Mining social data is a means of improving individual campaign performance and increasing brand relevance. The data can be used to distinguish which customers are in which part of the purchase funnel, which is key to getting the right message to the right consumer. This essentially means analyzing what type of messaging works well and on what platforms, learning from the messages that don't work and tweaking them the next time around for better results. This has made Social Media Monitoring extremely important to businesses that value data and insights. SMM gives "quick pulses" on what people are thinking and buying. These so-called conversation-analytics tools are often more cost-efficient and faster than doing primary research.
But from looking at it in the larger context, what do you do post-social media monitoring? How do you translate that into a concrete marketing/media strategy? How do you scale the delivery of media? How do you make the delivery process seamless? These are just a the questions marketers are grappling about.
Social monitoring tools can capture and process large amount of data to provide valuable insights but when it comes to engaging with those audience it's highly cumbersome and cannot scale. The reason is that engagement is on a one to one basis. On the other side you have Social Media Marketing Systems (SMMS) which enable brands to engage audience at a reasonable scale but have limited data processing capability due to it's limitation of being channel specific (For ex: Facebook, Twitter). Only about 5% of conversations happen on Facebook and Twitter Branded Pages, the rest happens outside. Hence these issues with scale in Reach and Engagement has made the job of brand marketers that much more difficult on social media.
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Why should insights and media/engagement be tied together?
Consumers produce incredible amounts of social data every day, and the data can help marketers talk to the people who want to hear from them with the right type of messaging. There's more to it than just optimizing marketing, i.e., targeting ads. Often the discussion around social data, like all digital data, begins and ends with ad targeting. But that's only half of the picture, if that. Social data is a powerful source of insight that can craft new marketing strategies or even entirely new products and services. Hence, tying insights with intelligence based engagement/media delivery engines enables marketers to scale, optimize and reduce cost of their marketing activities.
Data never lies, even in social media. Procter & Gamble's Pepto-Bismol sales were declining two years ago, when the company realized that consumers were discussing the indigestion-relief medicine on Saturday and Sunday mornings after drinking a bit too much. P&G began luring hungover P&G Facebook Fans. This resulted in an 11 percent market-share gain in the 12 months through fall 2011.
In a recent study by Harvard Business Review analytic services that was conducted on brand marketers more than 40% of respondents said they have a challenge in understanding the potential of social media and 40% of them said the challenge was in quantifying the impact of social media interns of ROI. Also what is interesting to see is that only 5% - 6% of respondents have tied their social monitoring with other marketing solutions. Hence there seems to be a big disconnect between social media insights and marketing/media activities.
The process of understanding how the social web is amplifying messages and what people are talking should be a seamless transition into optimizing and taking some control over how that amplification plays out. Hence, Brand Marketers should aim to interweave social monitoring insights with marketing/media/engagement activities at scale which would result in higher reach, engagement at continually lower cost as well as creating value for customers through right content delivery.
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