In a data-driven world, social media analytics are proving to be a game-changer for businesses all over the globe. By collecting and analyzing social media data, companies can gain actionable insights into their customer base in a way never seen in the past. These insights can inform everything from future social media campaigns, new product development, the way teams operate, and even the future direction of the company. Today we’re going to be delving into the benefits of social media analytics and looking at use cases and case studies to see how social media analytics can boost your business.
The Benefits of Social Media Analytics
Before we look at what data to gather and analyze, first let’s identify why social media analytics are important. Here are the key benefits of social media analytics:
- It helps you create highly effective social media campaigns.
- It helps you identify key influencers in your industry. You can leverage this information to build robust relationships and reach new audiences.
- It provides a benchmark against your competitors. Learn from your competitor’s campaigns to see where you need improvement or can offer something new.
- It helps you understand your customer segments, demographics, and target audience. You can master your market segment and become an authority in your field.
- It helps you identify new opportunities for success. For example, new market openings or new products or services.
- Increase customer loyalty
- Build accurate reports that can be utilized by all areas of the business.
- Validate your ROI
- Identify conversation trends so you can get involved. With social network analysis, you can track online conversations about products and companies.
The Top Use Cases of Social Media Analytics
While looking at the benefits as a whole is important, it doesn’t tell you much about how or where to use social media analytics. We live in a world where the number of social network users is now almost 2.5 billion. We utilize social media every day and it impacts most aspects of our day to day lives. Social media can mean your big networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but it can also mean legacy social tools like email. There are 188 million emails sent every minute, 4.5 million YouTube videos watched every minute, and 1 million Facebook logins every minute. The true scale of social media data is almost beyond comprehension.
Use cases are specific situations where a product or service (in this case social media analytics) can be used. With that in mind, below are the top use cases of social media analytics.
Social Media Campaigns
With social media analytics, you can analyze the success of your campaigns and get to the bottom of your social media audience segmentation. You can take a deep dive into social media exposure and impact when it comes to your campaigns and the sentiment they bring to your customers. Through analysis of posts, you can identify the sentiment drivers behind customer actions and engagement. You can find social media behavior inferences. All of this information is crucial in creating social media campaigns that land with your audience and encourage them to take action.
Market Research
Does geography influence how engaged your customers are or their buying decisions? Do your customer segments reflect what you see in your social media analytics? Are your competitors reaching audiences that you aren’t reaching?
You can utilize social media listening to gather intelligence on what your audience is saying about your brand or competitor products. Understand how customers from different demographics use your product and create marketing campaigns to reach these customers.
Branding
What do customers think about your brand? Do you have a prominent and robust brand presence or are your customers confused about your brand? Do they associate your products with your brand or are the two disconnected? Your brand is an important tool in building customer loyalty and increasing customer acquisition.
Competitive Intelligence
Is there a reason why some consumers prefer your competitors? Does this apply to one market segment or all? How are your competitors engaging with their customers? Are these customers highly engaged or is it more passive engagement? Can you use this information to springboard your campaigns to new audiences?
Social Media Analytics Case Studies
Social media analytics drives real innovation and results in effective business goals and resolutions. To get a feel for how social media analytics can boost your business, let’s take a look at some real-world examples where it made a difference.
Barclays – Popular international bank Barclays introduced a new app called PingIt to allow customers to transfer money to others easily with just a phone number. They made significant changes to the app shortly after its release based on information gained through social media analytics. Although the app was widely praised, there was a small vocal group of people who had negative things to say. They were complaining that the app wasn’t available to under 18’s. It wasn’t just younger users who were frustrated, but also parents who wanted to transfer money to their children. Based on this feedback, Barclays made the app available to over 16s within the same week it launched .
CISCO – CISCO utilized social listening to track ongoing topics and improve how they respond and engage with customers CISCO reported a 281% ROI due to social media analytics .
H&M – Clothing retailer H&M ran four social media campaigns each featuring a different celebrity spokesperson. They tracked the online conversations and engagement and found that success depended on their geographical markets. Different areas felt differently about the campaigns due to culture and societal differences in those geographical locations.
Pizza Hut – Pizza Hut ran two very similar campaigns, only one featured pizza on a white background and the other on a black background. They monitored the conversations and engagement of these campaigns and found that the post with the black background was performing three times as well as the other post. They used this information to boost the ROI of their marketing posts .
Grow your business with Social Media Analytics?
It is currently essential to utilize social media for making your business sucessful. However, to make this channel indeed powerful it is important to monitor social media by applying advanced analytics.