The digital revolution and the
advent of social networks are providing unprecedented opportunities to engage
with customers. But, every business that wants to realize this potential faces
a daunting task; it must first intercept and interpret vast quantities of data
through social media monitoring and convert that to actionable insights that
can feed into business processes to deliver measureable business results. Sheer
presence on Social Media is not enough. A feedback mechanism is necessary for
evaluating whether what we are doing is right or wrong; for analyzing and
measuring the social media impact. To extract true value, user generated
content can be harnessed to promote businesses. By evaluating what the mass is speaking
about a particular company/product and gauging the net sentiment – positive or
negative, future strategies can be planned. But the question that arises is how
to measure all of this.
- Can I quantify my social marketing spends in numbers?
- What are the returns on social media investment?
- What improvements can I make to my next campaign?
- What topics should I cover in my content marketing?
Addressing the problem: AMA Framework
The problem is three fold: Right
AMA - audience, message and analysis
1. Right Audience: What is better - broadcasting
a message which may or may not be registered by the viewers or to have a select
target audience who will be affected by the message? The principle of targeting and positioning
holds true here; select the target and customize the communication such that it
will be impactful on the selected audience.
2. Right Message on the right channels: There might
have interested listeners but there might not be addressed with the right
messages or the right channel.
3. Right Analysis: Measuring the impact is not
enough. Analyzing the results and learning how to move react based on the
results is what makes the difference. Pointers for increasing the efficiency of
communication over these social channels are required to be in place.
The fans and followers are only numbers that don’t translate to business
objectives. The rules of sales apply here as well, qualify your leads! Social
Media is a unique environment where it’s about a conversation and not
broadcast. This element is usually forgotten. If a sustainable engagement with
a 1,000 fans is achieved, it’s better than having ad-hoc chatter among 10,000.For
getting the message, channel and audience right, monitoring of marketing
communications is required. For effective analysis, such monitored results need
to be stored and then trends can be analyzed. This analysis then acts as a
feedback which can then be looped for further marketing activities. In the past there have been
models to measure the return on marketing investments and to evaluate the most
effective channel for marketing efforts. But with the new age of data we need
new techniques. This is where Analytics comes in with answers to the solicited
business questions.
Going deep: What is SMA?
SMA = Measuring + Analyzing + Interpreting
interactions and associations between people, topics and ideas.
Social Media Analytics today
has evolved from traditional listening to be used for online reputation
management to more sophisticated influencer mapping,
crisis management, lead generation,
campaign measurement, competitive mapping and brand health checks. It helps in
identifying aspects such as community presence, influencers, detractors,
communication themes and interests etc. It helps in competitor tracking. Tracking analytics of competitors is a great way to
devise a more robust social media strategy for your brand.
Predictive Analytics is a very
interesting field of research and is poised to be the game changer especially
for the consumer targeted businesses. Traditionally predictive analytics have
been widely applicable in the field of marketing. Some of the key areas
included, forecasting sales, predicting churn probabilities, finding brand affinity
drivers, optimal pricing and discounts, merchandising mix, predicting the best
channels for marketing communications, tracking product launch effectiveness
are some among a plethora of other ways.
In today’s digital arena, some
interesting predictive analysis can be done by focusing on daily volume, share
of voice, demographic analysis, sentiment etc. Providing intelligence reports
that include trends in online conversation, brand awareness, impact prior to
and post campaigns etc.
One of the requirements
enabling predictive analysis is the cluster of historic data. It’s interesting
to see how companies will look at the total number of tweets, as well as
positive and negative comments to predict whether a stock price will go up or
down.
Comprehensive SMA Framework
Organizations can harness the
true power of this big data coming from social media only if they truly
understand this data and channelize it properly. They need to access the data
that is coming in, evaluate this along with the enterprise data available (like
sales data, transactions data etc.) and also manage the responses on social
forums.
