Social Media + Analytics
So how do marketing analytics specialists use social media analytics to boost their campaigns?
Let’s start with some statistics.
In Pew Research Center’s latest report regarding Social Media, they recognize that 71% of online adults (ages actively use Facebook, 28% actively use Linkedin and Pinterest, and 23% actively use Twitter. Overall, we’re seeing a much higher usage of social media by ‘online adults.’ Which is not even addressing the constant stream of usage by younger generations.
If you look at the chart to the right, you can actually see overall social media usage by various generations across time.
This shows us that social media is certainly the newest, hottest landscape for uncovering marketing insights.
But, how are analysts seeking out these insights, and what tools help them build content quickly while evaluating trends?
Tools
Let’s start with the basics. As of 2012, 52% of businesses were using social media to engage with customers, and 35% were using analytics from that to research their customers (Stanford Social Media Study, 2012). Four years later, today, those numbers have likely risen exponentially. Some of the simpler tools used by most small businesses would be things like Hootsuite, Klout, Sprout Social, Crowdbooster, etc. These tools are known for giving you easy controls for posting to all of your social media sites at once, ways to schedule posts days and weeks in advance, and a basic analytics dashboard which gives you quick insights about your customers.
But, if you want to get deeper into designing for your users, you need more sophisticated tools that give you deeper insights, as well as more resources for designing new content. My current favorite would be Unmetric.
They provide brands with smart insights that catch trends as they happen, and alert you to them. But, the most interesting thing about Unmetric is that they will help you analyze other brands like yours to get a better idea of what they’re doing right, and how you can shift to do the same.
They allow you to see your brand in context, and then study other brand campaigns so that your brand can grow. Even showing you a stream of popular posts from similar companies so that you can begin to gain insight and ideate around these visual examples.
Other examples get into things like sentiment visualization. One of the most popular (and successful) sites for sentiment visualization would be NC State’s Twitter Sentiment Visualization webapp. This allows marketers to quickly understand how their brand is being perceived by people online, and allows them to draw insights for free, which they can integrate into new content.
There are many enterprise softwares which provide similar services that integrate greater depth. Oracle, IBM, and Salesforce are three key providers in the enterprise sphere.
That’s enough for today, folks.
We’ll be back for more next week.
In the exciting world of marketing analytics.
