Social Content Marketing Is Incomplete Without Social Analytics

As social is all about sharing and talking about interesting content, brands across are the globe are going out of their way to make their social channels the destination for interesting, valuable, inspiring and clever content. Little wonder then that Content Marketing is currently the ‘in-thing’.

Content marketing revolves around some of these fundamental principles. Heather Healey, an award winning digital strategist lists four such steps:

      1.Set definite goals for your brand’s content marketing, being very clear about what you want to achieve through your social content.

      2.Know your audience well and find out what kinds of content they expect.

      3.Develop content concepts in accordance with your objectives and brand values. 

      4. Get down to creating that content.

While these four steps form the core of a brand’s content marketing strategy, I believe that there is another very crucial step – analytics.

Social media analytics answer the million dollar question that every content marketer asks – are my efforts yielding the right and desirable results? Is content marketing giving me a favourable ROI? Through its advanced sentiment, trend prediction and competition analysis features; it strengthens your content marketing efforts in the following ways:

        a)  Sentiment Analysis:

Your social content is for your audience’s consumption. Hence, it is very important to know their likes, needs and preferences about it. Use Social Media Analytics (SMA) tools to find how positively or negatively are your audience are reacting to your content. Use this input to develop an audience centric content strategy

        b) Predictive Analysis:

Predictive analytics helps content marketers to closely keep track of the recurring and emerging trends in their customer behavior and devise content strategies based on those trends

       c)   Competitor Analysis:

How well are your competitors faring on the social? What are their content strategies? What type of content do they post and how much audience engagement does it create? Competitor analytics answers these questions for you; helping you to effectively beat your competitors.

       d)   Monitor and Measure:

SMA tools monitor your audience’s social conversations and measure it for audience sentiment, the content’s engagement rate, and of course it’s Share of Voice.

In summary, while good content strategy is essential for effective content marketing, content analytics ensures that your content marketing efforts are successful and profitable. SMA tools provide content marketers actionable insights that help them make rapid and instantaneous adjustments to their strategies. 

What content strategies are most important to you? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To know more about Shout Analytics write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com 

Social Media Analytics – Why Do Businesses Need It?

I came across a Forrester research article which posed a critical question about the difference between social media analytics and social network analysis. Further, this article specifically went on to explain the essential features of social media analytics tools.

To quote the author, James Kobielus, “Social media analytics refers to BI tools – reporting, dashboarding, visualization, search, event-driven alerting, text mining etc. applied to information sourced from social media such as Twitter and Facebook”.

What particularly interested me in Kobielus’ explanation was the fact that he mentioned BI as an essential effect of good social media analytics. We, at Nuvento Systems are constantly working towards improving and enhancing the BI experience for businesses. Our product, Shout Analytics is a modern; cutting–edge social media analytics tool that allows businesses to glean valuable BI through social media.

Volatile global markets and rickety economies mean that businesses now have to pull themselves ahead of their competitors to stay buoyant in their industry. And to them to achieve this, they must don their thinking hats to decide and strategize the road to unfaltering business success. It is in this scenario that BI plays a crucial role. And ever since social media has revolutionized the way business is conducted, it is extremely important for organizations to have that extra edge in the form of BI capabilities.

Shout Analytics facilitates BI through careful listening, active engagement, focused monitoring, precise measurement and tops it with comprehensive analysis of a business’s social media efforts. The rich information laden analysis equips organizations with actionable insights which in turn facilitate organizations to make informed performance/profits affecting business decisions.

These are precisely the characteristics that even Kobielus points out in his article. He says, “The key application of social media analytics is listening to and engaging with customers, and prospects”.

To learn more about Shout Analytics or to find out how we can help your businesses BI needs, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Are You Happy With Your Social Media Monitoring Tool?

Why do businesses need to measure their social media efforts?

Well, if you look at it from a simple business perspective, then, you measure your social media efforts because you want to know for sure if the thousands of dollars that you spend on your social media marketing are yielding the desired, profitable yields or not. You have strategies and goals for social marketing, and the only way to find out whether those strategies have been successful and whether the goals have been met, is by measuring and analyzing your social media efforts.

And yet, you are not fully satisfied with their social media measurements, are you? You feel that somewhere, something is missing and you are not getting a complete picture. Well, you are likely to face this problem if you are stuck with a social media monitoring tool that does only a few of the several key functions of social monitoring or analytics.

In fact, what businesses actually need is a single comprehensive social media monitoring and analytics tool that monitors, measures, analyzes and provides critical business intelligence through actionable insights. Shout Analytics is one such sophisticated social media monitoring and analytics tool that offers businesses the best of both monitoring and analytics, including Sentiment Analysis, Predictive Analytics, Competitor Analysis and Intent Analysis.

                              

Shout Analytics allows businesses to measure the following critical metrics of social media marketing success:

1.Rate of Engagement:

Shout Analytics helps you find out how well your audience is appreciating and participating in your social engagement efforts. Apart from measuring ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, you will also be able to see the conversion

rate of prospects into customers.

      2.Share of Voice:

Find out the extent of social mentions and social conversations your brand generates as compared to your competition and explore the reasons behind it.

      3.Lead Generation:

Know precisely how much of traffic is referred to your website via social media. Also, learn how effective or ineffective your social pages have been in generating leads for your business.

      4.Sentiment Analysis:

Monitor and analyze correctly the sentiment surrounding your brand and products. Get insights pinpointing the reasons for positive, negative and neutral sentiments.

      5.Predictive Analytics:

Take control of future events likely to happen in your industry. Learn how present behaviours could lead to future trends and get your brand readied for challenges of the future.

This is not all. To learn everything about how Shout Analytics can help you in your social media monitoring and measuring efforts, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Brand on Social Media – Are You Leveraging Your Social Intelligence?

Till recently, conducting extensive, in-depth market surveys using lengthy questionnaires was considered as the only reliable method to gather market information and customer data. Customers had to be asked what they felt about the brand. They needed to be urged to share their experiences with the brand.

However, with the advent of social networking and active usage of social media by both brands and its customers alike, gathering customer perception has become a child’s play. Today, customer conversations on the social channels are information mines providing critical, valuable information from customers’ wants and demographics to brand reputation.

Yet, the big question still remains – with social media changing the way business is conducted around the world, is it enough for brands and organizations to merely gather social data?The answer is definitely NO.

Collecting social data is one part of any social media strategy. Gleaning insights from the collected data and using it effectively for intelligent business decision making must be the primary goal of any organization that has an active social presence. What is crucial in this exercise is the critical ability to turn data into actionable insights.

Zacharia Hofer Shall, a researcher with Forrester defines this ability as Social Intelligence in his research, Defining Social Intelligence. According to him, Social Intelligence is, “the management and analysis of customer data from social sources, used to activate and recalibrate marketing or business programs”. Hofer Shall says that Social Intelligence involves monitoring social media, analyzing the content, and using the insights to inform your strategy.

Who needs Social Intelligence?

I believe that Social Intelligence is the need of the hour for any organization that has a social presence and is serious about its social media strategy. That said, Social Intelligence will especially benefit those organizations that deal with large streams of social data on a daily basis; making it necessary to separate valuable conversations from plain noise.

How to Achieve Social Intelligence?

Social Media Analytics tools are the source of Social Intelligence. Using text (Natural Language Processing) analytics and statistical modelling techniques, social media analytics tools monitor social data and convert it into simple but rich intelligent information to aid CxOs in better and informed business decision making.

How important is Social Intelligence for your business? Share your views in the comments below. To learn how Shout Analytics can help you garner Social Intelligence, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com.

6 Major Differences between Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Analytics

With everybody talking about social media analytics and social media monitoring, it is easy to get confused between the two. Did you know that the two are very different concepts yet very often (mis)used while referring to the other?

The fact is that social media monitoring and social media analytics, though different, often overlap and sometimes are even interwoven  whenever social analytics are applied. Most social media analytics softwares today, including Shout Analytics are incorporated with social media monitoring capabilities.

Yet, since the two technologies are often misunderstood, we decided to list out the factors that distinguish the two. I hope that this list will clear the ambiguity around social media monitoring and social media analytics, simplify separately their finer details and explain how the two are different from each other.

Social  Media Monitoring	Social Media Analytics
Qualitative in nature	Quantitative in nature.
Only tells what is being said about the brand or product.	Informs in detail how much is being said about      your brand or product.
Assists you best in defining a particular search term related to your brand and then monitor it.	Provides you with a detailed quantitative analysis   of the said term, complete with graphs and reports.
Gives you an account of the positive, negative and neutral sentiments surrounding your brand.	Enumerates how those different sentiments will affect your brand.
Limited to monitoring alone.	Social monitoring is a part and parcel of social media analytics.
Helps brand managers understand a brand’s social standing – explains on which social platform the brand is faring well and on which it is not.	Measures the social standing and even gives critical insights to help intelligent decision making – the quantified analysis provides enough input to direct the next course of action.

In a nut shell, while social media monitoring allows brand managers and leaders of organizations to get a clearer picture of their social media marketing efforts, social media analytics allow them to evaluate their social media efforts, correctly identify problem prone areas and most of all glean valuable insights from the analysis data. 

What do you think are the factors that differentiate social media monitoring from social media analytics? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To know how Shout Analytics can provide

Top 30 Uses of Predictive Analytics

Predictive Analytics will be the force to reckon in the future because of its power to predict and foretell industry events based on the previously existing conditions. In other words, predictive analytics helps organisations across industries to anticipate negative events and misgivings thereby helping them to prevent failures and frauds.

While most Analytics gurus opine that Predictive Analytics is best suited for financial institutions, we believe that it is equally beneficial to any organisation that wants to be prepared for the challenges and opportunities of the future.

Therefore, we listed 30 uses of Predictive Analytics for various organisations:

Banks:

• Improve customer service
• Build and nurture great customer relations
• Detect and prevent fraud
• Sharpen your businessintelligence
• Plan future strategies and chart out revenue boosting methodologies

Financial Services:

• Anticipate risk, especially interest rate risks and price risks
• Calculate credit scores with greater integrity
• Increase accuracy while making pricing decisions
• Prevent future risks and reduce defaults
• Curb fraud – be it in transactions, customer authenticity or credit applications
• Credit card companies – take charge of credit lines
• Zero-in on the right customer to sell your new offers

Insurance:

• Enhance underwriting by leaps and bounds
• Be well informed of the risk factors while fixing premiums
• Alleviate fraud –  false claims and wrong claimant profiling

Retail:

• Forecast sales, improve service and buying experience
• Understand customer purchase behavior
• Target the right product for the right customer
• Accentuate product marketing and promotions
• Improve store(s) management
• Streamline and take control of overall operations 

Government

• Better decision making – back important policies and bills with concrete data
• Predict electoral results
• Detect fraud
• Study citizens’ reaction to government policies and measures
• Predictive Analytics was used extensively in the US during the 2012 presidential election to find newer ways to persuade voters.

Sales and Marketing

• Know whom to target and with what products
• Increase sales; save time
• Propel cross selling
• Boost customer service, customer relation management and customer retention

So, if you belong to any of the above industries, you have reasons enough to invest in Predictive Analytics. Do you see/ look forward to any other uses of it? Share your thoughts in the comments below or write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com.

Are You A Social CEO?

In the age of social networking, is it enough that only your company and its brands have a social presence? Or is it essential for the top leadership of the company also to be active and engaging on the social media?

Weber Shandwick, a digital communications agency released a research report in May this year titled The Social CEO: Executives Tell All which explored the question- are socially active CEOs beneficial for an organisation and its executives. Here is what the report revealed:

76% of executives (surveyed worldwide) wanted their CEOs to be active and engaging on social media. 

The benefits (according to the executives) of a social CEO were many, like being able to share company news, impart thought, leadership information, build company (and employees) reputation and initiate one-to-one communication with employees and customers alike.

52% of executives said that social CEOs were a source of inspiration.

46% of the executives felt that having social CEOs made them feel technologically advanced.

So you see, as consumers seek interesting but authentic and authoritative communication from brands, the onus falls on the CEOs to step on the social bandwagon and lead from the front in listening to and engaging with their customers.

One such social CEO is Peter Aceto of ING Direct Canada. One of his admirers, Carmine Galloa a communications guru and also a Forbes contributor, describes Aceto as “active, authentic and very transparent bank executive and a “student of leadership who shares case studies and best practices from leaders in other fields”. In fact, Aceto was named Toronto’s Communicator of the Year in 2010.

According to Carmine Gallo, Aceto’s social media efforts are very open and direct. He openly communicates with his customers and employees like you would do with your friends and family members. He uses his Twitter handle @CEO_INGDIRECT to talk to his customers and stakeholders about finance related issues. 

In fact Aceto (in conversation with Gallo) seconds the Weber Shandwick study finding when he stresses that it is essential for CEOs to be engaging on social media because this increases the credibility of the organisation and motivates employees. Also, in the wake turbulent markets and global financial crisis, consumers are cautious about receiving information from third parties (read random news articles and blog posts). Therefore, CEO’s blogs, tweets, posts, webinars etc go a long way in restoring the customers’ faith and trust in organisations.

Do you know want CEOs to be active and engaging on the social media? Share your thoughts in the comments. 

Social Media Monitoring For Banking and Financial Enterprises

Banks and Financial enterprises need social media monitoring. Here’s why –
After the global financial crisis, one of the most damaging consequences that plagued the finance and banking enterprises was lack of customers’ trust in them. Customers and other stakeholders nurtured scepticism about their banks’ financial position and were too apprehensive to conduct business with them. People’s trust and faith were at an all time low.

However, financial enterprises had to endure this challenge and find feasible solutions to overcome it. Some banks like the Fidor Bank that I mentioned in my last post read the situation well and went social for reinventing business. They incorporated social media into their marketing and product innovation strategies. They relied on active customer engagement on social networks and extensive, open interactions with their customers for trust and reputation building.

The success of a few banks and financial enterprises on social media motivated many others to follow suit. Today, along with having a presence on social media, most financial institutions are also exploring and extracting the benefits of social media monitoring. 

How Social Media Monitoring Helps Banking and Financial Enterprises?

Banks and Financial institutions can immensely benefit from social media monitoring tools. From finding prospective customers to generating new leads and beating competition with out-of-the-box strategies to analyzing the sentiments surrounding your brand or knowing what intents lead customers to your website, social media monitoring tools will help you achieve all.

Some of the most useful benefits of social media monitoring for financial services include – 

•     Analyze and measure others perception of your brand, product and services.
•         Manage and monitor your organization’s reputation.
•     Conduct Competitor Analysis
•     Predict and tackle PR crisis
•     Build and nurture customer communities
•         Produce content tailor-made for your audience
•     Develop products based on customer insights  
•     Boost customer service
•     Cost effective, easily customizable to suit varied needs and serve different departments.

Our product, Shout Analytics is an innovative solution for banks and other financial institutions looking for cutting-edge social media monitoring services. For the banking and finance industry Shout Analytics performs among other things, Sentiment Analysis, Predictive Analysis, Customer Profiling, Brand Intelligence, Share of Voice Analysis, and Churn Analysis. Plus, it all happens in a single integrated dashboard for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Blogger and News. 

If you want to know more about Shout Analytics, share your thoughts in the comments below or write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com.

3 Ways How Your Social Audience Can Help Your Brands Do Better Business

Your social audience is an important part of your social marketing plan. Hence, you keep them in the center

of your brand marketing design and devise plan and strategies to please them, satisfy them and retain them. But did you know that they can also be a source of critical insights for you? And that you can leverage their power (yes, your social audience is very powerful) to do better business?

By carefully listening to your audience’s likes, interests, habits and beliefs, you can glean some insightful and very critical information relating to your brands, services, products and overall business. You can use this information to:

Identify Market Changes

Your business arena is constantly evolving; new players make their foray here every other day and those already existing are diversifying and modifying their business plans. In such a scenario, for you to survive, you must be flexible enough to make changes to your product and services according to the shifts and changes in your market.

And the best person who can give you timely updates about changing market trends is your audience. Because of their genuine interest and passion for products and services that you (and others in your market) offer, your audience will be constantly tracking and responding to the market trends. Listening to their conversations will reveal a lot about what is currently happening in your market.

Measure Brand Reputation

What is the vibe that your audience are exhibiting when they talk about your brands and services? Is it positive, negative or neutral?

Sentiment Analysis can help you to critically examine the success and effectiveness of your customer service initiatives. If your brand constantly sees high negative sentiments, then it means that you need to modify your products and services whereas considerably positive sentiments indicate that all is well with your brands and services.

Revise Marketing Tactics

Social media marketing is all about interesting and useful content that your audience can like and share. If you fail to provide rich and resourceful content, your social marketing efforts will not be successful.

Keeping this in mind, examine what content your audience likes best and provide them with just that. If you find that certain content is always ignored by your audience, then it’s a lesson for you to completely do away with that type of content.

Shout Analytics can help you leverage the power of your social audience, to know how, write to info@shoutnalytics.com

Effective Customer Analysis Using Social Media Analysis Tools

We, as heads of businesses, acknowledge the fact that our consumers or customers are the real drivers of our success. A high rate of customer satisfaction is vital for the success of our brands/ products and services. And with increased use of the social media, consumers today have an online presence more than ever before and they use the social channels to make purchases, get feedback on a product, review services etc. In other words, a customer’s purchase decision – something that’s so important for our businesses – is now radically influenced by the social media.

In fact, an article by Karthik Sharma in CIO.in, summarizing a Gartner report, points out that social media is “the most compelling example of how consumerism drives enterprise IT practices.” Of course we realize this, don’t we? That’s why we specially invest in innovative social media strategies and devise social media campaigns. But, while there is no denying that social engagement will take us one step closer to our customers, we still lack in important information relating to the customer’s emotional, social and demographic state, the knowledge of which is so critical to making business decisions in the future.

I believe that organizations can do better business when they productively harness the social data surrounding their brands and products or services. Investing considerable time and effort to analyze and uncover insightful revelations about customers – both existing and potential – can prove extremely useful for your business success. The insightful data gathered from customer analysis can be used to propel superior product development plans, customer relationship management and marketing strategies.

Serving organizations in this end are efficient and highly competitive social media analytics tools which facilitate effective customer analysis using which marketing and customer relationship department heads can:

·         Understand trends in their customers’ purchase habits.

·         Know their customers’ sentiments and attitudes.

·         Identify their brand advocates and key influencers.

·         Monitor and measure their brand reputation and share of voice.

The above insights will assist organizations to:

·         Develop and design specific products that will meet customer requirements.

·         Design accurately targeted marketing campaigns.

·          Foresee negative reaction to products or promotional campaigns

·    Identify causes of customer dissatisfaction and chart strategies for resolving these issues.

Shout Analytics is one such high-end Social Media Analytics platform that enables organizations to perform an effective, efficient and insightful customer analysis for leveraging their business.

To know more about Shout Analytics, contact us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Why Small Business Needs Social Media Analytics?

Small business with high demanding customer expectations and with a huge increase in the competitors has to face the challenge for survival.The usage of social media for the business is effective only when your customers are widely using it to communicate and share their valuable thoughts. The right choice in picking the best social media channel for brand marketing is acute as it will not only help in brand building but also helps in reaching out to the right audience.Moreover, Social business intelligence is foremost in understanding the impact of business values as well as how well the promotions for the product can be done with proper utilization of the tools that is essential for your business solution.

Businesses are now moving towards the capability which lays down a platform to use the social media in a conjunctive way. When social channels are used effectively, it helps in bringing major outcome of your expectation.Social CRM is an idea which builds powerful and lasting customer relationships through digital communities. Predictive analysis is step forward to know an exact picture of present and future trends of your business that will helps in winning the business competition.To anticipate the future need of the customer preferences and the interests, the ultimate objective would be to reach and promote the brand successfully through right social media channels.

Role of social media for small business growth:

•    The purpose for your marketing has to be best understood to achieve the expertise in the quality as well as in the areas of concern. Additionally, to reach your prospective audience, it is very important to provide them with the expectations which are the foremost.Your business should start with good planning as it will help in marketing the brand to achieve the objectives.
•    As a marketer you should be aware of the social scale of the brand for which they are marketing and should be in a position to measure their outreach through proper analysis and make effective judgment. Moreover, the kind of engagement with the context of the brand is essential for further growth of the business.
•    The active participation of the potential client which can directly lead to the sales is accountable. Analyze and study the patterns of the comments made by the audience as it helps in identifying their behavior and also to understand more what their expectations. Additionally, you should know audience preferences and understanding towards the brand through proper social media Analytics.

Social media Analytics could best lead the small scale business by,
•    Supporting them to be more competitive
•    Helping them in growing effective brand building with minimal time and finance efforts.
•    Reaching out to right target audience.

Shout Analytics is one such social media analytical tool which supports every business for the promotion of the brand and to better know the potential audience. By the usage of Shout Analytics better understand the business values and the preferences of your own customers.

To know more about Shout Analytics do visit http://www.shoutanalytics.com or do mail us info@shoutanalytics.com