Understanding Social Media Analytics

Imagine you had the ability to know exactly what your customers were saying about your organization at any particular point in time. With this information, you’d be able to change your product lines to accentuate the things people like about your products, do away with the things they dislike, or plan your sales and marketing efforts to deliver the right messages to the right people at the right time.

It’s not a fantasy: Customers generate these kinds of valuable business insights every day on social media. However, not every organization has the right social media analytics tools in place to capitalize on the information their customers are generating online. For these organizations, the things their customers are saying will remain out of reach unless they get the social media analytics technology needed to start decoding the meaning of social media posts.

What is social media analytics?

Social media analytics is a subset of analytics technology based specifically on determining the sentiments people have about certain brands and products on social media networks.

The data created on social media networks every day is an example of “big data” and is often unstructured, meaning that it is very difficult to break down into traditional database solutions. Like all types of big data, social media data is filled with plenty of valuable business insight – and plenty of completely irrelevant data. Social media analytics attempts to separate the business insights so that business leaders can learn what consumers really think.

Social media analytics tools are based on text mining and natural language processing. Basically, this means that the tools break down the natural language that people use when posting online, searching for instances of particular brand and product names. Then, these solutions look at the context in which those names are used, looking specifically for words that would indicate positive or negative sentiment. When performed on a massive scale, social media analytics can help paint a vivid picture of what customers really think, based on thoughts that come straight from customers themselves.

How do you get started with social media analytics?

Most social media networks offer their own analytics platforms specifically to help businesses gain data that can be used to help support better decision-making. For instance, Twitter offers Twitter Analytics, and Facebook offers Facebook Insights.

There are also a number of different third-party technologies that promise to provide complete social media analytics across all networks. To learn more about how to pick the right tool and make social media analytics an ingrained part of your business going forward, contact The frank Agency today.