Customer Analytics in the Social Media Age

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Customer Analytics Social Media

Social Media is the lovechild of the World Wide Web. Everyone is on social media. According to Statista, the active social media population worldwide is 4.14bn. That’s an awful lot of social media users, isn’t it? It’s not just users but brands too have their presence on one or more social networks to run their marketing campaigns, which is why Ad spending in the Social Media Advertising segment is projected to reach US$110,628m in 2021 (Statista)

Social media networks have quickly become the backbone of business strategies and are key to building meaningful connections with consumers. To know your audience’s taste and test new marketing efforts & Ecommerce touch points, social media channels are helping to gain real-time insights. Be it storytelling, product launch, or new initiative, social media is the perfect launchpad.

In 2020, the global social penetration rate reached 49 percent, with East Asia and North America having the highest penetration rate at 71 and 69 percent respectively (Statista), what does this mean for brands? The way brands put themselves in front of their audience can inspire action and create an army of followers. For this to do well, the brand should know how to trigger its social-media-savvy audience. This is possible by gathering data from social channels, knowing who your audience is and what they expect from your brand.

Customer Analytics using Social Media
Customer analytics, seasoned with insight from social media data can help organizations in making faster strides in determining the attrition rate, retention rate, and other such essential aspects. Social Media is so fluid that if your product is good, it can spread like a wildfire; however, if it isn’t that great, it can spread more quickly. It is therefore essential to address consumer experiences by knowing what goes well with them and what does not. How social media analytics can be applied here?

• Spotting trends
• Figuring out the conversation about the brand
• Deriving customer sentiments
• Gauging responses
• Identifying what is valued
• Competitive Analysis
• Mapping out how it is affecting performance

Why it matters?
Social media analytics affects a broad spectrum of business activities like product development, customer experience, branding, competitive analysis, operational efficiency to name a few. Getting a clearer picture of customer pain points, shifting needs, and desired features is critical for product development. Spotting trends can shape the existing products and help designing new product development strategies. Tools like behavioral analysis can leverage micro-moments that keep your customers happy and in turn, increase brand loyalty. It is social media analytics that helps in maintaining your brand health and suggest the right attributes for your brand. Also, gauging demand is possible using social media analytics which further helps in inventory management and cost reduction.

Social Media Analytics Platforms
What makes social media analytics effective? It is a multi-step process along with the usage of relevant capabilities. The first step is to understand the pain point your brand is facing, be it a declining revenue or customer service issues, your pain point will help you define the goal of social media analytics. Based on the goal topics or keywords can be identified, followed by setting the parameters. Another essential step is to specify the sources pertinent to your brand and the product you are selling. The data generated is then retrieved, analyzed, and reported to make sound decisions.

Capabilities empowering Social Media Analytics Platforms

Natural Language Processing (NLP) & Machine Learning (ML): NLP & ML technologies knows how to identify the entities and relationships in unformatted data to get useful insights.
Customer Segmentation: This is the foundation of social media analytics based on which customers are segmented by geography, age, gender, marital status, parental status, and other demographics. All this, to identify the target audience and their needs.
Sentiment Analysis: When it comes to social media, tone and intention matter a lot. Using sentiment analysis various sentiments like positivity, negativity, neutral, etc, can be identified.
Behaviour Analysis: The goal of behavioral analysis is to differentiate various participants based on their behavior so that targeted messages and responses can be derived.
Clustering Analysis: Clustering analysis knows how to uncover hidden conversations and unexpected insights by associating the keywords that usually appear together.
Visualization: The findings of social media analytics can be represented using visualization capabilities that help even its non-technical users to get insights instantly.

Social Media Analytics Tools
To know which social media strategies are working and which aren’t, there are some of the top social media analytics tools available:
• Hootsuite Analytics
• Google Analytics
• UTM Parameters
• Brandwatch
• Sprout Social
• Agorapulse

Let’s see some of the use cases of this amazing technique
1. Banking: Banks are using social media analytics to transition from enterprise CRM to Social CRM, educate the customers, gain customer insights, expand the customer base, achieve customer delight and manage risk efficiently.
2. Marketing: Social media analytics helps marketers in assessing conversions, CPL, content and channel performance, timing impact, etc.
3. E-commerce: The Ecommerce industry can reach consumers in the places that matter along with creating frictionless shopping experiences, focusing on popular products, customization, and other benefits using social media analytics.

There is a big ocean of opportunities available, however, becoming “customer-centric” is a top priority today. The customer today do much more than simply buy a product, which is why customer analytics using social media is no more a trend, it’s a must-have and new frontier for the business. Finally, it’s worth mentioning customer analytics in the social media age is essential as it is the age of the customer, and delighting the customer at every turn requires the right social intelligence.

Aashesh D Shaah
Aashesh Shaah is the CEO & Co-founder of Fusion Informatics Limited, a digital transformation company that transforms businesses through digital applications empowered with technologies such as AI, ML, IoT, Cloud, and more. He is a business leader with 20-plus years of experience and works with Startups, SMBs, and Enterprises to craft, enable and accelerate their digital journey.

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