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

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

Social Listening – Are Your Consumers Liking It?

At a time when there is substantial noise being raised over an individual’s privacy, especially on social media, NetBase and J.D. Power and Associates conducted a survey on 1,062 consumers to find out if consumers know that companies are listening to them on the social media and how they feel about it.

The study reveals some interesting insights –

According to the Altimeter Group, 42% of companies have social listening as one of their top 3 priorities 

But consumers are apprehensive towards this popular business trend and increasingly expressing their angst over it. However, the nature of their response hasn’t been consistent either.

• 51% of the consumers want to talk about organizations and their products; but they do not want these organizations to listen to their conversations.  
• In fact, 43% of them believe that social listening is an intrusion into their privacy
• But, completely contrasting to the above two ideas, there are also 32% of consumers who are completely unaware of the fact that organizations are listening to their social conversations.  
• Another important aspect that this study revealed was that 48% of consumers wanted companies to listen to them on social media and use the conversations for product/service improvements.  
• But there was also another 58% of them who opined that companies must use social listening only to respond to and solve customer complaints. 

But the real surprise was here-

• 42% people want brands to respond without fail to their positive comments
• 64% of consumers insist that brands must respond to social comments only when spoken to

This is a challenge to social media chiefs because such expectations from your social audience means that you must somehow, know beforehand how each of them is going to react to your social engagement efforts.

Now, we acknowledge that listening to, engaging with and understanding their social audience (customers, influencers, fans, stakeholders and even the competitors) are the three basic and fundamental principles of social media engagement for any brand marketers and the organization’s leadership. 

But, given the recent reservation among the consumers towards being listened to by brands on the social channels, the onus is now on the social media marketers, brand managers, CXOs and even social media monitoring and analytics people like us to delve deep into this new development and find new, feasible ways to, as the study’s infographic says, “demonstrate how listening doesn’t intrude but instead builds relationships”.

The Power of Predictive Analytics in Helping Banks Build Excellent Customer Relationship

Wouldn’t it be great if banks could foretell which of their customers would be a perfect potential buyer for their latest credit card or home loan? Well, Predictive Analytics can help banks do exactly this and much more.

Banks deal with voluminous streams of unstructured big data. Using cutting edge social media analysis tools and Predictive Analytics tools in particular, banks can closely monitor their customers’ banking behavior; depending on which they can pitch new offers and promotions with greater success. 

A banks’ marketing department is often faced with intriguing questions like these –

•   Which customers would opt for what promotions
•   Would combining offers on loans and credit cards be a hit  ?
•   Which offers and promotions would attract new customers

Similarly, the bank’s operations manager would want answers to questions relating to detecting and identifying fraudulent customers, credit card faults, and account mismanagement. He would also want to identify and reward the banks’ long standing, loyal and ‘bank-perfect’ customers.

Predictive Analytics helps banks find answers to the above questions. From the time a new customer makes his first transaction till he turns into an influential brand advocate for the brand, banks can use Predictive Analytics to make him a happy customer and build a healthy relationship with him. 

To start with, banks can pinpoint exactly what services and products the new customer prefers the most by identifying his banking behavior pattern. This also indicates his responses to new offers and products, thereby telling the bank if he is the right prospect for the new product or not. Over a period of time, as the new customer becomes a known customer; predictive analytics can help the bank to craft tailor made services to him. 

Thus, aided by predictive analytics, when banks make sustained efforts to know, understand and provide need-centric services to their customers, they succeed in nurturing and growing a group of loyal customers who only have good things to say about their bank. These customers (remember, you and predictive analytics made them that way) are strong brand advocates who are powerful enough to influence others (read potential customers) banking decisions.

How else do you think Predictive Analytics can benefit banks? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To know more about Shout Analytics and its Predictive Analytics capabilities, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Wondering What Content Works Best For Your Brand? Try Sentiment Analysis

Content, they say is, king on social media. The content that you post reflects your brand and its attributes. But how do you know what type of content is best suited for your brand? And also, how do you know what type of content do your customers and social audience wants to receive from you?

Harnessing the power of Social Media Analysis tools and Sentiment Analysis are the best ways to find answers to these questions.

Social media analysis tools allow you to closely monitor the reactions to the content posted on your social channels. Similarly, Sentiment Analysis allows you to analyze those reactions and find out how well a particular type of content is being consumed. Therefore, use these tools to –

Study ‘Likes’ and ‘Favorite’:

Closely monitor your content on the social media and see what gets the most likes and favorites. Is it pictures, posts, blog posts, videos, presentations, info graphics, tweets or status updates? Also find out what qualities in the content did they like the most – witty, attention-grabbing, sober or to-the-point?

Now use Sentiment Analysis and find out what people had to say about the content they liked. Did they call it ‘awesome’ or ‘super like’ or did they say ‘thank you for sharing such a wonderful post’?

Likes and favourites are the first indicators that tell you what content is best for your brand. So leverage this to the maximum.

Monitor ‘Shares’ and ‘Retweets’:

People share something on the social only when they feel that that piece of information is useful to a larger community – their friends, customers, colleagues etc. The same goes with Retweets.

These are indicators that tell you what type of content people would like to receive from your brand so that they can share it with many more people. You can also find out whom among your audience shares and retweets your content the most. This way you also know who your top influencers are.

Which Content Works Best?

While plain text (statements, questions, quotes etc) work just fine, photos and videos are hugely shared. Info graphics are popular too. Make your posts valuable by adding links within it to other interesting articles (human-interesting stories, case studies) or combine it with pictures and videos.

So, once you know what content works well and what doesn't for your brand, go ahead and create lots of amazing, interesting content for your audience.

The Fidor Bank Story: A Lesson in How and Why Banks Must Utilize Social Media

In April this year, computerweekly.com published an article based on Ovum’s various studies of the global banking sector where the research agency predicted that “social media will become a significant channel for retail banks in Europe within three years”.

Let me give you one of the finest examples of a bank utilizing social media. Germany’s Fidor Bank was established in 2007.  It is the world’s first online-only bank that operates only through the internet and using social media. From customer service, communications and engagement to new product development, everything happens on social media at the Fidor Bank.

Fidor Bank’s success through social media is best described by Karl Finders in his article when he says, “Fidor currently has more than 200,000 people registered and 150,000 community members. It has €160m worth of deposits, and its lending totals about €100m. With only 34 staff, no branches and a cost of only €3.50 to set up a customer with full banking, the overheads are low compared with traditional banks”. He adds, “Fidor’s customers trust it because it listens to them all the time through social media and customers have a trusted community supporting them”. 

How did Fidor Bank achieve this?

At a time when customers’ trust and faith in their banks was at an abysmal low, courtesy global economic crisis, Fidor Bank’s leadership took a bold move. They were brave enough to rely entirely on social media to restore that trust through personalized social media interactions. They communicated openly about issues related to banking and personal finance on social media. They opened channels on Facebook and Twitter for their customers to interact candidly with them, thus creating a high level of operational transparency. In no time Fidor’s customers realized that this bank was genuine and trustworthy. So, customers who came to Fidor Bank, stayed with it. In fact, even the bank’s customer service is handled by loyal customers on their social community.

Key takeaways from Fidor Bank’s strategy:

• Use social media to overcome the cost and complexity of traditional banking
• Always listen to your customers.
• Make social media a customer engagement tool.
• Increase customer trust through an online community
• Increase sales and improve customer service through enhanced customer communication strategies.

So, would you like to emulate Fidor Bank? To know how Shout Analytics can help you, 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

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. 

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