The rise of social media as the go-to communications platform for millions of people worldwide has been nothing short of a phenomenon. For business there has never been so much customer information created and shared so readily by so many.
The challenge now is for organisations to seize this opportunity to listen to, monitor and measure the sentiment driving social media conversations, and then use all of that new-found intelligence to develop smart new business strategies.
Size up the opportunity
The sheer volume of customer opinions now available online will help marketers learn from consumers, show businesses how to get direct product feedback from their buyers, and provide customer service professionals with access to a vast real-time focus group. The total number of active Facebook users is now nearly three times the entire population of the United States, with 95 percent of those 1.5 billion users logging in every day. There are more than 550 million registered Twitter users, with 40 percent of members happy just to read other people’s tweets as a source of opinion. Social media is already hugely influential and it’s becoming more important by the second.
However, in a recent survey of London marketers and customer professionals that my own business commissioned, less than a third of brand managers said that they currently use social media sentiment analysis. So what exactly is stopping businesses from accessing and using such an invaluable resource? Well, it’s largely because they don’t know how to be good listeners. Yet.
Learn how to listen
Every second of every day, customers are telling marketers precisely what they want, why they want it, and how they want to get it – the marketers just need to listen properly. To do this effectively, businesses need fresh technologies capable of extracting rich business insights from social media – sufficient information to differentiate themselves in crowded markets. Modern marketers will therefore need to be equipped with social media analytics tools capable of transforming real-time consumer data and opinions from social media into practical business intelligence.
There are hundreds of social media analytics tools on the market, and nearly all of these overlook social sentiment and the nuance of conversation. But as social media becomes ever more pervasive, the opportunity to truly understand, engage and influence consumer behaviour through social media sentiment is too good to ignore. So marketers must demand a more incisive approach that delivers those valuable actionable insights while supporting real-world, real-time business decisions. Unprocessed raw data and entry-level metrics simply aren’t business-class. Why should any marketer settle for merely measuring positive and negative sentiment from global social media sources, if they could be uncovering the actual themes of consumer opinion and the drivers of sentiment?
Use the right tools for the job
What marketers require is a disciplined, scientific platform capable of extending beyond basic metrics and delving deeper into social conversations. Advanced analytics and data visualisations of engaged online consumer behaviour offer unprecedented insights to any marketer - and more readily and affordably than traditional market research.
Technology must be flexible and customisable to specific business questions, contexts, and competitive landscapes. Only targeted social media analytics allow digital marketers to tune out the white noise and extract context and meaning from the hubbub and banter of meaningless conversations. A truly innovative social intelligence platform is able to pin-point the drivers of sentiment to reveal actionable insights that deliver more successful and productive business decision making which cannot fail to ring true with the connected world.
By Curt Bloom, President for Crimson Hexagon.
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