Social media promises to accelerate innovation, drive cost savings and strengthen brands through mass collaboration. Companies across every industry are using it to hype new products and services, and also monitor what people are saying about their brand. And yet, most struggle to measure the true value of social media engagement and few have the big data analytic capabilities in place to deliver insights on how these activities impact the bottom line.
To truly leverage social media as a tool for the organization, the entire business must be aligned for effective interaction to be achieved. “[Employees] need to respond in a proactive and timely manner on the social channel of choice and be able to tailor the communication or content that they provide to different audiences with the right reply, the right response, the right content and the right tone of voice,” says Helena Schwenk, principle analyst at MWD Advisors, an IT advisory firm based in the U.K.
Strategize for Success
As Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social sites continue to unleash a torrent of data, organizations need to not only turn the information generated into actionable intelligence, but also to measure the business value.
Businesses often struggle to determine what social data is actually useful for them to collect. By utilizing listening tools and sentiment analytics complemented with human intelligence, companies can filter out noise and—with the help of machine-learning technology—hone in on the critical data that advances the business.
“This is still a very tricky path to navigate for lots of organizations, and I don’t think there’s a bulletproof method out there that allows organizations to do this in its entirety,” says Schwenk.
Correlating social media strategies with key performance indicators (KPIs) is imperative for getting a handle on ROI. Counting the number of new followers on Twitter doesn’t provide significant insights, but tying metrics and KPIs back to something meaningful can deliver substantial benefits.
Maximize Product Performance
Measuring how social media sentiment correlates to an intention to purchase or the likelihood a customer will churn provides insight that can be analyzed and acted upon.
For example, launching new products in the marketplace is a challenge, especially when, according to a Nielsen Global New Products Report, nearly two out of every three new products are destined to fail. To counteract that, companies can harness insights from searches, blogs and social media data to reduce uncertainty and improve product performance.
“You can gauge consumer interest before the launch and use that information to decide whether or not the interest level in the new product is sufficiently high to move ahead, or if significantly higher marketing spending will be needed in order to reach the sales goals,” stated Dominique Hanssens, a professor of marketing at UCLA, in his webinar UCLA-Make a Bigger Blockbuster.
One way to gauge consumer interest is to look at Internet searches. “Search activity contains information about the success of a new product,” notes Hanssens. “We know that search drives revenue.” To increase that search volume, organizations can create awareness and generate initial interest through advertising and promotional strategies.
Big, diverse data is opening opportunities in every industry. By tracking search and social data, companies can gauge interest pre-launch and use those insights to evaluate marketing tactics and increase or reallocate advertising spending, if needed, to maximize product performance.
Subhead: Real Business Value
Social media marketing and analytics are in the early stages of maturity. Still, organizations can make the channels and the information collected work to their advantage by instilling the right company mindset, creating the right strategy and employing the right technology.
By knowing how to effectively measure the business value of social initiatives, companies in every industry can gain critical insights that allow them to improve and promote their products and services–and increase the bottom line.
(Forbes)
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