Social media means big business for a lot of brands. Many companies jump into social media outlets with great gusto and litter the place with ethusiastic diatribes about how great they are. They release tweets with no greater value proposition than “try our great product now”, and then they wonder why their social media efforts are not returning an impressive ROI.
What these brands fail to realize is that in social media listening and engaging are the most potent ingredients. Social media begs brands to be part of the conversation around their brands and around those topics that are the most important to their target market.
This concept was broken down quite well in “The 5 W’s of Social Media Listening“, which highlights the questions an organization must know so that they can listen and engage appropriately. They are:
- Who is talking about you or your products?
- What are your stakeholders saying about you?
- Where are the conversations happening about you and your products?
- When are they talking about you?
- Why are they talking about you?
Sound easy enough? Not so much. Let’s take some random brands and gauge their recent impressions via Twitter:
- Hershey: 21,494 impressions
- Sony: 29,853 impressions
- Ford: 34,907 impressions
- Whole Foods: 87,902 impressions
- Verizon: 115,765 impressions
When you add in impressions gained from the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., it is easy to see that no mere mortal could be responsible for deeply listening and engaging this mass of impressions. However, they can do so quite easily with help from analytics.
The Art of Listening Deeply
The power of analyzing big masses of data can kick a company’s social media ROI into overdrive. This is now possible through business intelligence tools that dive into big data through text analytics. Text analytics is the art of deriving relevant information from unstructured text. In the healthcare industry text analytics is used to diagnose disease . In the music industry, text analytics are being use to find the next hot artist among social media buzz.
If this technology can be used as physician’s assistant and talent scout, then just think about what it can do for your brand. End users can view social data through a dashboard that tracks intelligence in near real-time along with key social media metrics. This social media data can also be integrated with existing marketing data to improve marketing efforts, target specific markets, or improve customer service efforts.
I completely agree that text analysis is probably one of the most important things when it comes to listening in social media. I use Sysomos’ (my employer) text analytics all the time. By using a few simple tools I’m able to get a big picture about what people are talking about without having to read through thousands of tweets and blog posts.
If someone can use text analytics properly, they could really get to the heart about what their community/audience is talking about in regards to them/their industry/their competition. Understanding this big picture coming from thousands of people at once can sometimes be more powerful than trying to respond to every piece of social media that you think may have to do with you. Sometimes though.
Choosing a social media monitoring tool with powerful text analytic capabilities should be on everyone’s mind when looking for these tools.
Cheers,
Sheldon, community manager for Sysomos