Social Media Analytics trends to watch out for in 2016

Though we are already in the end of Q1’16, however it’s still worth to focus on some of the crucial social media analytics trends and happenings that will be leveraged by businesses around the world.

The year 2016, which can also be termed as the year of ‘improved data-informed decision making’, expects certain revolution around how can social media data be consumed in an improved manner to relate with specific business needs and not at generic need level. If we look-back in 2015, we observed lot of focus on “Sophistication”, “Customization” and “Innovation” within the social media analytics space, and it is more likely to see the developments around these areas in 2016 as well, along with the additional focus on “Collaboration”, “Integration” and “Automation” to provide a better and personalized products, services and experiences across industries.

Let’s quickly recall what we had anticipated in 2015 along with what we will experience in 2016:

• Sophistication of analytics platforms and dashboards: Overcoming the challenges to meet the real demand from the marketers
  • What we have seen in 2015:
    • Companies emphasized on the return on investment (ROI) from social media by relying on more sophisticated solutions on how to measure the engagement and conversion related performance more efficiently.
    • IBM’s release of beta version of Watson Analytics platform showed the ease-ability of data Exploration and Prediction using the platform without any pre-requisite knowledge of Predictive Analytics.
    • Already matured customers who were using social media analytics platform expected to drive and push the analytics companies (tool based) to launch more innovative and customized products for niche category or industry
  • What we can expect in 2016:
    • Watson Analytics will widen the opportunity for both marketers as well as analytics professionals to leverage the advanced analytics algorithms with a much more matured platform and with lot of enhancements and in-built use cases.
    • There is growing demand of tweaking and re-defining the existing metrics basis the business objectives and issues and not just what a tool can define and provide. So, this would require a lot of business intelligence along with human intelligence to come up with a better solution that businesses are expecting
    • Increased amount of out-of-the-box features and functionalities are on the rise across analytics platforms and users eventually expect more customized widgets and dashboards within the purchased license and not with any additional cost

• Deep-dive on User Profiling and Customer Data Analytics: To connect with individuals to offer more relevant and personalized products and services
  • What we have seen in 2015:
    • A growing demand was seen for deep-dive analytics on Customer Data to support the Affinity-based Targeting (e.g. Ad Marketing). This led to evaluating and identifying Customers based on their preferences, interests, hobbies, professions, etc.
    • But with a certain limitation to get the user information at an individual level from the various social media channels, the space is still open to explore.
  • What we can expect in 2016:
    • The demand for user profiling at an individual level has been increased by multifold. However, we still see lot of challenges w.r.t. demographics and other user centric data that matters a lot for marketers.
    • Marketers are still eagerly waiting for the right audience (most relevant), at the right place (most efficient channels to target) and at the right time (occasions, celebrations, etc.) to run the most efficient campaigns ever. This requires a tremendous amount of integration and automation which is going to be a major interest and area of focus in 2016.

• Social CRM/ Social Care is now leading towards “Personalized Social Care”: Bringing the right set of stakeholders to communicate with the customers directly that makes marketers more “Responsible”
  • What we have seen in 2015:
    • Social CRM was not restricted to only on Facebook and Twitter to connect with customers to resolve their queries and complaints. But there was a growing segment of customers who also go to various online complaint boards & forums to express their dissatisfactions. Realizing the need, marketers transformed their Social Customer Service model and implemented the right strategy to deal with customers across different platforms.
  • What we can expect in 2016:
    • In 2016 and going forward, we expect that marketers will connect with customers via the most appropriate stakeholder who can directly talk to the customers to resolve issues. Thanks to the vendors who are emphasizing more on channelizing/ routing different types of complaints to the right set of stakeholders in the most appropriate manner.
    • Now customers demand appropriate communication from the authorized company representatives with the most appropriate solutions in social media. This will lead to a decrease in the workflow structure where the agents (resources from the service providers and not from the companies) who were responding on-behalf of the marketers, rather there will be an increase of workflow structures where companies put their own effort to connect with the customers.

Let us also quickly also look into the other key aspects that will drive the overall social media analytics space in 2016 and beyond.

Collaboration:

• Social Collaboration within an enterprise has been there but with a different objective to improve the productivity and performance of employees.
• But in the age of growing social media, we will look the other side of collaboration where different units and departments within an organization team-up and collaborate to improve the customer experience at various levels.
• For example, improving customer experience in the hospitality industry and the similar services industries has been a major focus. But now the players in these segments, leveraging social media to well connect with customers to provide a life-time experience in each of their stays/ travels through an improved collaborative effort and also utilizing the social & wearable technologies. Similarly, we can see how the patient experience has been improving and served better through proper social collaboration in across hospitals and patient care centers. On top that, analytics still play an important role to help the decision makes at different levels, to take the most appropriate decisions in a much faster way to make collaborative effort a successful one.

Integration:

• Wearable Technology and Social Media Integration: Apple Watch and Fitbit are the two leading examples of the potential for social media to integrate with wearables. A newly-unveiled Fitbit device called Blaze is set to compete with Apple, adding watch-like capabilities at a lower price point. The more and more wearable devices are in the use, more use cases are on rise w.r.t. social media as how can we track, monitor and take actions on the go!
• Growing demand for Social Media Command Center leading towards more integrations: As we speak, large organizations and responsible companies are focusing more on building social media command centers in premise. This eventually is driving the need of the hour – “more and more social media platform Integration to simplify the processes across Marketing, Customer Services and Analytics”

Automation

• We need to think differently when we speak about Automation. We already have realized the miserable consequences if in every aspects we try to automate things across social media activities. Most importantly, now a days, if we are communicating with customers, then just the automated/ curated content can create a negative impact. It really needs some personalization! However, at the same time, the automation is very important and also getting lot of attraction, when we talk about the simplifying different process across Marketing, Customer Services and Analytics.
• With respect to data visualization, we have few powerful tool that simplifies the process of bringing data points to make a sense out of it and to take action.
• With respect to social media data analytics, we are now able to use some of the available tools (like, Clarabridge, open source tools like R, etc.) to automate the process of reading and analyzing each of the data points and infer the best possible recommendations.
• Knowing that there are already lot of developments are in place (as discussed in above points), however, there are still some gaps which needs to filled through more automation. Saying this, we also understand that the Automation can be driven through more and more Integration

Hope the above points make sense in the real-time marketing and w.r.t. improved customer service with the help of social media analytics which continues to play the major role behind the scenes... and it will continue doing so!

Thanks and appreciate your time to read through this till the end. If you have any thoughts, please do not hesitate to put some words in the comment section. I will be glad if you can connect me on Twitter (@BeingAnalytics) or, drop me an email if you have any further queries/ideas to [email protected]