3 must dos for gathering relevant social data

What keeps marketers and communicators afloat in the vast sea that is information?

Often, this is the case because they get equipped with (often unnecessary expensive) inflatable life-saving charts. These charts usually contain a ton of numbers but they often miss out on the insights. With the right insights from social data, great things can happen.

So, we need to ask ourselves. Is it really good enough to just stay floating, or should we rather start aiming for something more tangible, contextual and insightful?

Define & Refine

Technically, these are two things already at the top of the list — but they are so intertwined that they should not be separated.

Make sure you have a clearly defined the purpose of why you are collecting social data and what kind of social data to gather.

First, what is of most importance when this data is collected? Rather than collecting and presenting social media vanity numbers, the more important thing should be putting the online behaviors into the right context. Then you will be able to gain insights to base smarter decisions upon.

Can you and your organization make any real business decisions based on the social data that you’re collecting?
Is the amount of likes or re-tweets on your own content what will amplify your sales or is it perhaps more important to discover new topics and sub-topics amongst influencers and potential customers?

Being able to deliver key points in the right context is probably the one thing that enables you to be the internal rockstar of your organisation when presenting social data to your boss or team.

You need to define what to do with the data more than just collecting it. If you’re solely collecting social data on vague topics or keywords, you will end up having your reports filled with bloated data that needs to be sorted. This is why the importance of smart filtering can’t be stressed enough. Also know thy limits. Segmenting to infinity will in most cases provide you with too little information to make any sound decisions.

Refining and fine-tuning your social monitors to get relevant data you can act on, does not have to take a lot of time. Usually it is a combination of well-defined goals, a mindset devoted to relevancy and then put this into a set of proper analytics tools.

The importance of proper tools

Like most, you probably have an arsenal of different tools with different price tags. But are they really doing that many things differently when it comes to gathering social data?

If you have clearly defined the goals, you will notice that many of these tools fall short when it comes to providing you with either relevant or actionable data.

Jason Keath of Socialfresh wrote a great piece on how you can make a social audit to do sort among all your tools. If the tool is not saving the organization any notable amount of time, doesn’t provide you with crucial information for the your daily work or the overall business, it is most probably a nice-to-have rather than need-to-have. This becomes especially important when fine-tuning the social tracking of your company.

Granted, not all PR & Marketeers are responsible for providing actions throughout the whole sales funnel, but what if you could get enough data and insights to go one step beyond reach and impressions?

Make your social data easy to understand

Maybe you need to present the social intelligence data and insights to your boss or your team. Make sure that it does not become a slideshow of charts. Present the purpose, the context from which the data was collected and then pick out the juicy insights that you can take action upon.

Maybe you discovered that your customers are talking about your products in relation to unexpected everyday-situations? This could provide new business opportunities for you to present and will definitely give your organisation and yourself a leg up in you content strategy or how you can market new offers.

Defined goals, fine tuning and analytic tools only get you that far. In the end, it is up to you to be able to suggest line of action and present opportunities for your business. But with the proper preparations and most importantly proper tools — it’ll be smooth sailing in the never-ending sea of information.

Dennis Engkvist — PR & Analytics at Observify

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