Social Media Analytics: The Next ‘Poster Boy’ of TV and Entertainment Industry

As a social media enthusiast, I am impressed by the number of TV shows that have active social pages on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube etc.

Yet, I believe that the entrainment industry still has a lot to learn from social, especially from social media analytics. That said, I can’t deny that I pleasantly surprised by RTL Nederland’s successful use of social analytics.

This Dutch multimedia and entertainment company has successfully and very, very effectively used Predictive and Sentiment Analytics for market research, program formatting and ideation, improving the quality of current shows and most of all, incorporating audience feedback into their shows and give them customized content.

For their two popular shows, So You Think You Can Dance (SYTYCD, Dutch version), a dance reality show and X Factor, a singing reality show, RTL collaborated with InSites Consulting^*, a market research agency to monitor and measure the two shows’ audiences’ comments on the social media.

Here’s what RTL Nederland achieved from social media analytics –

      a)    Improve decision making and market understanding:

Found out which topics (relating to the two shows) created the most buzz.

      b)    Analyze positive, negative or neutral sentiments:

Sentiment Analysis measured the viewers’ thoughts after the show and found that there always was an increase in the positive buzz – a clear indication that the show was hit.

      c)  Measure audience attitudes and quickly adapt the show accordingly:

When it was found that a certain contestant on SYTYCD generated no vibe at all, the show’s programmers went on to give the said contestant a complete style makeover. This new development instantly became the ‘talk of the social’ and generated much positive sentiments.

   

       d)   Understand customer needs and preferences:

 Learning that the songs and themes in X- Factor were much talked about, the show’s programmers increased their audience involvement during the finals week. They let their audiences to pick the songs that the finalists would sing in the finals.

So you see, social media analytics empowers broadcasting and entertainment businesses to effectively tap into their audiences’ psyche, and with razor sharp precision ascertain what they expect from new shows and how they want their existing favourite shows to progress.

 

As Emilie van dan Berge, RTL Nederland’s Senior Research and Intelligence Project Leader puts it, by listening to our viewers, we give the power to contribute to the creative process – helping us produce better, more compelling television for our audiences.

If you are a TV production house aiming to explore and exploit the power of social media analytics, then 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

How successful Your Social Media Efforts Are? Find Out Using Social Media Analytics.

What does optimal social media engagement mean to your brand?

It is true that likes, shares, retweets, and number of fans are all factors indicating that people interested in your product/service are coming to your social page(s), spending time and doing some kind of an activity there. However, do these numbers tell you how many of those people who spent time on your page went on to actually become your customers?

Well, Social Media Analytics (SMA) tools tell you this. In fact, using these tools businesses can now know precisely; and how well positioned their social media engagement efforts are. Other benefits of these tools include the following:

1. Measure and Monitor Your Social Footsteps:

While the number of fans and followers you have is pretty obvious on your social page, using Social Media Analytics tools, you can analyze how much and how successful has your brand’s reach been on the social media. Based on this, you can widen your target market and reach out to more prospective customers, thus enabling you to measure and at the same time increase your social footsteps.

2. Gauge Your Share of Voice, Brand Awareness and Brand Reputation:

A few thousand likes would be an indicator that your products are growing in popularity. But, if organisations want to go beyond the number of likes and know how their brand’s/ product’s social reputation, brand awareness or Share of Voice (the amount of social conversations that their brand/product is generating as compared to their competitors) is affecting their business, then they have to rely on effective Social Media Analytics tools that measure, analyze and simplify these game changing factors.

3. Quantify the ROI of Your Social Engagement Efforts:

When organizations are setting aside huge amounts of money exclusively for their social media marketing, it is imperative for organizations to also keep track if the money spent has yielded the desired business success or not. Social Media Analytics tools assist social-conscious organizations to do just that. By allowing marketers to break down the success rate of customer engagement initiatives into precise numbers, these analytics tools helps organizations in quantifying the success of their social media engagement efforts. 

What do you think are the other benefits of Social Media Analytics tools in optimizing social media efforts of brands? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To learn more about Shout Analytics’ social media analytics capabilities, 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

Social Media and Entertainment: Truly Made for Each Other

What do Psy, Varun Agarwal and Dhanush have in common?

Psy’s Gangnam Style and Dhanush’s Kolaveri Di went viral on the social media and set the world tapping its foot to its rhythm.  Varun Agarwal’s blog and Facebook posts were compiled to make the book, How I Braved Anu Aunty and Co-founded a Million Dollar Company. These entertainers owe their success in the entertainment industry entirely to social media. It brought them unprecedented fame and success.

Social media in itself is considered as the biggest entertainer. But social media’s power to influence and drive the entertainment industry is even bigger. The relationship between entertainment and social media and also with individuals consuming the two is quite strong. In fact, statistics reveal that while watching TV, 83% of people surf the web, 79% visit Facebook and 41% tweet about the show that they are watching.

People go to watch movies based on the reviews in the social media, reality shows are the topic of discussion on Facebook, photos from a rock concert are shared and liked all over the social media and sporting events are the hottest  topics on Twitter.

Social Media and Entertainment in India:

Today, more and more individuals rely on social media for deciding whether or not to watch movies. Knowing this well, directors and production houses are now using social media to promote their movies and generate a positive buzz around it through exceptional engagement ideas and other marketing strategies.

In India, Bollywood and Cricket are two of the biggest entertainment forces. For a nation that simply swoons over its celebrities and yearns to get every little detail of their personal and professional life, the social media was a custom made solution. The celebrities too have made the best use of social media. Most of the leading actors and cricketers are active on Twitter and Facebook and they are among the most highly followed people on social media. It has brought the celebrities and fans closer to each other like never before. What is even more interesting is the active and engaging presence of distributing companies, directors, scriptwriters, lyricists etc on social media. Even TV stars are not far behind in sharing news and photos from their shows.

So, at a time when movie-goers are turning real-time critics by tweeting reviews, wannabe authors are writing their manuscripts as status updates and musicians and theater artists using Pinterest and YouTube to promote their works, we know for sure that social media and entertainment are truly made for each other.

Social Media: The Real Hero In Film and Entertainment Industry

It is no news that social media has changed the way we communicate, share information and market products. In this blog post, we examine how social media influences films and entertainment industry. 

Paulina Wyczawska, in an article in the social media.ie has pinpointed that movie advertising has undergone a sea change and distributors like Warner Brothers are now using social media to engaging with their audience. Substantiating Wyczawska’s point is the Marvel’s Entertainment’s official Facebook page. Iron Man 3 is releasing today (May 3) and see how their Facebook page is garnering shares and likes for their latest venture.

The official page of Iron Man 3 already has over 14,000,000 likes (at the time of writing)

Closer home, Cricket and Bollywood are the two entertainment giants in India. Indian Premier League’s official Twitter page has sent out close to 20,000 tweets.

Vidya Balan has an average of 500 plus likes for her individual photos posted on Facebook. 

Dharma Movies’ yet to be released Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani starring Ranbir Kapoor’s and Deepika Padukone has a staggering 3,00,000 plus views on You Tube for the song Badtameez Dil.

So, how exactly does social media influence the film and entertainment industry? 

• Builds Popularity. Film and entertainment industry needs enormous amount of support from their consumers – the masses. It requires them to like its shows and films and love its stars. It requires them to say nice things about the films to others. It requires huge publicity. And social media is a one stop solution that guarantees all of the above and more.

• Boosts Marketing. Marketing a film well means reaching out well to the film’s audience and turning even non-fans into fans of the films and stars. While print and television marketing does not ensure optimal engagement, social media facilitates instant one-to-one interaction with the audience. Plus, within the first few days, marketers understand the sentiment brewing around the film and can amend their strategies accordingly. 
• Gets The Film Closer To The Audience. Social media brings fans closer to their heroes which no other medium can do. Celebrities and their lives are always a fascination for the ordinary man. The social media fulfils their curiosity to know everything about them, without being anywhere near them.

Factors for Influence:

Amrita Sharma in an article titled, How Bollywood Is Using Social Media in the socialsamosa.com has highlighted factors (content) that makes social media so influential for the films and entertainment industry. They are –

1.      Tweets and FB posts from lead actors promoting their films and shows.

2.      Trailers and behind-the-scenes clips on You Tube.

3.      Film related engaging, interesting contests and apps on Facebook.

4.      Quizzes, games, puzzles related to the film’s plot.

5.      Photos, posters and merchandises.

The Future

While social media will continue to influence films and entertainment social marketers have to look beyond shares, likes and engagement. They must leverage other features of the social like social Media Analytics and use predictive and sentiment analysis tools to strategize and market the film better. 

This is my take. Now, I’d love hear from you. What do you think are the ways in which social media is influencing films and entertainment?