A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding Your Social Media Analytics

Social analytics refers to the fast-growing field of monitoring,
measuring, analyzing and interpreting social media conversations —
often in real time. The goal of most social media analytics is to learn
in order to help an individual or company communicate more effectively
via various social media channels.

Key Points

Increasingly, the ability to make sense of the social media
conversational stream on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere on the
Internet plays a crucial role in business. Effective social analytics
can help companies communicate and interact more effectively with their
customers, business partners and even employees.

Definitions of social media analytics vary widely. Some experts focus
on the quality and context of specific media behaviors, while others
look more at the tools for measuring and quantifying those behaviors.
Most effective strategies, however, do both by combining qualitative
and quantitative approaches.

Qualitative analysis of social media is widely regarded to matter the
most, but quantitative analysis seems to be gaining a great deal of
attention now, too, especially with the rise of new social metrics
tools. The exploding popularity of social media has occasioned a virtual
tsunami of data about people’s online behavior, prompting software
vendors to rush in and create new tools to help businesses and
individuals measure various data points. The ultimate goal, of course,
is to make sense of the data; hence the ability to perform qualitative
analysis is crucial in implementing social media.

The first step in social media analytics is to figure out how to
monitor what’s happening in social media by collecting data generated in
the social media channels.
But what data should be collected? Should companies track every
“mention” of their brands on Twitter and Facebook? Should they go
further and attempt to classify all those “mentions” as either
“positive” or “negative” through some kind of “sentiment” analysis?

The answers to those and related questions vary greatly depending on
the business objectives a company is seeking. Some companies might be
using social media primarily to market their products and services,
while others may use social networks mainly to serve their existing
customers. Still others may want to simply monitor competitors and
trends in their industry.

There’s no shortage of social media monitoring and measuring tools on the market today to accomplish all of these goals.

Popular software programs that allow people and companies to listen
to and analyze content in social networks include Sysomos, Sprout
Social, and Salesforce-owned Radian6. Other popular tools include SocialMention and Hearsay Social. There are hundreds of other tools, including many that are being combined into unified software suites to simplify the work.

In 2011 and 2012 in particular, big software and Internet companies
have been showing more interesting in buying or partnering with social
monitoring and measurement startups.

The wave started in 2011 when online business software company
Salesforce bought one of the leading firms in this field, Radian6.

In mid-2012, Oracle bought three social metrics-oriented
firms–Involver, Collective Intent and Vitrue–and disclosed plans to
integrate them into a “unified social platform” that would allow
businesses to analyze behavior and content across many social networks
from a single interface.

Google bought Wildfire, a social marketing and advertising service,
in July 2012. A month later, Facebook announced it was buying Threadsy,
the creator of a social media influence measurement tool called Swaylo.

Choosing Tools by Function

A plethora of other tools exist to help with social analytics. The
choices of which to use are typically governed by the business (or
other) goals someone wants to achieve, along with the size and budget of
the organization.

Enterprise software giants such as Oracle and SAP offer more
expensive, but also powerful tools for monitoring, measuring, analyzing
and engaging on social media. Increasingly, these activities are being
unified into integrated software suites to make data handoff easier and
to simplify social media management for those doing it.

These large, integrated enterprise software suites tend to be so
expensive that they’re cost prohibitive for many individuals, sole
proprietors and small businesses. But there are plenty of less expensive
— even free options –available.

It’s best to start by defining your goals and then consider how each of
the different types of analytical tools might help achieve them. Tools
often are classified by their function, including:

Social media monitoring — These scour conversations
occurring in social media and typically look for the keywords and
phrases you’re interested in the most. For that reason, they’re called
“listening” tools. Businesses use them to track how often their
products, services and company names are mentioned, along with those of
their competitors. Another common use is simply to track trends in a
particular field or industry.
An important part of the monitoring process is thinking smartly about
what you’re hearing and seeing so you can identify what to measure and
how to engage, which are the next steps. Focus on identifying keywords
that people are using in conversations (beyond obvious ones such as a
company’s brands and CEO and so forth) that seem relevant to particular
business goals.
Social media measurement — These tools also do monitoring
but add the capability of measuring and refining the data-crunching
based on filters and parameters. Many of these social metrics apps are
specific to a type of social media, such as Twitter or Facebook. Social
media measurement is often more effective if it’s done strategically
and incorporates lessons learned or insights gleaned from the listening
phase. That way, insights learned can be applied to target measurement
efforts wisely. Knowing what to measure can be tricky and involve
anything from simple mentions to more complex social media influence tracking. Learn more about social metrics.
Social media engagement — Tools that allow or help
automate communication across various social media platforms often are
called “engagement tools,” “social media management” tools, or simply
“social media dashboards.” The key function of “engagement” tools is
communication, meaning that they allow someone to log into a single
software program and then post updates or comments to various social
platforms, along with photos and videos. Read about the top 8 social media management tools.

The most powerful social analytics platforms combine all three steps of
engagement, monitoring and measurement into a single app.

Enterprise examples:

Salesforce integrated two social media monitoring tools, Radian6 and Buddy Media, into a solution it calls the Salesforce Marketing Cloud .
Oracle is integrating the three software services it bought–Involver, Collective Intent and Vitrue-into a single social analytics platform.
SAP has partnered with a leading social media database
warehouser, NetBase, to sell NetBase’s social media analytics services
and integrate them with SAP’s enterprise business intelligence apps.
NetBase is known for its massive data warehouse that contains a
rolling archive of social media conversations from the likes of
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the blogosphere, along with a gazillion
other social media sources.