Gain Real Insights with a Social Analytics Program

Social media is wildly popular with consumers and as a result, many businesses are starting to develop a presence on social media services like Facebook and Twitter. However, many businesses still struggle with understanding how to leverage consumer insights from these services to drive business decisions. They’re intimidated by the sheer volume of social data, and aren’t sure what to do about it.
Companies that do have an analytics program are often operating it on an ad-hoc basis rather than making an effort to integrate social insights with existing sourcing of consumer data. In doing this, they’re failing to make holistic decisions and missing out on valuable consumer and competitive insights.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Social analytics are indispensable in gaining real-time insights across marketing, sales, and customer service. SMBs can use social analytics to gain valuable consumer insights at a significantly lower expense than traditional forms of market research.
The greatest value from social analytics comes when organizations marry social data sources with other forms of customer information, such as point-of-sale data, customer surveys, focus groups, and psychographic profiles.
Social analytics must be integrated with your broader BI program for maximum effect. Consider creating a Customer Insights Center of Excellence (CICOE) to serve as a one-stop shop for both traditional and social customer analytics.
IT has an invaluable role to play in helping to govern and manage the analytics program. A best-of-breed Social Media Management Platform is the key enabling technology for conducting analytics, and IT must assist with selection, implementation and operation of this solution.
Internal social analytics is an emerging field that allows you to gauge the sentiment of your employees, while turbocharging ideation and feedback processes. Social networking analysis is particularly valuable for internal analysis.

Impact and Result

Understand the value of a social analytics program and the various departmental use cases – how social analytics improves decision making and boosts critical KPIs like revenue attainment and customer satisfaction.
Determine the different social metrics (such as sentiment and frequency analysis) your business should be tracking and how to turn metrics into deep consumer insights.
Follow a step-by-step guide for successfully executing a social analytics program across your organization.
Roll out an internal analytics program to gauge the sentiment of your employees, improve engagement, and understand informal influencer networks.

Gain Real Insights with a Social Analytics Program Research & Tools

1. Determine the organization’s use cases

Decide which functional areas in the organization will benefit the most from using social data, and create use cases accordingly.

2. Define and interpret metrics

Identify and evaluate key social analytics metrics and understand the importance of combining multiple metrics to get the most out of the analytics program.

3. Execute the social analytics program

Leverage a cross-departmental Social Media Steering Committee and evaluate SMMPs and other social analytics tools.

4. Leverage internal social analytics

Identify specific uses of internal social analytics: crowd-sourcing ideation, harvesting employee feedback, and rewarding internal brand advocates.

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We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Table of Contents

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 1-phase advisory process. You'll receive 4 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Call 1: Determine your use cases

Determining the right social analytics use cases for your organization is the critical first step to delivering business value. A call with one of our analysts will help you define what your objectives for social analytics should be.
Call 2: Define and interpret your metrics

Let us help you decide which department-level metrics you’ll track and utilize as part of your social analytics program. Review the outputs of your social analytics opportunity assessment.
Call 3: Execute the social analytics program

Discuss governance and technology selection for a social analytics program, staffing your social analytics program, debrief after your social analytics pilot program, have an analyst review a draft of your social analytics business plan.
Call 4: Social analytics inside the enterprise

Let us guide you through the process of “listening inwards” – an analyst will help you identify strategic points to embed internal social listening.