Social media platforms including Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, in addition to Instagram are first worldwide forums used for expression, where millions of individuals connect as well as share their experiences, opinions, and personal views regarding everything from live events to vacations and business.
Nevertheless, social media isn’t a platform for individuals to connect. It’s also a place where brands, as well as customers, interact. The growth of these social media platforms has offered companies an emerging source of insight to base strategies. These strategies are termed as social conversations. Using social media analytics, companies in business have the opportunities to dig into the conversations and grasp an understanding of what people are saying to improve their decisions in relation to brand awareness and product presentation.
Understanding Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics is the art of extracting valuable insight from a significant amount of semi structured as well as unstructured social media information to contribute to the creation of informed as well as insightful decision making. Many companies don’t listen to social conversations for the reason that it has an overwhelming amount of data. However, particular tools capture and interpret this conversation online, thereby making it easier to separate useful signals from social media’s valuable content. These tools can often crawl social media channels, including anything from the primary social networks to blogs. Within organizations, people and departments have various reasons for leveraging insights on social media. Some of these cases are such as:
• Brand positioning assessment
• Campaign planning as well as measurement
• Audience interest as well a demographic understanding
• Performance benchmarking
Types of Social Media Analytics
1. Descriptive analytics
Descriptive analytics is interactive. It refers to the interpretation of initial data to understand changes that have occurred in a business. Often, descriptive analysis describes the past of a business using a broad range of information to draw comparisons. Commonly reported financial data are a product of descriptive analytics.
2. Diagnostic Analytics
Diagnostic social media analytics is an advanced form of analytics that examines data to answer the question of why something happened in business. For instance, although descriptive analytics provides an overview of a company’s social media marketing campaigns and performances, followers, as well as fans and reviews, diagnostic analytics distills the same data into one view to identify what worked for your businesses campaigns and what did not. Facilitators of diagnostic analytics are such as inferential statistics and behavioral analytics.
3. Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics is proactive. It entails the analysis of large amounts of social media data in order to predict future events. Therefore, predictive analytics deals with the question of what is going to happen or why it would happen. For instance, an intention expressed via social media such as to sell or recommend a product can be mined and used to predict a future event such as a client’s ability to purchase. Then again, businesses can use past visits to forecast their sales figures.
4. Prescriptive Analytics
While predictive analytics plays a crucial role in predicting the future of the business, prescriptive analytics is the suggested best action to take, mainly when handling a scenario that involves clients. For instance, if you have various groups of social media platforms that display specific patterns of purchasing behavior, how can one optimize their offering to each group? Prescriptive analytics hasn’t found its way into the use of social media data yet. The primary enablers of this social media analytics include simulation modeling and expert systems.
NetBase Company Profile
NetBase Solutions, Inc. offers social media analytics solutions by providing a platform that processes social media posts every day for actionable business insights that can be used for marketing, research, sales, public relations, and customer service. Netbase Solutions offers a broad range of products that provide visibility into the movement of brands and managers.
