Digital marketing’s tactical nature allows you to build a personal camaraderie between a brand and its customer. Effectuating a purchase is no longer the only goal. Every brand is leveraging social media to foster brand loyalty alongside brand messaging and fan/follower amplification.
- Social media has changed the way companies do business. The indirect way has been through accurate insights on regular and smart data, which you compile from analytics.
- The direct way is through a purchase button, which is now increasingly available and popular on social networks.
So, social media intelligence is the ability to understand or learn things or deal with difficult or new situations. Hence, reporting on social media data is not intelligence, per se. You catapult it to that status when you learn something from the data. You need to understand the difference between social media intelligence and monitoring.
- Social networks generate loads of data every day. Many brands quite rightly scan the data for information impacting them.
- Monitoring helps you to know the sentiment/feedback towards your brand or the number of mentions it’s fetching.
- Social media monitoring is imperative for big and small brands. If a business receives over 4,000 mentions with a good sentiment, it’s a positive data point to underline and report on.
- However, it doesn’t underscore the reasons. You need deeper data analysis to pull in further points from different sources.
On the implementation
For today’s marketers, social media intelligence is a mandatory tool. You already use a number of social media platforms for engaging fans and followers, finding influencers, and tracking and bolstering your online reputation.
- However, there’s much more you can do with social media. Numerous brands are actually missing out on great scopes to detect opportunities and trends, source resources and inspiration for products and campaigns in the future, and find proper customer/audience tribes.
- Social media has become a hotbed of insights. Consumer insights are much more than mere demographics and touchpoints like age and gender.
- They can elucidate shared sentiments and interests for certain products.
- For instance, insights can tell food companies exactly what vegetarian consumers want from different markets.
- With proper understanding and infographics, brands can develop relevant marketing modalities, prepare advertising budgets, and assess and select social media influencers.
- You can even develop new ranges of products. In each case, social data provides a thorough and accurate picture of the customer’s voice, helping brands to find new solutions to complicated issues.
Gathering social media intelligence
Adding merit to your report by attaching intelligence layers starts with thinking why and asking relevant questions. For starters, you need data that API from Application Protocol Interface collects. By compiling this captured data and overlaying the same with multiple data points, you will merge it with metrics. It occurs in phases.
- Phase 1 is to listen. You collect your data and organize it in a simple and standardized way to make it manageable. In stage 1, it’s likely that you’ll start understanding social media intelligence’s potential, but you won’t figure out the way of tracking the patterns and conversations pertaining to your brand.
- This is where you start brand awareness. It includes tracking your brand’s online mentions, competitor analysis, and industry keywords.
- The best way to ensure this is to figure out the correct dashboard that provides a prismatic view of your online presence.
- Phase 2 is to start the analysis. When you have a better understanding of data and how you can analyze it, you can use it for multiple functions.
- This stage necessitates a solid hold of social media analytics and awareness, with people understanding the analytics.
- In this phase, you learn using social data to track your online campaigns and measure their performance across social channels.
- Phase 3 is advanced analytics and phase 4 is incorporation.
Modalities of monitoring tools
Most social media monitoring tools perform by continuously crawling and navigating sites, and indexing and underlining them. They crawl some in real-time, for example, Twitter. They may crawl other sites less frequently. Some tools integrate data providers.
After indexing the sites, you can search for all of them. Many tools incorporate some type of search strings or queries, which the user needs. It subsequently brings the mentions back into the interface of the tool. You can then read, dice, and slice the material.
- Some important pointers are that social media monitoring doesn’t just encompass social networks. In fact, most of them crawl every type of website and monitor media.
- It includes news sites, blogs, review sites, forums, and others. The coverage obviously varies between regions and tools. Hence, you need to do your homework when assessing different tools.
- You need to remember that some sites have stringent rules.
- When you have a wide range of social operators to write queries, your users can find more specific content.
- They can exclude other things and thwart spams or spammy content and mentions from the search results.
Choosing a tool
Small brands often ask about payment matters regarding social media monitoring tools. You do have free tools too. But you need to realize that you get only what you pay for. While you can get free likes and followers from Blastup.com, you need to channelize that traffic for your sales.
- Speed and accuracy are extremely important. Social data is futile if it’s not accurate. The ability to converse in multiple languages, entailing emojis and slangs is critical to the context.
- The ability to discern the analyze the emotion/sentiment behind images and posts is equally pivotal. You need to know it in real-time.
- AI analytics is so popular today because brands cannot afford to waste time and money on inconsistent results.
- Integration is also very crucial for social media monitoring. It’s an ongoing study to track your current baseline.
It only functions properly when you sync it with other methods and modalities, which include social media listening. In addition to this, you may want to engage again with your customers to select social scheduling software. You may also combine CRM and auxiliary data.
Brands need a social monitoring tool that can syncopate with the tools already in use.