Translating Social Insights into Business Intelligence

Social media was once seen as strictly the realm of MarCom teams, however, it's increasingly being used as a valuable source of data across all departments. Raw data from social networks is unstructured, vast and usually collected through multiple channels. However, with the right tools, raw social data can be translated into killer business intelligence and help companies gain more insight into their customers, products, competitors and industry.

Social insights present great opportunity for companies, but far too often we forget to make the connection between social data and strategic KPIs. This can lead to:

• Time-intensive manual searches for relevant data 
• An inaccurate picture of changes in the industry
• Lack of coordination between departments leading to inefficient work

Only after we've defined which KPIs are important for different business units can we contextualise social data and develop a better understanding of the environment we’re working in.

So, why integrate Social Media and Business Intelligence?

As we know, social media can provide us with rich insights. If you know what customers are saying about your product or competitor's products, you have an immediate information advantage that can be used to shape the direction you take in the future, for example, how you can further develop a specific product line. Companies that keep an eye on these kinds of insights are better placed to defend their competitive position over companies that don’t.

Competitive intelligence

We can, of course, monitor our competitors on social media to discover opportunities and threats in our market while learning how other players are tackling them. But to truly do so, you need to more than just follow competitors on Twitter.

With the help of social media intelligence solutions, we can compare consumer responses to our own activities with those of our competitors. Alternatively, we can leverage how consumers are responding to competitors' activities to guide our future strategies. Doing so allows us to optimise our own performance, while at the same time, avoiding any mistakes the competition are making.

Proactive response

Access to reliable, real-time data enables teams throughout your entire organisation to respond quickly to relevant threats and opportunities in real-time. Responding quickly to customer needs, concerns or important developments is essential to grow or maintain your market share.

Obtaining a 360 view of your industry also enables teams to respond as quickly as possible to legal, political or economic shifts that can affect their business unit.

Real-Time Data

Conversations generated on social media have two important qualities: spontaneity and directness. In contrast, frequently used consumer data from focus groups and questionnaires take a lot of time to collect and can be filtered by social pressure and the knowledge that responses are used for research.

Real-time interactions on social media have the potential to make it easy for organisations that want to measure the success of their campaigns, services and product launches as they occur, with less bias involved. This directness enables marketers and other important stakeholders to receive feedback on campaigns that are currently running and to optimise them or to improve planning for future campaigns.

#NoFilter

Listening to customers in real-time also yields highly relevant and accurate data. Customers tend to express their honest opinion about a brand or its products on social media and forums or to complain. By listening, all departments can benefit from almost unfiltered feedback from the target group.

Which social KPIs should we focus on?

Try to ask yourself why you are focusing on a certain topic. Is it a 'vanity metric', or does it provide useful insights? For example: Does it matter that the competition has more followers than you if the sentiment surrounding their latest release was overwhelmingly negative?

The first and most important thing to remember is to measure only what’s important.

Social metrics such as mentions, share of voice, sentiment and the like must be contextualised with the company's internal business KPIs, like leads, sales and satisfied customers etc. The data that’s relevant to your organisation depends entirely on your business objectives and can vary between departments.

If your goal is to have more connection with your audience, engagement is a good indicator. Look at the differences in engagement for various social activities on your own pages and your competition. This metric is useful for shaping your future social strategy and for determining the consumer's response to various business activities.

If the goal is brand awareness, you can examine share of voice to benchmark yourself against the competition. Also try to look at the wider social environment outside of your own channels and listen to the conversations happening on public pages and forums outside your own online channels about relevant topics.

If you are trying to overcome a crisis, sentiment can be a great indicator to focus on. Responding to negative sentiment around a product or campaign is a useful way to show how well you handle unwanted incidents or how quickly you can jump in when these situations arise.

If you’re looking to improve your product or service, real-time feedback is super valuable. Collect direct, unfiltered reviews from consumers on social media and use their feedback to make plans for the future. Look at the same data around your competitors to further enrich these insights.

Social media is still one of the most important data sources we have, regardless of which department you’re in. Companies that are not able to synchronise social data with their business goals put themselves at an unnecessary disadvantage. By using the power of social data, we can create insights for teams across the organisation and ensure that you always have a competitive edge.

Want to discuss how you can better leverage social media insights? Direct message me on LinkedIn - let's chat!