May
04

So You Want to Start a Social Media Analysis Program

John Scott

A nagging question in the mind of communications professionals these days is “What’s the best way to tackle social media analysis?”

In short, it depends.

There isn’t one universal solution for taking advantage of the vast treasure trove of information about your company or organization on social media channels.

Like so many things in life, getting informative social media data isn’t easy. When launching an analytics program, here are three points to consider:

Are people talking about you?

“Nobody is talking about us,” is the No. 1 reason companies don’t start a social media analysis program. If your audience isn’t talking about you, what are they talking about? What makes them tick? Learning everything you can about your audience will help you connect with them both on and offline.

For example, a paper company with low brand recognition may not have much buzz on social media channels. In that scenario, it should consider looking for people mentioning the things their customers use paper for (writing letters, art projects, paper airplanes) or problems they are having with paper (paper cuts, printer paper jams). Information gleaned from this content may hold immense value for how the company markets its product and may have insights for perfecting its business processes.

Do key staff members and stakeholders support the need to start a social media analysis program?

Mining social media for valuable insights and data can be great for understanding your audience and improving how you do business, but you can’t do it without getting input from other business areas. First and foremost, you’ll need to understand the needs of your colleagues — what information do they wish they had? Beyond that, your social media data won’t be useful until you can sync it up with data from other departments. This will enable you formulate smart metrics to help gauge the success of your organization’s efforts.

If you work for a nonprofit, you may be able to easily track mentions of your issue as a gauge of overall awareness, but it will be difficult to provide actionable analysis without more information from your colleagues. Did a spike correspond with an unusually high number of interactions with potential donors?

In other words, unless you know why something happened, why your colleagues should care and how to best present them with your information in a compelling way, you likely won’t have much support to continue your social media analysis work.

Do you have the time and resources to commit to making sense of the data you collect?

Monitoring social media channels for valuable information does not have to make a big dent in your budget. It does, however, take time. Creating smart tools and dashboards to collect data and monitor conversations is a great first step to harnessing social media to your advantage. Identifying how you plan to staff your measurement program is vital to ensuring that you can sustain it, and that it can provide you with real value.

Those are just a few questions to before you start a social media analysis program. There are of course many more.

What is holding you back from starting a program for your organization?


 

Michael Stopford

Executive Vice President and Senior Global Corporate Strategist

Brian Wommack

Senior Vice President

Lance Morgan

Chief Communications Strategist