Social Media - Enagegement From Evolution to Suite or Point Solution

Social Media Research and Analytics

The New Face of Customer Engagement

What is Social Media?

“Online technologies and practices that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other”

Social media includes popular networking websites, like Facebook and Twitter; as well as bookmarking sites like Digg or Reddit. It involves blogging and forums and any aspect of an interactive presence which allows individuals ability to engage in conversations with one another, often as a discussion over a particular blog post, news article, or event. 

Evolution & Spread of Social Media

Expansion & outburst of social media enabled brands to outreach the end users directly from one point of action (POA). Embracing all traditional techniques of engaging end-users Social media is now considered as one of the most efficient platform to monitor & track the end customers minimizing the cost & effort involved in the process. Social Media assists marketeers to track the perception & preference of the buyers. It also facilitates in identifying the loyalists, switchers, prospects & existing user of a client’s brand.

What is considered to be a social media is now in the genes of every Individual around the nation and across the globe.

Evolution of social media over the past two decades, below are some of the most important mile-stones:

• 1989 – the first PC’s
• 1995 – the Web becomes accessible to anyone
• 1996 – Larry Page & Sergey Brin develop BackRub, which later becomes Google
• 1996 – icq and instant messaging
• 1999 – the ‘weblog’ is born, so is Blogger
• 2001 – Wikipedia is launched
• 2002 – RSS (Really Simple Syndication) introduced
• 2003 – MySpace launched as a social networking site
• 2004 – The birth of Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr
• 2005 – YouTube launched as a video sharing site, Bebo launched, Social commerce introduced by yahoo
• 2006 – Twitter reinvents online comms and news braking, Facebook opened to general public, YouTube acquired by Google, YouTube ads launched on site
• 2007 – Tumblr Launched
• 2008 – Facebook surpasses MySpace in number of users count
• 2009 – Facebook creates the ‘like’ button, Unfriend was the new Oxford American dictionary word of the year, YouTube reaches 1 Billion views per day
• 2010 – Twitter sponsored tweets launched, Facebook launched the Open Graph, Pinterest was born and in 2012 its importance grew rapidly
• 2011 – Google+ became alive, Snapchat came in to existence, Facebook launches Timeline, which later became mandatory for businesses
• 2012 – Facebook reaches 1 Billion users, acquired Instagram, Launches paid promoted posts, Pinterest becomes the fastest site in the history to break through the 10 Billion plus unique visitors mark, Google plus launches communities & events features
• 2013 - Instagram Video launched, YouTube Launches paid channels, Instagram introduced sponsored post advertising targeting US users in November, Twitter crossed 500 Million+ registered users mark with more than 200 million active, Yahoo acquires Tumblr
• 2014 - Facebook Turns 10, Ellen DeGeners’ Oscar selfie becomes most re-tweeted tweet of all times, Instagram introduced sponsored post advertising targeting UK users in September

Evolution of Social Media Analysis

With the aggressive occurrence of social media the concern of marketeers strained to track & identify their customers from a single point of action. Serval business heads have embraced this emerging gigantic platform & have also developed many methodologies & recommendations justifying the need of social media analysis, which encourages the practices to track the activity of each individual existing online & derive insight full marketing & business information.

Social Media Intelligence: As the name itself, outlines the scope of analysis involved. Social Media Intelligence is a process which refers to the collectives tools and solutions that allow organizations to monitor social channels and conversations, respond to social signals and synthesize social data points into meaningful trends and analysis based on the user's needs. Social media intelligence allows one to collect intelligence gathering from social media sites, using both intrusive and non-intrusive means, from open and closed social networks. Social Media Intelligence helps the marketeers to surveillance the brands on social networking platforms which enables in effective decision making right from brand voice engagement.

Social media monitoring: Process involved in Social media intelligence which refers to the active monitoring of social media channels for information about a company or organization. Several different providers have created tools to facilitate the monitoring of a variety of social media channels from blogging to internet video to internet forums.  This allows companies to track what consumers are saying about their brands and actions. Companies can then react to these conversations and interact with consumers through social media platforms.

What Is Social Media Marketing and Analytics?

Social media analytics comprises of the practice which gathers information from social networking streams such as Facebook and Twitter, as well as blogs, news feeds, and comments from rich media sites, to better understand customer attitudes and characteristics. This information informs social media marketing campaigns which use these same outlets as marketing channels. Social media marketing software automates the processes and activities associated with marketing campaigns geared toward these channels.

Social media creates new opportunities for companies that want to engage better with customers. Real time engagement, which binds customers to companies, can drive revenue gains and reduce the costs associated with customer churn. However, engagement through social media requires new ways to manage and understand customer interactions.

The key to properly managing social media customer interactions is to first listen to customers individually and then as a group. Using the data gathered by social media listening, correlated with other data from internal and external sources, it is possible to better understand customer wants, needs, and desires. From these insights, a marketing professional gains a full picture of how to best message to and approach a customer. The message then has to be deftly transmitted using compelling content delivered through social media channels, which allow the marketing professional to leverage the network amplification characteristics of the social media. Finally, the company has to continue to listen in order to modify and fine tune the message, gauge its effectiveness, and look for other effects that the message may generate.

In other words, social media marketing is like every other marketing campaign: It’s a process that needs to be monitored and managed. The difference is that the social media marketing process is iterative and can change and adapt more quickly than traditional marketing campaigns. Being this adaptive requires platforms that help marketing professionals properly design, initiate, and manage social media marketing campaigns as well as perform the social media analytics that allow for deep customer understanding and monitoring for the effectiveness of these campaigns. 

A Major Goal Is Engagement

Engagement seems to have become this year’s marketing buzzword. Customer engagement is a set of targeted activities with the goal of creating loyalty to a brand or product. That loyalty should, in turn, drive sales not only in the present but in the future as well. Even more important, companies hope that through peer engagement, loyalty will be passed along to others in a customer’s network.

This is nothing new, though; engaging customers in some fashion has always been the goal of marketing. The difference is the social networking methods used to engage with customers. Social media changes the engagement model from a passive model (in which sellers push messages to buyers hoping they feel a connection) to an active model. With active engagement, messaging is bi-directional. Social media helps companies to have active conversations with customers. Even more importantly, social media can drive active conversation between customers themselves, amplifying the effects of a message while leveraging a trusted source for messages.

Social media marketing platforms can manage these customer conversations individually and collectively at the same time. This is different from more traditional ways of speaking with customers where the communication is asymmetrical or limited to a one-on-one or one-to-few conversation. Typically, marketing professionals have had to rely on asymmetrical communication in which messages to customers are sent out to a large group but companies can only listen to a small sample group. With social media marketing and analytics platforms, companies are now able to speak and listen directly to the entire customer group all at once. At the same time, they can communicate one-on-one with customers. These conversations help customers to feel like a part of something bigger than their last purchase, which is the whole point of engagement.

It is important to note that engagement does not occur unless the company is both listening and speaking. This is the vital interplay between social marketing and social analytics. To listen without speaking is to appear uncaring and unresponsive. To speak and not listen is to remain unconnected with customers, resulting in incorrect messaging and poor results.

Market Structure

There are two major components to social media marketing automation platforms: social marketing automation (social marketing) and social media analytics (social analytics). The former provides the toolset for the marketing professional to create and manage successful social media campaigns. The latter is focused on providing useful information by ingesting social media streams, usually referred to as listening; performing analysis that helps to detect important attitudes and demand signals in the marketplace (monitoring); and then performing deeper analysis to better understand customer behavior and buying patterns.

Social Media Marketing Capabilities

The heart of social marketing is the management of social media campaigns. At its most basic, social marketing has to enable marketing professionals to publish a message to major social media outlets, typically Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, blogs, and, increasingly, video sites such as YouTube and Vimeo, as well as photo sharing sites such as Pinterest. More importantly, it has to provide the tools to publish content in a controlled fashion with scheduling and coordination of a series of posts as a common feature.

However, the ability to simply post messages, videos, or photos to a site does not make for a true social marketing platform. Instead, social marketing platforms have to be able to: 

• Assist in creating compelling content designed for social media sites such as Facebook tabs.
• Automate the publishing process, including the staging of posts for timed release.
• Manage the overall social media campaign, including evaluation of message efficacy.
• Drive opportunities for amplification using social network effects and by leveraging influencers. 

Social marketing platforms often help marketing professionals create content for distribution or integrate into content creation platforms to better tie together all the social media marketing activities into a single social media management solution. Community management features—tools that assist in engaging individuals within a subset of the market that marketing professionals are trying to reach—are also a common element of comprehensive social marketing solutions.

One of the hallmarks of digital marketing automation products common to social media marketing software is workflow management. Many social media marketing solutions include some way of managing the creation, revision, review, and release of content. Workflows are essential to ensuring that posts are on message, compelling, and comply with company policies and government regulations.

Social Media Analytics Capabilities

Social analytics are divided into two basic components. Different vendors express these components differently but both types of features are necessary for social media analytics to be meaningful. These components are: 

• Listening, which really means ingesting, aggregating, and adding metadata to social media feeds?
• Monitoring and analysis, which entails looking for trends over time such as changes in sentiment, share of voice, and volume of posts. 

Additionally, some products include deeper, offline analysis of data to discern important information such as profiles of customers who have a propensity to buy a product.

Listening is, in essence, gathering, aggregating, and conditioning data for presentation. Many listening services or software will normalize data and add additional metadata from other sources. A common technique for listening platforms is to correlate metadata from one type of stream with other streams that don’t carry this type of metadata.

Monitoring and analysis are often expressed as a series of short term trends, usually three months or less, attempting to detect a change in demand signals such as sentiment and influence. These, in turn, may detect that an event has occurred such as an issue with a product or successful launch of a new brand. Monitoring relies on both historical and current sources of social media data, typically from a listening service or package. Deeper analysis usually entails offline processing of historical data (meaning data that is not being acquired in real-time) to gain deeper insight into market trends and customer behavior. 

Common Social Media Analytics 

Social media analytics are based on existing text analysis such as natural language processing and machine learning. This provides the raw material for other types of analysis. Social marketing professionals rely on a number of common forms of analysis. Each tries to tease out a different type of information from the social media stream.

The most commonly encountered types of social media analysis are: 

• Sentiment and other demand signals
• Reach and influence
• Customer profiling 

Sentiment analysis attempts to understand from social media posts how positively or negatively a company, brand, or product is perceived. Comparing changes in sentiment before and after a marketing activity may also be used to judge the efficacy of a marketing campaign. It is one type of demand signal that social marketing professionals use as indicators of a change in attitude that may affect brand equity or product demand. Other types of demand signals such as opinions (opinion analysis), likes and dislikes, and common themes signal possible changes in buying behaviors.

Reach and influence, while related, are not the same. Reach can be thought of as the actual or potential number of listeners a message may have at some point in time. It can be measured, at least in part, by the size of a network that is reachable given a company’s followers. Influence is an assessment of the ability of followers to induce their network to spread a message. Total volume of mentions as well as the number of reposts is two measures of influence. Some vendors incorporate Klout3 scores into their influence ratings as well. In analyzing influence, marketing professionals try to identify specific nodes in the network—which represent members in a community—who are willing and capable of spreading a message. These influencers are typically targeted for additional attention. What influence scores don’t look for is how the message changes or whether it spreads in a positive or negative manner.

An increasingly common type of analysis is customer profiling. Customer profiling, sometimes referred to as audience targeting or audience segmentation, attempts to create rated profiles of potential or actual customers and their behaviors. The analysis attempts to discern what purchasing actions a potential customer may take, derived from individual behaviors reported in social media and augmented by data from other sources. Companies can marry this type of analysis with predictive analysis to develop lists of leads to market to directly. These leads can then be reached through social media campaigns or other marketing activities.

Social media marketing and social media analytics software build these profiles in different ways. Some focus on direct interactions, more like a CRM system, collecting information from responses to marketing campaigns over time. Others use a more analytics-based approach, deriving customer information from social media often with the help of other information from both internal and external, publically available sources. 

Suites and Standalone Products 

The social marketing and social analytics segments are organized around feature sets in the following manner:

• Point solutions address only one functional area of the social marketing landscape.
• Integrated social media solutions combine a number of tools together into a unified package.
• Digital marketing automation software includes social media marketing and analytics as a component of a broader marketing platform. 

It is impossible to generalize about the best approach and say “this model is better than the others.” It is fair to say that integrated solutions are becoming more common—examples of which would be the social marketing automation solutions from Oracle, Saleforce.com, and Shoutlet, to name a few. Vendors such as Adobe, HubSpot, and Marketo have made social media a key feature of their more general digital marketing automation solutions. That said, there are still many popular point solutions such as Hootsuite’s social media publishing platform and the IDInteract analytics and reward marketing solution. 

Market Participants 

The market can appear, at first, to be a jumble of companies with considerable feature overlap yet rarely 100% overlap. This makes head-to-head comparisons difficult for someone looking to add social media marketing and analytics capabilities to her marketing environment. However, if products are initially evaluated within broad categories against the overall needs of the organization, a picture may emerge that zeroes in on the software that best matches the organizational needs.

A Framework for Evaluation 

Social media marketing and analytics software can be complex to evaluate from a buyer’s perspective. There is great disparity in the feature sets of many of these packages, ranging from limited purpose standalone applications and services, to multifunctional products designed to manage and automate all marketing activities. To make this complexity simple, ESG groups broad feature sets into manageable categories. These categories are best informed by the structure of the market; that is to say Social Marketing and Social Analytics with subcategories of features.

With this framework in mind, it is possible to get a general idea of the features a product emphasizes and how that aligns with an organization’s needs. In this report, we will be looking at product features based on this framework in the following manner:

• Digital Marketing Automation or whether the social media marketing or analytics features are a component of a broader digital marketing automation suite. Other products may work alongside other digital marketing automation tools without being a component of a broader, integrated suite.
• Publication, which is the ability to publish to social media and social networks both on the fly and as a scheduled activity.
• Amplification, as in the ability to actively amplify messages using the characteristics of social networks. This is different than simple publishing in that it requires tools to help incent and track messages in a social network, as opposed to passive amplification via natural network effects.
• Social Media Campaign Management, which, unlike publishing, refers to the ability to manage multiple multifaceted social media campaigns from content creation through evaluation. This includes workflow management for social media marketing campaigns.
• Listening, which entails ingesting and aggregating social media streams and adding important metadata to those streams?
• Monitoring and Analysis, which includes performing analysis on incoming streams in both real-time or near real-time (monitoring) and offline (analysis).
• Three types of common social analytics: sentiment analysis and demand signals, influence, and customer profiling, also known as audience segmentation.
• Many other features are also important—workflows, other demand signals, and content creations, for example—but are not yet universal both in need and availability. 

Social Media Analytics Pitfalls 

Many marketing professionals seem to feel the need to embrace “big data” solutions and social media, and to become more data driven in their decision making. The danger in doing so is that they will become overly reliant on the data from these systems and on marketing through social media channels. While social media is a viable source of information and valid marketing channel, social media marketing and analytics tools also have several drawbacks and caveats. These include problems with bias, message drift, and analyzing non-textual content. Marketing professionals should consider social media data and channels as some of many tools in their marketing toolkits but not the only ones. Traditional market research and marketing channels cannot be ignored in favor of social media. 

Age and Geographic Bias 

At present, an acknowledged bias in social media data can affect social media analytics’ output. Social media use is more likely amongst younger people and in certain geographies. This age bias is similar to the way phone-based consumer surveys can be biased toward an older, landline-owning demographic. There are geographic biases in social media as well. For example, more activity in social media exists on the East and West Coasts of the United States than in other places, causing this data to have an outsized effect.

Some social media analytics vendors normalize their data in an effort to reduce these biases. Even so, marketing professionals need to consider bias when making decisions. For products targeted at a younger, urban demographic, this is a positive bias. When marketing to more general groups, social media data can only be viewed in light of data from other sources that does not have these biases.

It is worth noting that it is possible that this bias will disappear over time. As social media becomes part of the normal fabric of commercial interactions, as websites have become, some of the biases will dilute or dissolve. That is likely to be far into the future, however, and marketing professionals need to approach social media data with these biases in mind. 

A Downside to Amplification

One of the reasons that social media is such a cost-effective marketing tool is amplification. Using network effects, social media can take an investment in content and messaging and spread it with little to no incremental costs.

Amplification has a serious drawback though: message drift. It’s a new take on the old psychology experiment called “the telephone game.” Social media followers often simply repost—in other words, share—posts and content. That’s preferred since it amplifies without changing the message. It doesn’t always work that way though. Sometimes people will rephrase or shorten a message, inadvertently changing the meaning. When viewers comment on a post, blog, or video, they can change the basic message encoded in the post, even interjecting entirely new messages. With social media, it is difficult to control the message without constant attention. 

Non-textual Information Grants a Problem 

Another potential problem with social analytics platforms is their reliance on text data. Most sentiment analysis and demand signal tools, for example, are unable to directly analyze the growing amount of image, video, and audio content. While many of these products can provide useful information derived from the metadata and comments associated with social content, they cannot decode the actual meaning of the non-textual content itself where the majority of the information is contained. This means that the growing body of content contained in video blogs, on video sharing sites such as YouTube, on photo sharing sites such as Instagram and Pinterest, or in podcasts as well as much of the content on Facebook do not yet figure prominently into social media analysis. 

Reasons to Implement a Social Media Solution 

Marketing professionals look to implement social media solutions of any type for three primary reasons: lead generation, brand management, and market research. Products in this space reflect these marketing activities. Most publishing tools, along with sentiment analysis, focus on injecting positive messages into the marketplace. For brand builders, social analytics also allows them to test the efficacy of social brand building. 

Some social media marketing publishing tools also have a lead-generation component as well. This is usually expressed as content pushed out to Facebook tabs and websites that contain coupons, contests, and other offers designed to gather leads. Integrated or social media marketing suites, along with customer profiling, are more likely to try to drive traffic back to the company website or through e-mail for lead generation. Finally, a subset of social media analytics products tries to produce data for more general market research. These solutions offer a wide array of information, leaving it to the marketing professional to determine how the data is used. 

Suite or Point Solution 

There is considerable debate about whether standalone, so-called “best of breed,” products are a better way to approach social media marketing and analytics. Since analytics and marketing are intertwined, it would appear that the suites provide a better environment and value. In addition, “best of breed” is highly subjective. Components of integrated solutions can themselves be a best choice for an organization. Suites not only provide a unified process, but also a more complete view of the social media landscape.

Suites do provide more functionality but require more commitment to learning and resources. In many cases, especially for smaller organizations, they may be overkill. More extensive analytics may not be necessary for running lead generation campaigns while publishing tools are not warranted when the goal is to augment current market research. 

Social Media Analytics Is Not Just For Social Marketing 

Social media analytics is a key part of social media marketing but also all marketing campaigns. Like all data analytics, social analytics informs all marketing decisions and content creation. It also provides critical data for other types of decision making. For example, rising sentiment in social media streams may indicate increased demand for a product which, in turn, may indicate a looming supply problem that needs to be planned for.

It is important to remember that social media analytics are a form of business intelligence. It represents another source of information to help make business decisions. Customer profiling especially represents a crossover between business intelligence and social analytics. Data from core systems of record such as CRM are vital to creating a viable customer profile while social media data represents a new source of information about the business as a whole. 

Over and above all the above displayed processes, tools & cases are well-defined for a successful social media engagement. Henceforth the effectiveness of any kind of brand communication on social platforms depends upon the interpretation of the end audience. Numerous times the traditional benchmarking processes are useful but enormously there are also studies which showcase the disguised blenders of the prime brand players. Well if there are loops there are also new sight of innovation so all brand managers should be proactive not only in designing the campaign & measurement process but also in testing & breaking the enormous nomenclature. 

Thank you for reading. Please click the like button if you think my effort deserves it. Also do not forget to comment in case you think anything important I have missed should be included in the study. 

**Disclaimer: Lot of information used in this case study has been taken from different web resources & blogs already present online. The moto behind the case presentation was to bring down all distinguished information present on different source, shared by different authors under one study for the better understanding of the evolution, importance & growth of social media giant. 

Written & Compiled By: 

Gaurav Shankar

Assistant Manager (Social Media Research & Analytics) @ Metlife GOSC

Practicing Social Media Listening, Analytics & Communication from Past 5 years

https://www.dhirubhai.net/profile/public-profile-settings?trk=prof-edit-edit-public_profile 

Date: 27th April, 2015