Actionable Data – A Needle in the Social Data Haystack

I love numbers. And my search for the latest social media statistics led me to this post by Brain Honigman in the Huffintonpost.com. Thanks to his compilation, this is what I discovered:

• 2012 US Elections witnessed a record breaking 31.7 million political tweets.
• 75 million tweets are sent from Twitter in a day
• Instagram users make 575 likes and 81 comments every second.
•  Pinners on Pinterest spend 83.9 percent of their time Pinning, 15.5 percent liking and 0.6 percent leaving comments

  
Incessant Influx of Social Data & Information Deluge 

The above statistics are proof that data and information is flooding the social arena like never before. This poses a serious challenge for organizations and their brands. They are left marooned in this torrential data flood, not knowing how best to harness the gargantuan volume of data generated around their brand.

But social data is good. Brands and organizations need it. It is social data that facilitates social engagement, promotes brand building and assists revenue increase.

The Challenge

We all know that the problem lies not in the large volume of social data but the inability of most brands and organizations to filter the social data for useful, actionable data. There are three challenges here:

First – accurately identifying and understanding the social data surrounding our brands and products.

Second - Formulating an effective, ground-breaking approach to use the gathered data.

Third - finding equally reliable and feasible means or products to help you achieve the above.

Social media analysis (SMA) tools are one such product that is most appropriate and also readily available for the organizations. However, in order to effectively deal with and make the best use of social data, organizations must go beyond listening and engagement. While there is no denying that listening to our influencers and engaging with your customers are all pervasive to the success of our social media strategy, the most important thing that organizations need to do is to monitor and measure our brand’s social reputation.

Solution

Highly advanced SMA tools offering sophisticated features (Natural Language Processing capabilities, Sentiment Analysis, Predictive Analysis etc) are the latest buzz in town. Organizations that want to make the best use of their social data – analyze the available data, derive actionable insights and extract business intelligence out of it – must consider investing in a SMA tool.

How do SMA tools make this happen? What magic do they weave? Find out in the next post.