Social Media Analytics can help businesses bring the best out of their online marketing and customer relationship management. As more customer interactions are happening on social media, more and more businesses are using online metrics to measure their performance and gain feedback on their activities.
Prior to social media analytics, businesses were limited by page views, time on site and bounce rate to measure the success of their websites. In terms of online ads, impressions and clicks were the only metrics advertisers used to optimize the campaigns. But not anymore. Today, customers are not only visiting webpages but they are also sharing their experiences with their friends and their online networks. This changes the dynamics of online marketing, as more decisions are being made by what people are talking about certain products or services.
At its fundamental, Social Media Analytics allows businesses to measure the customer voice and their interactions with the brands. For example, social media analytics can help companies discover what kind of topics people like to talk about, their sentiment towards brands and their products.
Below are the 5 key uses of Social Media Analytics:
1. Measure your Brand Health
Understanding what people feel about the brand is the most important metrics to follow. Social media analytics can help brand manager discover the topics that are driving negative or positive conversations. These insights can be calculated in terms of percentage of positive/negative sentiments or favourability score of the brand.
Generating these brand health reports also commonly known as brand audit can be give the brand manager or marketing executives complete picture about the brand’s positive features, negative features, areas of improvement, industry influencers and more importantly benchmark reports against competitors.
2. Marketing Optimization
Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook are becoming an important channel for running campaigns and announcing new products. Companies ranging from large enterprises to startups are using social networking platforms to reach out to their target audience.
Hence, it has become increasing important to measure the impact of the marketing activities and tie them to the business outcomes. Social media analytics can help marketing team measure the performance of the content being designed, reach and impressions of the campaigns and conversations to business.
3. Customer Experience
Managing customer service on social media is the highest priority for any larger organizations. The major issues with managing customer on social media is handling the engagement across the platform and understanding the trends in the customer behaviours.
Implementing social media analytics can enable businesses correlate the customer data and social behaviour to identify the trends and discover insights. In addition, using social crm softwares, businesses would be able to measure the performance of the customer agent’s response and optimize the customer support.
4. Innovation
Tapping into the social media can enable businesses sync with the new trends and discover new business ideas. Many companies employ crowd sourced ideas to generate new product or campaigns. Using social media analytics, product managers or marketing team can gain insightful feedback on the existing product features, and potentially new product ideas.
5. Operational Efficiency
Many companies are using social media to keep track of the inventory and provide feedbacks to respective business units. On the other hand, social media analytics is not only about listening to outside of your organizations. Many large enterprises are using internal networks to engage with the employees and manage internal organization communications.
This implementation of social media analytics can enable HR personals measure the sentiment of employees and their concerns. In addition, HR can identify influencers in the company and make decisions to make proper use of internal resources.