Let Data Analytics Drive Your Social Media Activities, or Perish.

Social media came and it conquered, gripping modern humanity like an unshakeable fever!

It is no secret that the Holy Grail of marketing has always been creating an emotional engagement with the customers while focusing on ROIs. And now every business is trying to get leads through this incredibly huge platform.

We all know how big social media is. But what fun is it to get loads of comments and dozens of tweets if we don't know how to “hear” them? For this same reason, businesses are taking the help of tools to gain an insight into the minds of their consumers, because a flood of information is now available on various online platforms. This is not limited to knowing only the consumer, but also keeping a track of the competition.

What do WE want?

Undoubtedly, social media analytics is an extremely potent instrument to understand and absorb the customers' mindset. The first step towards achieving this would be to understand our business goals, our goals, our intentions behind being on social media, to figure out whether we want leads or brand recognition, and if social media is a short term tool for us or we plan to take a long-term plunge. Once the business goals have been identified, key performance indicators (KPIs) for objectively evaluating the data should be defined.

Who will analyze the data?

After these questions are jotted down, we will need to see what are we going to do with all this data. How will we store it, and how will we act on it? Gone are the days when we kept a college student on a part-time basis to scroll through our Twitter account. Today we need a whole orchestra of people to make sense of our social media interactions.

What then? How will analyzing data be useful?

It’s not enough to understand how many people have “liked” a Facebook status, clicked on a link, or “retweeted” your tweet, without having a sense of how many people saw and chose to — or not to — take that option. An insight into that is a must.

Let us start by taking the example of “listening tools”. What are they? Letting the name speak for itself, these tools will keep a tab on the conversations in social media and tend to look for those keywords that a business is actually interested in. As they say, "let us separate wheat from chaff .”

Social media analytics can also help you segment audience along demographic and geographic users too. Isn’t that cool? Keeping a human tab on the truckloads of daily interactions is an impossible feat.

But, hold on. There is a lot more to it than you can probably think of. You can also categorize your audience into actual users as well as potential users, including influencers, supporters and critics

Now this is an endless list. We can continue to wax eloquently on the uses of data analyzer tools, but let us pause and think about what would happen if we didn't have these tools? That would be an eye-opener!

If we didn't have these tools, would we have been able to get an insight into determining whether our customers are pursuing another brand or sticking to ours ? How would we have known what products and services our customers should have been offered, so as to keep them glued to our brand?

Be cautious!

The whole idea behind how much information these tools are capable of churning out is breathtaking, so before you get too overwhelmed by these magic tools, hear me out!

One thing you need to understand and remember well, is that the social landscape is always changing. Social media is basically a form of technology, and like any kind of technology, it’s always changing. And with this, the analytics tools change as well. So always keep an eye out for upcoming trends. Always.

Social media has the power to connect consumers with brands in a very big and powerful way. But we still need to know if that emotion is turning into profit. So do keep a tab on your ROIs always. Also make sure you don't use tools which merely churn out relentless amounts of data. Use tools that give you a clean view of your consumers, loyalists, critics, and competitors.

Undoubtedly, these tools will be game changers because of one simple reason: Today, every person is on some social platform or the other. Companies cannot ignore the power of social media. Without data analysis, all your social media activities will be like a stab in the dark and  it would be utter foolishness to commit your expensive resources without extracting any information from it.

So go for these tools, but make sure you do so in a goal-oriented and sensible way.