10 Quick Tips on Social Media Analytics

Social media analytics tools are becoming an important investment for marketing professionals. With out social media reports and measurements, the marketers are as good as blind. The traditional reports do not capture the pulse of customers like the social media analytics report does.
In a traditional customer analytics reports, the data sets are gathered through various types of surveys. In such methods, the questionnaires are designed to reveal the insights about the customers. But in case of social media, there are no questionnaires or feedback forms to fill, but an unstructured reaction from the customers.
At Simplify360, our researchers work on social media data and create insightful reports for the clients. So this post is really the distillation of our experience of working with large sets of social media data.
Tips 1:  Prepare the list of questionnaires
It is very important to know what questions you want answered from social media data. This provides a plan of action and a purpose. With out this, you will be spending huge amount of his time tolling around the data without any definitive direction.
Tips 2: Prepare the structure of data you want
Based on the questionnaires, you can prepare a structure of data, which will be required for the project. It is not possible to have all types of data from social media, but this exercise is important to know what is possible and what is not.
Tips 3: Choose the right social media analytics tool
There are various kinds of free and paid social media analytics tools, among which Simplify360 is also the one. Based on the kind of analyses you want, you can compare the features of the products and choose the right one. The quality of tool is going to affect the quality of research reports.
Tips 4: Never forget to remove the SPAM messages
Traditional customer research has a problem of incomplete data sets, but in case of social media it is generally the excess of irrelevant data. The first step should always be to get rid of them.
Tips 5: Carry out platform wise social buzz analysis
Buzz should always be analyzed separately for each platform because the structure of content is different for each platform. In addition to this, the way people interact is also different for each platform.
Tips 6: Remember TIME and Location
While doing timeline analysis, it is important to consider the effect of location, which is going be reflect on the trends. If this is not handled than the results will be misleading.
Tips 7: Sentiment alone is not enough
Sentiment analysis is not enough for understanding the context of the social buzz. Various tags should be created to segment buzz like queries, complaints, feedback etc. Hence make sure, the tool you are using allows you to do so.
Tips 8: Love Excel
Excel can play a very important role in social media analytics project. Though there are many other statistical tools available, Excel has some powerful features like macros, which can reduce your time tremendously.
Tips 9: Visualization is as important as data
Using a better visuals and graphics to communicate your social media analytics report is a must. Most can refer to this as an art of story telling and so forth. But the important rule is to create interesting representation of the data, and connect it with a story.
Tips 10: Have Call to Action
If your social media analytics report doesn’t contain call to action than it is useless. Hence focus your research to create value rather than a basic reporting. Don’t report everything you see, only the ones which are important.