Last month, Hootsuite announced the launch of Hootsuite Impact and Hootsuite Value Realization services to help enterprises understand how to best measure and maximize the business impact of their investment in social media. In February 2017, the leading social media management platform acquired LiftMetrix, a social media ROI solutions provider for mobile. Nik Pai, the co-founder and CEO at LiftMetri, spoke to MarTech Series on how marketers can leverage social media analytics to improve B2B engagements and impact the company’s bottom line.

MTS: What is the inspiration behind Hootsuite Impact?

Nik: Hootsuite Impact is the logical evolution of LiftMetrix. Given the growing need for full-stack social media solutions and the demand for transparent, measurable social media efforts that can map back to business impact, we saw opportunities for deeper integration with Hootsuite. In one platform, marketers can now execute, measure, and evaluate their social initiatives.

MTS: How can marketers leverage Hootsuite Impact to generate more ROI?

Nik: Hootsuite Impact is integrated into the HootSuite Platform to give organizations a complete view of their owned, earned, and paid social initiatives in one dashboard. It integrates with web analytics solutions like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, along with business intelligence (BI) tools such as Tableau so marketers can track the effects of social media not just on their own accounts, but horizontally across the greater social sphere and vertically into the company’s own systems. With Hootsuite Impact, marketers will be empowered to identify, measure, and track campaigns in order to dedicate time and resources efficiently, and deliver the largest impact to the bottom line.

MTS: Is Hootsuite Value Realization a part of Hootsuite Impact? Should CMOs have Hootsuite Impact and Hootsuite VR, both, in their social media stack?

Nik: Hootsuite Value Realization is a separate consultation service. Our team of experts will assess a client’s needs, people, processes, and technology, then create a measurement framework for their social strategy that aligns with their goals. We will then help to strategize and track performance to maximize ROI on social. Value Realization and Hootsuite Impact work hand in hand to help measure and maximize social ROI.

MTS: How do you see social media technologies integrating with content marketing campaigns?

Nik: Social is a great way to amplify and sustain the conversation around great content. 72% of the general public trust social media content shared by friends and family, according to a global study by Edelman. Leveraging the team to share branded content establishes thought leadership and encourages their contacts to start conversations.

MTS: What are the metrics that social media marketers should focus on to measure real-time
social media performance?

Nik: One of the greatest opportunities with social analytics today is the ability to go beyond vanity metrics and link back to ROI. Each organization will have different metrics that best measure social’s impact on their bottom line, but engagement metrics such as video watch time, comments, shares, tags, and conversion metrics such as app installs and purchases can be valuable indicators of social media performance.

MTS: Brand Safety and reputation management on social media are the biggest challenges for marketers today. How should marketers maintain and mitigate risks around their social media campaigns?

Nik: According to analyst firm, Forrester, 81% of global businesses are concerned / very concerned about brand and reputational risk. However, marketers cannot afford for their organizations to not be on social in this day and age. An organization CAN be on social securely through a sound engagement, monitoring, and security strategy.

MTS: What are your thoughts on bots used to engage audiences in social media? Does Hootsuite Impact measure bot interactions as well?

Nik: Chatbots have tremendous potential to humanize the customer experience. For instance, Public service chatbots in APAC such as Bus Uncle have seen millions of messages to date and can deliver real-time transport information. Hootsuite Impact can measure any social account, enabling companies to identify points of automation and gauge feedback on a chatbot.

MTS: Bots versus Human Interactions: How do you see marketing campaigns losing their ROI due to mismatched analytics in real-time conversations?

Nik: There are as many breakpoints as there are parts in the marketing funnel. Tags or tracking pixels could misfire, leading to inaccurate attribution. That means the wrong campaign could be credited for results, or an inaccurate ROI amount could be credited. These errors would hinder the decision-making process.

MTS: Hootsuite Impact performs Competitor Benchmarking. Can Hootsuite measure the performance of Influencers and Brand Advocates too? 

Nik: Competitor Benchmarking can track competitors, but customers are free to use the feature to track other accounts from influencers to brand advocates for a high-level overview. For day-to-day mentions and campaign tracking, Hootsuite’s main platform enables marketers to directly reply to mentions and track link clicks on the ow.ly shortener.

MTS: Leadership Hack: How can marketers use Hootsuite Impact to best leverage their influencer networks?

Nik: One of the features I am most proud of is our social auto-tagger. As marketers, we are always struggling to identify which content will generate the most buzz within our own networks. Imagine if everytime you posted content, a system could automatically understand what that content is about, measure the performance against your business goals, and then give you insights on which themes perform the best with your audience. This is what we built and it enables every leader to be data-driven in their approach to content creation and syndication.

MTS: In 2017, what are the 5 Marketing Technologies for social media that you think every marketer should be familiar with?

Nik: – Social Media Listening solutions using AI or machine learning to filter the most relevant signals —

– Business Intelligence tools that help tie the value of social media to business results
– Tools to enable your entire company w/social ie- Amplify. The future is in enabling social across the entire enterprise.
– Social advertising tools that leverage social data ie- using Marketo/CRM data to inform social ad campaigns and vice versa
– Technology that enables a unified view of the customer ie- CRM integrations with social relationship platforms
– Influencer marketing platforms that help customers to discover and activate relationships with influential creators

MTS: How do you see Artificial Intelligence impacting Social Media Marketing technologies? Does Hootsuite Impact leverage AI in anyway? Does Hootsuite plan to use AI in the future?

Nik: Artificial intelligence is a hot topic these days and you see it being defined in many ways. To me, artificial intelligence is the ability to perform tasks that previously required human intelligence. In social media, there are a number examples of this – from sentiment analysis, image recognition of brands to classification systems for tagging.

In Hootsuite Impact, we use AI in a number of ways, from how we auto-tag content to providing natural language insights that explain your performance on social media as if an analyst wrote it. Making marketers more data-driven in their decision making is a core focus of ours and AI will play a huge role in that.

MTS: What was the most outstanding social media campaign that you led or were part of? How did it shape up? What are the key lessons from that campaign that you would want every marketer/CEO to take note of?

Nik: When we first launched our Google Analytics integration, we worked with one of our alpha customers to help them measure the overall business results of their most recent social media campaign which was around driving bookings on their website using different coupon codes and offerings.

Up to that point, they were just doing social for the sake of doing social. We advised them to start using Google Analytics UTM parameters. Quickly, they realized that social was actually driving significant revenue and could even understand which coupon codes/offerings were doing the best.

They then started to buy ads to generate more ROI. We saw them use the data around offerings to then optimize their offerings on other marketing channels which they told us helped to generate even more ROI for them.

It was awesome to see them mature on social media so quickly and being a key player in that transformation.

The key lessons from the campaign are that social media can drive direct business value and the insights you learn from your social media campaigns can be used to optimize ROI in other areas of the business as well.

MTS: What startups within martech are you watching/keen on right now?

Nik: The risk of phishing, malware, scams and other challenges that could affect a company’s social accounts and brand safety is very real today. Cyber security solutions for social media is a fast-growing field as marketers look to prevent issues before they happen. ZeroFox is one fast-rising startup providing cyber security for social media. Within three years of founding, they have already been named by Forrester as a leader in digital risk monitoring.

As the number of marketing channels grows, the content funnel is also becoming more complex. Content management solutions such as Opal can bridge the gap between strategy and execution. By integrating a multitude of marketing and content tools, they’re enabling teams to harmonize messaging and reach billions.

MTS: We recently did a piece — Modern Marketers Awry About Turning into Data Scientists! What is your opinion on this?

Nik: Data-driven marketing is a tremendous opportunity for APAC. Combined with significantly lower advertising costs, there is much more room for APAC marketers to innovate. Where marketers in other regions have a learning curve, there is an opportunity in APAC to show how data analytics can make marketing more creative and transparent.

MTS: Tag the one Martech CEO/CMO who you would like to see featuring on our TechByte
Series: (Twitter/LinkedIn handle)

Nik:  James C. Foster, CEO, ZeroFox

MTS: Thank you, Nik for answering all the questions. We look forward to having you very soon at MarTech Series for more insights.

Stay tuned for more on business insights on video ad tech, programmatic and header-bidding technology market.

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