Most social media analytics insight offers an incomplete, and ultimately harmful, view of your consumers and your market. We’ll show you how this happens and what to do about it in this post!
There are many ways to stand out online, so why do brands default to the same losing tactics over and over? Plan A worked last quarter – and analytics indicate it should have been a winner again, yet it wasn’t. What happened? We hear this a lot from people switching social and media analytics vendors and the answer is ultimately the same: their social media analytics are missing the mark.
More accurately, their social media analytics are not capturing an holistic real-time view of all available insight, so they aren’t even aiming at right mark. Instead, they’re actually creating unnecessary risk. Let’s see how that looks.
Creating Unnecessary Risk
The online landscape is more unpredictable than ever, so having one dataset work in isolation to determine an approach is dangerous. This may feel intuitive, but the idea of “one dataset” is typically misunderstood. “Social” as a whole, is one dataset. Many companies think that as long as they’re capturing the consumer voice from a variety of social media channels, they have a good sense of conversation affecting their company. This is just not true.
Voice is volatile and found on social channels, definitely – but it’s also reflected in forums, on review sites, in news articles, in survey data and hidden in call logs that you must upload and incorporate into your social listening efforts. And then competitor intelligence is key as well. You need answers, including:
- What are your competitors doing right now and how is their share of voice measuring up against yours?
- Did they just launch a similar campaign that tanked? What can you learn from it?
- What are consumers complaining about to them? Are you making the same mistakes, or can you showcase your ability to do that thing better?
- Precisely how much money are you leaving on the table right now by not knowing these answers?
- And can you be sure your competitors aren’t tracking this intel about you? They likely are.
All of this must be benchmarked over time using social listening – some of it daily or weekly, other pieces monthly or quarterly, but all on a regular cadence to note irregularities and pivot as needed. We’ve all learned how key pivoting is this past year.
Sound like a lot? It is. And having it all in one dashboard is a must, or it’s just not manageable. And yes, this is entirely possible too.
But your current “strategic planning” that’s informed merely by what’s trending on social in response to your pointed (and biased) ‘social only’ search criteria does little beyond offer a false sense of understanding – and that is where the danger lies. You think you’re making a data-informed move, when you’ve just fallen victim to your well-intended analyst’s confirmation bias. It’s time to recalibrate your brand focus – and make it a habit to do so consistently.
Recalibrating Your Brand Focus
Advanced social media analysis uncovers a 360-degree view of your company and its place in the social and market landscape, revealing crucial insight around the audiences you most want to connect with, relevant market movements you have to be aware of, and opportunities that are otherwise missed.
In The Ultimate How To Guide for Social and Media Analytics, brands learn the power harnessed by aggregating and analyzing millions upon millions of structured and unstructured data points from a mind-blowing array of social web, data, news and propriety sources. In a nutshell, it reveals everything a brand needs to know about social media analytics. Next, they see what happens then they apply a next-generation AI-powered lens to slice and dice the consumer and market intelligence and extract key insights. This approach offers a much more thorough understanding of everything in your category – and it all happens in real-time.
In the first few sections of the guide, we focus on how to ensure you’re getting the very best insight from your social analytics tool and how that research looks. Because outputs are important as well, and a focus on text visualizations makes communicating insight out to key stakeholders that much more impactful.
We also cover high-level, company-defining activities, including how to support new product innovation and campaign launches; and uncovering everything from brand influencers to merger and acquisition opportunities with informed insight. The second half of the guide focuses on becoming a trendsetter instead of a trend chaser, with tactics that category leaders adopt to win.
And then, sentiment analysis insight forms the foundation of it all, capturing the emotional context that has fueled every market surge and collapse. The most elusive intelligence from every market is surprisingly accessible when disparate data sources are meaningfully aggregated and analyzed. Game-changing and category-defining? Sure. Also remarkably accurate and immediately actionable – and that’s the best insurance against risk that any company could ask for. Reach out for a demo and we’ll show you how it’s done – and help you make sure your social media analytics efforts are helping, and not hurting, your brand!
