The Basics: Social Media Analytics

Social media analytic: the process of collecting unstructured data from various social media platforms and turning it into valuable insights that help businesses make crucial decisions.

Social media analytic encompasses the use of data technologies, for example, data analysis, data mining, information interpretation.

To ensure high performance on social media campaigns, utilize analytic; the data collected in the previous weeks or months will enable you to make data driven decisions. Essentially, data will help the social media team determine what is working and what is not working. With that, they can shift their strategy and avoid wasted effort.

Audience engagement – You can track it in various ways on social media. Take for example audience growth/rate of followers. Suppose you launched your salon website about six months ago, you want to know how the audience has grown. Are more people visiting the site?

Are some months busier than others? What about time of day; weekend vs weekdays, and geographical region. These are all important aspects of audience growth. Ultimately, any business wants to see continued growth. Frankly, there are ebbs and flows with audience engagement, but overall growth needs to trend upwards.

Importance of Social Media Analytics

Traditional ways of promoting your brand are not out of vogue. TV, word of mouth, and radio are the most well-known ways to promote your brand. However, social media platforms are used by millions of people all over the world. Since people of all ages use social media, it is easier to build a strong and loyal community and attract more clients.

The social media team spends their days posting videos, launching campaigns, adding promo pop-ups, and links to various social media platforms. To understand what is resonating with clients, you check analytic to see a promo pop-up being clicked at all.

Maybe you can check if people are watching videos in their entirety. Here are additional reasons why social media analytic are important:

Increase The Number of Customers!

When people click on certain content, a video, you will find out what your clients want. Naturally, you might want to ask questions or send an out survey to determine why there is interested in that video. Once you obtain the answer, note that recipe for future success. Then search for opportunities to report the video when there is a lull in chatter.

Protect Brand Health

A brand is a product or service that are distinguished from other product & services so it can easily communicate and marketed.

The consumer dictates brand perception no matter what. So, brands are always striving to influence consumers that their brand is better in some way, shape or form. Brand perception affects a lot of things, most of all, it affects how much money the company earns.

Savvy brands are fixated on keeping the consumer happy.

Keeping consumers happy comes in many forms:

• Donating a certain amount of money to disaster zones.
• A restaurant can donate food to a food shelter every so often.
• Wedding venues can donate their space to organizations or people at discounted cost
• A golf course can partner with an org to raise funds for Girl Scouts or a Boys and Club

Any of the above outreach efforts shows that a business involved in the community cares about well-being of people, and wants to do well by doing good.

Lower Customer Care Costs

When customers need assistance, options for support need to be in place. Customer expect answers when they contact your brand via email, phone, or chat.

Companies are constantly collecting data about consumers; they expect them to use this to enhance their shopping experience.

Data that is collected can provide some insights, for example, a survey might indicate consumer do not like the UI for the site. Maybe a customer sends an email to the general inbox indicating the ticketing system did not allow her to submit a case.

This would be an opportunity to review the processes, validate whether the issue is user error or not; and respond in a reasonable time with an answer.

Here are other ways to reduce customer care costs:

• Promote and Support Through Self-service
• Offer Support Through Multiple Channels
• Ensure Customer Support agents well-being
• Learn from Customers’ Needs and Wants
• Prepare An Efficient FAQ Section

Boost Product Launches

Trends in social media are always changing. Social media analytic can help marketers and their companies discover what services or products customers want. Actionable insights derived from the data can enable your team to ensure a product launch is successful.

Improve Crisis Management

Brands are constantly working on maintaining a positive reputation and reducing customer care costs. Social media analytic aide marketers with responding to minor queries via chat or other points of contact(CRM).

Suppose someone has been trying to reach support for a couple days but to no avail. Let’s say this extends to four days, once they reach an agent they will be frantic. And if the issue is not resolved on the call, the fallout might result in someone posts negative comments or worse.

All that to say, a crisis team needs to be ready to respond to issues at all times. The longer an issue remains unresolved, ignored/unseen, it’s unknown how long the consequences will last.

An example of fantastic crisis management.

Social Media Crisis: SZA and Sephora.

On April 2019, SZA tweeted that a Sephora employee accused her to shoplifting. The reaction from fans was swift. They defended her, some accused the employee of racial profiling, while others the employee is disrespectful.

What did Sephora do next? They responded directly to SZA’s tweet. In short, they apologized for the incident and thanked her for bringing the issue their attention. Later, they announced offices would close for an hour for diversity training – it unclear whether this is related incident.

Either way, it showed a willingness to face an issue head on.

Summary

Unstructured data collected from various platforms is turned into value insights which help businesses make important decisions. This is a social medial analytics a nutshell. Analytics generated through social media apps are important for various reasons. They help marketers understand whether their previous or current outreach efforts are worthwhile. Are the campaigns being launch on Friday afternoon resonating with customers?

Was the video posted on YouTube on Tuesday fruitful or a waste of time and money. The previous questions can be answered by data. Social media analytics can help you increase the number of customers. Mainly, by enabling review clicks, impressions, video views, and survey results. These can tell you what is working and what is not.

Lowering customer care costs can be done via social media analytics as well. When your team provides a self-service portal, it gives customers the power. Plus, it enables them to reach support about at any time and reduces business costs.

Furthermore, social media analytics will reveal trends occurring daily, weekly, or at certain times of the day. This information is invaluable because it shows, for example, when videos view spike. With this information, a marketing team will post certain content at those times. Thereby, boosting product launches.

One aspect of social media analytics that might be overlooked is crisis management. Maintaining a positive reputation is a constant battle and all it takes is one incident to ruin it. Anyway, earlier I highlighted a fantastic example of crisis management by staff at Sephora as it relates to SZA. She was accused of shoplifting but was not true. They reached out to SZA on the original tweet and apologized. Then the org held a company wide diversity training to address a multitude of concerns.