Valuable, additional and more than just counting.
Analysis of social web content is more than just monitoring and counting. Some enterprises might feel that they’re not ready for social media analytics, or that it’s foreign territory.
A better way to look at it is to consider social media a new, important and growing dataset. Regardless of what you as an enterprise do in terms of participating in social media, this data represents incredible value. Now.
Socia media data is valuable to the entire enterprise, not just PR, marketing or product development. Groups such as risk management, HR, investor relations, customer support, sales, finance, manufacturing, operations and more can all benefit from deep social media analytics.
Social media analytics about your brands/products/company/industry augments what you’re already doing. It doesn’t replace anything. It adds to your traditional market research, customer satisfaction survey results and focus group findings.
The difference is that this is content where people are talking about you, but not directly to you. They aren’t answering a specific set of questions or checking boxes. They aren’t under any survey bias or group pressure.
The unstructured nature and potentially huge volume of social web content might make some enterprises reluctant to embrace its analysis. But there’re valuable insights in this roiling sea of data and you need to take advantage. And true, posts are from online users and not a random cross-section or “people on the street.” However their growing ranks and influence cannot be denied.
Analysis of this enterprise-applicable data provides you with an additional set of measurements that can contribute to your business strategies and tactics. Integrate it with your financial analysis, manufacturing analysis, customer support metrics, etc. to make more informed business decisions.