“A brand is not what we tell the customer it is – it is what the customers tell each other it is”
– Scott Cook
65% of the adults use social media, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey on US Social Media Usage. Can any survey capture such a large sample? Impossible. Frankly speaking, none of the businesses can afford to avoid social media which provides instant access to such a vast coverage to their target populations’ lives. While not all conversations in social media are relevant to businesses, they have significant insights buried under the garb of casual unstructured conversations which can only be uncovered by effective Social Media Analytics.
Over the years, we have helped numerous businesses from diverse domains in unlocking the power of Social Media Analytics, yielding actionable insights which aided in informed decision-making at the strategic level.
In what ways, can businesses benefit from effective Social Media Analytics?
Here are the 5C’s where we have used Social Media Analytics to drive tangible results to our clients:
Campaign Effectiveness
While global advertising spend in 2015 is estimated at 540 billion dollars, marketers struggle with measuring the effectiveness of the campaigns they ran, wondering ways to find the impact and the reception their campaign created. Through our in-house social media analytics suite of techniques, we have helped our clients measure the impact of their marketing campaigns, tracking the impact on brand image, purchase intent and have benchmarked them against competitive campaigns. Our clients have used these insights in improving their future campaign effectiveness.
Crisis Detection
If it is feasible for the US Geological Survey (USGS) to detect an earthquake in a matter of 29 seconds using social media instead of trusting their innumerable sensors, social media can definitely be used by organizations to detect the occurrence of any crisis before it becomes detrimental to their businesses. Looking at the past crises, we have been able to predict with confidence about the burgeoning crisis by our trend and pattern mapping. Through our social monitoring support, we have alerted our clients to identify crises before it became viral.
Competitive Insights
Contrary to the widely held belief that Social Media Analytics is primarily useful only for monitoring and reactive purposes, we have been able to provide strategic insights to our clients by using Social media for widely new areas like: New Product Development, Opportunity Identification, Customer Preference Study etc. The insights we uncovered from Social Media were significant in driving competitive edge into our client product offerings.
Community of Influencers Mapping
A recent McKinsey study on purchasing behavior of 20,000 European customers, established that recommendations via social media induced 26% of all purchases across all the product categories and in some cases, a small number of active influencers accounted as much as 45% of the social influence generated in particular categories. Our clients have been aware of the power of influencers, and by mapping influencer community specifically for our clients businesses, we have provided a wide range of insights on their reactions to our client offerings vis-à-vis competition.
Convergence of Insights from Non-Social Data
While Social Media is able to provide rich insights in an unprompted way from customers, one cannot discard the use of structured market research efforts like Surveys, Focus groups etc. We have been lucky to assist our clients to form actionable insights by collaborating social & non-social data sources and also using social analytics to corroborate the insights derived from non-social data like surveys. In fact, our social analytics insights were able to give far richer detail which complemented survey findings and gave a whole new dimension to the depth of structured insights from non-social sources.
In summary, it is essential in today’s competitive landscape for businesses to use effective social media analytics to unlock the treasures hidden in social media to gain unique advantage over the competitors and also win the customer loyalty by listening to their conversations
