Awareness, offering social media marketing software to the world's biggest brands and agencies for almost ten years, published their new study last month: "Actionable Social Analytics: From Social Media Metrics to Business Insights". Social analytics is an evolving business discipline that equips companies with tools to understand how industry-driven and brand-driven conversations in online communities influence business performances, such as conversations driven by industry experts, competitors, prospects, customers and your social marketing team.

Marshall Sponder, one of the leading thinkers in the field, shared with Awareness recently that the definition of social analytics has significantly changed as the understanding of big data has evolved. He has been the one who pointed out that merketers first need to understand how to combine the Yin & Yang of Social Analytics, which means in a nutshell:

Yin: learning from external data to:

1. Identify the data sources and the frequency for the data streams to collect for your external social analytics;

2. Classify the information by segregating it by audience type;

3. Determine goals with each audience type;

4. Set up social monitoring by audience type.

Yang: learning from internal data to:

1. Determine your content and platform mix;

2. Measure what works and what doesn’t;

3. Benchmark one campaign against the next and across platforms;

4. Remove social media from isolation

Social Analytics Framework for Marketing and Sales Effectiveness

Awareness’s report emphasizes in general that harnessing the power of social data is no small task, pointing out that marketers easily get lost while tracking social metrics that often just add little or no value to their business. Indeed, the social media landscape is peppered with resources discussing the value of a Facebook fan or a Twitter follower, yet most fail to address the bigger questions, such as „How does having more fans or followers impact our bottom line? What is the impact of social reach and engagement on our ability to sell more, to increase our share of wallet with existing customers, and drive higher brand advocacy?

Thus, when it comes to actionable social analytics for marketing and sales effectiveness, marketers are advised to focus on specific engagement metrics that are closely tied to lead generation, sales and brand advocacy. And Awareness‘ Social Analytics for Marketing and Sales Effectiveness framework is doing exactly this by being organized accroding to business function, namely Marketing, Sales and Customer Service, followed by specific functional KPIs (e.g. brand awareness and reputation) and the corresponding Social Analytics required to support informed functional decisions, such as Share of Voice and Sentiment Analysis.

A1

For example, marketers focused on improving brand reputation need to measure overall Share of Voice as a starting point. To manage and impact reputation, marketers need a more advanced Share of Voice metric – namely Share of Voice within specific key constituencies, such as industry influencers and vocal customers. These two audience segments will have the biggest impact on how newcomers and less engaged customers perceive your brand and the company over time.

A2

 

Engagement Analysis

Let’s mention as well at this point the engagement analytics that are usually needed when looking for trends and variances and are useful for marketers to figure out social cause and effect.

Awareness is providing some advice on how to cope with engagement measurement, too, such as:

1. Analyze your campaign across all platforms: Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare, Facebook, promotional buys and influencer mentions;

2. Analyze specific platform effectiveness – be it Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn etc.

3. Review all of your Twitter posts and identify those that drove the most clicks to your assets. Next, examine how the Twitter posts were worded, by the use of hashtags, links, etc. , as this analysis will help you identify optimal ways to draft future Twitter posts for the most clicks and engagement;

4. Analyze contributor effectiveness – in this example, review the performance of your internal marketing team and that of your agency and drill down to the specific contributors who provided the most value – as this will help you to decide how to allocate resources in future campaigns.

A3

According to Awareness’s whilepaper, Dell expects more pressure on social media practitioners to have a better command of metrics and KPIs tied to business objectives and it remains to be seen if companies will take up the immense opportunities at offer to build stronger brands, tailored customer support, and increased sales offered by social media.

For more details, please download Awareness‘ Whitepaper - "Actionable Social Analytics: From Social Media Metrics to Business Insights"

By MediaBUZZ