There is a lot written in the last few years about the importance of consumer engagement with brands in the age of the Social Customer. Most writings are focused either on teaching how to get most Facebook likes and Twitter followers for your brand or how to manage PR disasters fueled by social media winds.
I always look for evidence of Social Customer impact on business growth. Intuitively, most people would agree that satisfied customers, who actively share their experience with other consumers, impact the product and brand market share growth. However, intuition is not very powerful agent of organizational transformation, I hope a proof in a form of data has better chance of success.
The most valuable insights often hide in the intersection of multiple data sources. For example, let’s look at how the combination of social media engagement and customer satisfaction information correlates to changes in a brand market share.
As smartphones represent one of the most dynamic and socially engaging market segments, it provides a good source of data for our example. See below the percent market share by operating system for the first quarters of 2012 and 2013:
(Source: Kantar WorldPanel “Smartphone sales by operating system-U.S.” report)
Amplified Analytics online marketing research mines customer reviews to produce Social Customer Engagement and Customer Satisfaction scores. We intentionally used Social Customer data from preceding time periods to examine the influence of social feedback on customer behavior that produces market share change.
After combining the data from both sources we calculated the year-to-year change you see below.
The Windows example suggests that strong growth of Social Customer Engagement combined with robust improvement in Customer Satisfaction lead to very meaningful change in the Market Share.
