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What Is Social Analytics?
What Is Social Analytics?
Introduction | 01
Conclusion | 16
Introduction
Despite popular belief, the advent of social media hasn’t fundamentally
changed digital marketing. Tactics, nuances, and roles are different,
but the basic principles of marketing remain.
Where social media has most impacted digital marketing is in the
tremendous volume of public data it produces and the potential of
that data to provide marketing insights, much like we’ve seen with
web data.
Social analytics – the ability to discover and communicate meaningful
patterns from this social data – gives social marketers the opportunity
to grow and develop their programs, fuel the entire marketing
organization, and challenge assumptions more easily than they’ve
been able to do with other digital mediums. The vast and disparate
amount of data available to social marketers may make the process of
analysis more complicated than it is in other areas, but its breadth and
volume is also the reason it’s so valuable.
In this paper, we’ll define social analytics, how it fits into the social
marketing process, and the components needed to develop an
analytics-fueled social media strategy. We’ll explain where marketers
often miss an opportunity to both plan and strengthen their social
strategy by analyzing the necessary components.
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WHAT IS SOCIAL ANALYTICS?
PLAN
EXECUTE
MEASURE
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Audience Analysis
Audience analysis is the process of profiling, segmenting, and grouping
people by demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Audience analysis can be broken into two main categories with a
variety of analysis types that can inform strategy and tactics:
Behavior Analysis: Collecting insight about most influential
followers, engagement patterns, and sentiment, such as
negative feedback, for example.
Demographic Analysis: Collecting insight about user
characteristics by analyzing keyword and profile data.
Audience analysis can help marketers answer several questions:
• Who is engaging with their brand or a specific topic?
• What are the characteristics of their ideal follower/fan?
• How are their audience members engaging with their brand?
Social analytics allows users to target people for outreach or advertising,
align a social audience to the ideal customer, and craft the right content
at the right time to align with audience preferences.
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Conversation Analysis
Conversation analysis is the process of identifying and understanding
conversations surrounding your brand, specific topics, or any selected
area of interest.
Conversation analysis can frame the way marketers speak about
their own products and brand, how they interact with consumers by
leveraging the topics that are already being discussed, and which
tactics or conversations to avoid altogether.
Conversation analysis can help marketers answer a variety of questions:
Volume: How many people engaged in conversation about
a specific topic?
Sentiment: Were interactions positive or negative?
Relevance: Were the conversations able to give pertinent insight?
Influence: Were the people involved influential enough to push
the conversation to a broader audience?
Social analytics allows marketers to pull out aggregate and specific
findings from conversations, benchmarking and analyzing details to
help create and deliver a relevant brand story in the most meaningful
context.
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Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis is the process of looking at specific companies
within a chosen industry or segment, focusing on competitor activity,
benchmarks, and tactics to gain critical strategic insight.
Competitive analysis should be conducted on at least one of the
following sample sets:
Industry Competitors: Companies competing for the same
market share, customers, and dollars.
Aspirational Social Competitors: Brands from the same space,
or a similar one, that are operating effectively and can provide
guidance.
Once the set of companies is established, competitive analysis can
be used by marketers to answer specific benchmarking and tactical
questions:
• What is their brand’s share of audience or engagement within
the competitive set?
• Which tactics are competitors using that marketers can learn
from and use to set benchmarks?
Social analytics allows users to analyze and benchmark the competition
to pull out successful areas of focus and tactics that can be integrated
into a brand’s strategy.
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Brand Activities
Brand activities include the activities your brand conducts like publishing
content, responding to users, and promoting brand campaigns or
initiatives.
There are many types of analysis to be done around brand activities,
including campaign execution, posting volume and frequency, content
type, content attributes, network distribution, and audience targeting.
The goal of analyzing brand activities is to help marketers answer
several specific directional questions:
• Are they executing to plan?
• Are time and resources being dedicated to areas that are
aligned with the insight and intelligence gathered during
the planning process?
• Can they bring these activity metrics into their audience
engagement analysis as tactical baselines?
Social analytics needs to fulfill a specific use case here, helping
marketers measure, compare, and optimize the tactics being used.
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Audience Engagement
Audience engagement in the social analytics framework is the analysis
of how your brand activities and earned media are received, interacted
with, and amplified by your audience, both at a content-specific level
and a brand level.
When engagement analysis is used as a KPI (key performance indicator)
for a successful tactic in concert with analysis of brand activities, it
can provide valuable insight in several areas, including content and
campaign performance, amplification and reach, sentiment, network
performance, or volume and reach.
The goal of analyzing engagement is to help marketers answer several
specific directional questions:
• Are specific brand tactics working less effectively than anticipated?
• What can we change to increase audience engagement?
• What are we doing well, that our audience is responding
positively to?
• Are time and resources being spent on the right content,
networks, and audiences? Does the strategic approach need
to be adjusted?
Social analytics allows users to gain insights about how their audience
has interacted with their brand message, benchmark against other
companies and time periods, and gain understanding about their
tactics and content performance.
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Business Results
The most difficult, and most valuable, component of social analytics is the ability
to measure social’s impact on both direct outcomes like engagement and traffic,
broader marketing outcomes like brand loyalty and customer lifetime value, and
business outcomes like revenue and sales.
The topic of “Social ROI” has been a hot one for some time now. Marketers feel
unequipped to define the ROI of their social programs, but the ability to integrate
social data with other channels is growing and, while social marketing at many
companies may not equate directly to a revenue figure, there are many ways to tie
social programs to business results. These include measuring website traffic, foot
traffic, customer lifetime value, brand loyalty, brand awareness, customer support,
and other sales metrics.
The goal of analyzing business impact is to help marketers answer several specific
questions:
• What tactics and campaigns are most effective for the business?
• Does the business see the right return on the investment of these tactics
and campaigns?
• Can marketers prove the value of social media to the organization, and how
does it stack up compared to other marketing channels and tactics?
• Is this strategy the right one for the impact their trying to make?
In this regard, social analytics needs to integrate social data with other marketing
and sales channels, tying social media initiatives directly to down-funnel activities,
workflows, and sales metrics.
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Conclusion
Social media is a core component of digital marketing and, as social
marketers are under mounting pressure to show value, tie activities to
business goals, and drive results with their programs, the emerging
category of social analytics is at the core of the social marketing process.
Using social analytics as the basis for planning a complete strategy and
measuring the outcomes of that strategy’s execution is now a fundamental
component to developing successful social programs, understanding the
value of those programs, and driving real results.
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The Fundamentals
of Social Planning
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