Primer: What is Social Media Intelligence in 2018?

This Is a Primer on Social Media Intelligence and Its Role in a CMO’s Stack in 2018.

Every social media network relies on certain metrics to measure their social media success. Each of these social media metrics plays a critical role in the modern marketing strategy. Global brands utilize social media marketing tools to engage their customers effectively, informing them about the products and services accurately and with better relevance. Companies not using social media analytics for their marketing campaigns find it harder to connect to their online customers, leading to a vortex of unaligned marketing campaigns. This is both costly and ineffective from a CMO’s perspective.

Therefore, you should know the true state of Social Media Intelligence. This is a primer on social media intelligence and its role in a CMO’s stack in 2018.

What is Social Media Intelligence?

Social Media Intelligence refers to tools and technologies that allow marketing teams to accurately monitor social conversations and channels, to respond to social signals and to synthesize data points into insights to better understand a consumer’s social media behavior. Social media intelligence tools allow marketers to collect information on a trend or brand from both open and closed social networks.

Social Media Intelligence is universally defined as, “The management and analysis of customer data from social sources, used to activate, measure and recalibrate marketing and business programs.”

According to Talkwalker– Social Media Intelligence allows you to act on your insights and work towards becoming a social data-driven business based on the conclusions derived from your social media reporting.

According to Brandwatch– The Social Media Intelligence stack incorporates four levels: social listening, data management, advanced analytics and distribution. At each of the levels is a unique set of technologies that empower businesses’ ability to make socially informed decisions.

Also Read: Have Facebook and Google Done Enough to Restore Advertiser Trust?

Why Social Media Intelligence?

Social media intelligence takes a deeper dive into the ‘listening’ tools of social media, which go beyond the ‘retweets’, ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ and actually depict the real show of what consumers feel and think of brands. Organizations can leverage this information and take advantage of this. The key to making the most out of social media is ‘listening’ to what your audience, competitors or the market in general think of you.

Some of the key takeaways from Social Media Intelligence include:

Segmentation of Audience:

A huge part of understanding social intelligence refers to texts that can be scanned and interpreted for sentiment and emotion, which may be positive or negative. Social media intelligence allows users to be broken into more than just the basic demographics of age and gender, but it also focuses on tapping into the right audience. This greatly helps marketers create advertising and social media campaigns, which further push this to the right people who want the message and are responsive to it.

Analysis of Trends:

Keeping a keen eye out for developing trends in the market is every good marketer’s responsibility. Trends always assist marketers in creating products that the customers find an interest in thus driving sales and engagement. Social intelligence helps marketers in understanding the key metrics related to a new trend and how it could be leveraged to suit a customer’s satisfaction.

Also Read: Are You Pinterested Yet? User-Generated-Content Is Going to Transform Online Advertising

Competitive Intelligence:

Marketers can either keep an eye on their competitors through Google, Twitter etcetera or play smart and use Social media intelligence tools to do the same, simplified. Employing a social media intelligence platform shall provide real-time insights and comparisons on everything related to the competitor. Other factors like consumer awareness and perception will be in the limelight and shall help a marketer dive into what the audience actually expects, wants and perceives.

Customer Retention:

The consistently-changing nature of social media platforms makes customer-retention tricky. With social media intelligence, insights are provided to marketers about woes related to a product or service that customers deal with. Social media intelligence steps in to create effective strategies related to customer satisfaction and retention.

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Influencer Identification:

Social media brings its users directly into contact with influential people that make an impact on the services/products a brand provides. Be it fashionistas, food bloggers, twitteratis or martech experts; the social sphere is constantly evolving at a rapid pace. Social media intelligence platforms help brands zero down the most influential voices in online conversations. This helps fill the gap between a brand’s customers and the influential social media world.

Brand Analysis:

Each brand speaks of their own culture and value, and marketing teams are constantly trying to decipher strategies which help a brand stand out amongst the crowd. Social intelligence takes brand analysis to another level by offering marketing teams the in-depth analytics and real-time insights of the digital ecosystem. An honest understanding of emotions likes and dislikes about the brand and its standing in the market can be duly noted.

Social Intelligence and its abilities have the power of bringing marketing to the next level. Monitoring trends of the past and the present make it important to marketing professionals who can finally measure responses and understand results like never before.

Also Read: 5 Reasons Why Social Media Influencers are the Future of Digital Marketing

Social Media Listening Tools

Key to making the most out of social media intelligence is by gathering data- but to gather this data, powerful social media intelligence tools are required. These tools monitor everything about user behavior by tracking relevant hashtags, keywords, URLs and more. While looking for a social media listening tool, it is always smart to try out a couple of them and then settle on the one that matches your needs.

Below are the most renowned choices for functionality and analysis —

HootSuite

HootSuite is an extremely popular, free social media listening tool that covers multiple social media platforms like LinkedIn, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Foursquare. It is known for its ability to manage social media accounts by scheduling posts across various platforms. It is also extremely useful to delegate tasks when one or more people are handling tasks.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a great content tool for research, and it is also a great tool for analyzing activity pages on Facebook. The monitoring of metrics around each individual post is Buzzsumo’s best capability of understanding what each content page holds and how well it performs. Buzzsumo tells you which posts work best, the best time of the day to post and the monthly stats that follow.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is the social media listening tool for beginners since it is extremely easy to set up and understand. With Google Alerts, you can monitor the web for content that is popular, for content with specific mentions of your brand, competitors, and even trends. Creating an account with Google Alert will also assist you with email notifications about new topics, blogs, newsletters, forums etcetera that interest you.

TweetReach

TweetReach is an incredible tool for Twitter which aids you with figures as to how far your Tweets travel. It measures the implications and the impact of every social media discussion related to Tweets. It also helps direct your account to the right people after surveying your most influential followers. With TweetReach, you can target the right crowd and possibly achieve better results.

Keyhole

Keyhole tracks the specific keywords, mentions and the most influential people who engage with your brand. Keyhole helps in reaching out by promoting content and increasing brand reach. The social analytics dashboard for Keyhole is easy to read and share. Keyhole’s real-time dashboard shows how many retweets, hashtags, likes people have posted and it also shows the impressions a campaign is generating.

Why incorporate Social Media Intelligence into business?

There are unique set of technologies such as social listening, data management and advanced analytics which contribute to the power of Social Media Intelligence. Social Media Intelligence for every aspect of business can make an impact on fields related to R&D, HR policies, marketing, sales and customer service. The most important thing for brands using Social Media Intelligence requires them to effectively capture information garnered and sourcing it to all the departments involved. This incorporates brand engagement based on best marketing analytics, social media intelligence and monitoring of trends and posting.

Also Read: The World Beyond Social Media