• Social media is wildly popular with consumers and as a result, many businesses are starting to develop a presence on social media services like Facebook and Twitter. However, many businesses still struggle with understanding how to leverage consumer insights from these services to drive business decisions. They’re intimidated by the sheer volume of social data, and aren’t sure what to do about it.
• Companies that do have an analytics program are often operating it on an ad-hoc basis rather than making an effort to integrate social insights with existing sourcing of consumer data. In doing this, they’re failing to make holistic decisions and missing out on valuable consumer and competitive insights.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• Social analytics are indispensable in gaining real-time insights across marketing, sales, and customer service. SMBs can use social analytics to gain valuable consumer insights at a significantly lower expense than traditional forms of market research.
• The greatest value from social analytics comes when organizations marry social data sources with other forms of customer information, such as point-of-sale data, customer surveys, focus groups, and psychographic profiles.
• Social analytics must be integrated with your broader BI program for maximum effect. Consider creating a Customer Insights Center of Excellence (CICOE) to serve as a one-stop shop for both traditional and social customer analytics.
• IT has an invaluable role to play in helping to govern and manage the analytics program. A best-of-breed Social Media Management Platform is the key enabling technology for conducting analytics, and IT must assist with selection, implementation and operation of this solution.
• Internal social analytics is an emerging field that allows you to gauge the sentiment of your employees, while turbocharging ideation and feedback processes. Social networking analysis is particularly valuable for internal analysis.

Impact and Result

• Understand the value of a social analytics program and the various departmental use cases – how social analytics improves decision making and boosts critical KPIs like revenue attainment and customer satisfaction.
• Determine the different social metrics (such as sentiment and frequency analysis) your business should be tracking and how to turn metrics into deep consumer insights.
• Follow a step-by-step guide for successfully executing a social analytics program across your organization.
• Roll out an internal analytics program to gauge the sentiment of your employees, improve engagement, and understand informal influencer networks.