objectives.
