What Is Social Analytics?...Turning Insight into Strategy Armed with insight about their audience,...

What Is Social Analytics?

1 simplymeasured.com

IntroductionDespite 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.

Introduction | 01

The Social Marketing Process | 02

Why Marketers Need Social Analytics | 03

The Two Core Functions of Social Analytics | 04

Planning: Defining a Social Strategy | 05

Audience Analysis

Conversation Analysis

Competitive Analysis

Measurement: Optimizing Social Tactics | 11

Brand Activities Analysis

Audience Engagement Analysis

Business Impact Analysis

Turning Insight into Action | 15

Conclusion | 16


The Social Marketing ProcessOptimizing a social plan starts with analyzing tactics and execution, as it would in any marketing channel. Modern marketers don’t have to make purely qualitative decisions. The data available for any digital channel arms marketers with the ability to quantify their entire social marketing process.

Social marketers have three distinct needs to address in order to develop effective programs and campaigns. These needs are not unique to social marketing, but instead mirror the needs of any other type of marketing:

1. The ability to define and plan a social strategy.

2. The ability to execute on that strategy.

3. The ability to measure and optimize campaigns and tactics.

No marketing strategy is complete without coming full circle from planning to measurement. In order to execute tactics, marketers have to plan a strategy and, in order to plan, they have to understand how their tactics make an impact on their plan and goals.

PLAN

EXECUTE

MEASURE

WHAT IS SOCIAL ANALYTICS?



Why Marketers Need Social AnalyticsSocial analytics is a critical step in the social marketing process, allowing marketers to plan and measure the actions they take to execute on their social strategy.

But, creating an effective process for analysis in both the planning and measurement categories remains a challenge for most marketers.

According to a recent CMO Survey, social media budgets are expected to increase by 128% over the next five years, but only 15% of marketers report that they know how to show the impact of social using quantitative approaches.

A complete social analytics process helps marketers understand the impact of their social strategy. It gives marketers access to the information, analysis, and insight necessary to plan their strategy, measure their performance, optimize their tactics, and tie social activity to larger business outcomes. In addition, it helps them understand how to use that insight in constructive ways.

PLAN

EXECUTE

MEASURE

A recent CMOSurvey.org poll found that only 15% of marketers believe they can qualitatively prove the impact of their social media programs.


The Two Core Functions of Social AnalyticsAs the CMO Survey suggests, most marketers don’t have a well-defined approach to social analytics. They haven’t had access to the information and insight needed to plan and measure correctly on their social marketing tactics, so their process has simply been to use what’s readily available, or ignore the process of analysis all together. This isn’t optimal and wouldn’t be acceptable in other marketing channels.

As the category of social analytics has formalized, the expectations of what the process should cover has grown to include a wider set of needs and enable both the planning and measuring components of the social marketing process outlined above.

Social analytics informs the planning process with intelligence from several different components of a brand’s social ecosystem, and the measurement process by enabling a brand to understand the impact of its own activities on its audience and business objectives.

For the purposes of this paper, we’ll look at the full scope of social analytics and how it enables marketers to find success in both the planning and measurement processes.



Planning: Defining Social StrategyExecuting effective social media programs and campaigns requires data-driven planning. Analytics in the planning category involves collecting insight and intelligence about a broader social ecosystem, focusing outward instead of on your specific brand activities to define strategic initiatives.

Planning within social media marketing is composed of three key types of analysis.

Using just one of these components as a basis for social strategy is an ineffective way of operating and leaves out crucial information. By combining all three, marketers gain a holistic view of their social landscape.

The outcome of the planning process, when done effectively, is a set of goals and tactics that relate directly to business objectives and follow the S.M.A.R.T. criteria, first introduced by marketing thought leader Peter Drucker in 1981.

S.M.A.R.T. defines an effective goal as one that is specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. In the context of social analytics, each goal and outcome of the planning practice should fit into the S.M.A.R.T. framework.

Is the goal well-defined? Does it align with overall business objectives in a way that is clear to leadership?

How is success or failure of this goal defined? What are the tactics associated with this goal, and what is the point where a pivot or optimization is needed?

Specific

Measurable


Audiences Conversations Competitors


Each of the three categories of analysis - audiences, conversations, and competitors - has unique components but, in concert, they are essential to forming a social strategy, including tactics necessary to achieve those goals.

Is this goal even possible? Is the goal aligned with an understanding of the audience and interest around the product or initiative?

Does this goal fit with overall business objectives in a scalable and manageable way?

What is the time frame for this goal? When have other brands in the same space reached similar objectives?

Attainable

Realistic

Time-Bound



Audience AnalysisAudience 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.



Conversation AnalysisConversation 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.



Competitive AnalysisCompetitive 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.



Turning Insight into StrategyArmed with insight about their audience, competitors, and relevant conversations, a social marketer is able to transform their social planning into a more sophisticated process than the current status quo, simply by organizing the information gleaned through their analysis. They are now ready to complete the following these steps, which help them sort through their findings and develop a complete strategy and action plan.

Aggregate: Compile the insights gained from each of the three areas of analysis. For example, marketers can organize and group information about conversations with similar insights about audience segments and competitors.

Align: Align this newly aggregated insight with overall business and marketing objectives then develop tactical roadmaps based on the desired outcomes, best practices, and realistic goals gleaned from the analysis.

Prioritize: Prioritize the goals and tactics based on relevance to company and department objectives, the amount of resources needed, and the likelihood of a desired outcome.

Implement: Equipped with data-driven goals and tactics that are aligned with company objectives and weighted for optimal success, begin acting to the newly developed plan.



Measurement: Optimizing Social TacticsMeasuring tactical execution is essential to understanding and optimizing social media programs.

Social analytics in the measurement category involves understanding the relationship between our brand activities, audience engagement, and business results.

The outcome of the measurement and optimization process, when done effectively, is a complete understanding of how brand tactics impact audience engagement and drive real business value. This insight can then be used to alter, improve, or change the tactics and execution decided upon during the planning process.

When analyzing social execution, it’s important to start with what the brand controls.

Brand Activities

Audience Engagement

Business Results



Brand ActivitiesBrand 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.



Audience EngagementAudience 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.



Business ResultsThe 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.



Turning Insight into ActionArmed with insight about their brand activities, audience engagement, and business impact, a social marketer is able to understand the impact of their brand’s social programs, simply by organizing the information gleaned through their analysis. Social marketers are now ready to use this insight in a variety of ways:

Prove Success: Both within the social team, and to the broader marketing department and organization, social marketers are now able to quantify whether or not their social programs are successful.

Discover What Works: By analyzing audience engagement and business impact, marketers are able to identify successful tactics so they can invest more in specific areas.

Discover What Doesn’t Work: On the other side of that coin, this analysis allows marketers to understand what isn’t working so they can abandon those tactics and focus on other areas of their social plan.

Develop Additional Hypotheses: When something hasn’t worked, the data and insight now available gives marketers the ability to develop and test new tactics and actions.

Modify and Execute Again: Above all, this process allows marketers to make the necessary changes and execute the plan again so they can measure it once more and continue to optimize.



ConclusionSocial 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.


Simply Measured is the most complete social analytics solution, empowering marketers with unmatched access to their social data to more clearly define their social strategy and to optimize their tactics for maximum impact.

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