Making the business case for social data analytics

For the most part, social data analytics has been confined to social media teams and marketing departments. However, the insights gathered from social data, when implemented, can have a direct impact on the wider business.

So the question now is – how can you prove this to business leaders? How can you get buy-in from the wider business about the value of social data analysis? This was one of the topics discussed at the 2021 SI Tech Demo Day.

How to link social media to business priorities

What’s the link between social media and other business priorities? That’s what you need to show to prove to business leaders that social data analytics benefits the business as a whole.

Let’s take a look at some use cases on how social intelligence can support business priorities.
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Proving ROI on sponsorships

Sponsorships are a powerful way for brands to gain exposure and draw in a bigger audience. But how can you prove that your brand sponsorships are really working? That’s where social media data comes in.

Platforms like YouScan help brands to find mentions beyond text with visual analytics. They can scan both organic and sponsored posts for images and logos related to specific brands rather than relying on hashtags or written text. In other words, it tracks the “visual mentions” of your brand to measure the ROI of your sponsorships. This is perfect for identifying brand exposure during sports events, for example, where brands are more likely to be shown (e.g., logos on team kits or advertising screens) than written about.

It then shows you who has seen your brand, in what context people are using/showing your products, and how people are engaging with photos that feature your brand. YouScan also gives you the potential reach of a particular sponsorship to measure the impact.

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YouScan helps identify brand mentions with visual analytics

Identifying trends

Social data and conversations are a great way to identify trends. How are consumer preferences shifting? What do they like to talk about now? How has that changed in the past month or the past year? All of these insights can not only inform your social media and marketing strategies, but your business approach as a whole.

For instance, platforms like Synthesio will let you identify viral topics and media to inform and strengthen your content strategy. It also lets you monitor shifts in interest, which could help you identify an emerging competitor in the industry.

Synthesio can identify trending topics to help strengthen content strategies

Consumer insights for product development

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of social data is that it helps you understand who your customers really are. You can get insights into their demographics, interests, needs, wants, and behaviours. This can inform every aspect of your business – from the customer journey and user experience, to the competitors you need to watch out for.

Platforms like Digimind will help you cut through the noise to narrow down on unmet customer needs based on consumer discussions and competitor activity. Your research and development team can then use these insights to innovate and deliver new or improved products.

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Digimind can help to narrow down unmet customer needs

Accurate segmentation for better retention

It costs five times more to win over a new customer than to retain an existing one. So customer retention should always be a business priority. The good news is that social data analytics can help with this, too.

A platform like Infegy uses social data to create different audience segments based on demographics and psychographics. This allows you to focus your customer retention efforts on certain audience segments. For example, you can create a segment of customers who have logged a complaint and then focus on resolving their issues to retain them.

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Infegy uses social data to create different audience segments based on demographics and psychographics

Opportunities to predict future implications or investment opportunities

Using social data to predict future trends or consumer behaviours was talked about a lot at this year’s SI Tech Demo Day.

While the predictive use of social data is still evolving, many brands are already looking at smaller signals in conversational social data to predict the future. Besides just looking at the big themes in certain conversations, brands can look for anomalies and identify the things that are quietly developing in the background to understand future implications.

This will give them the necessary insights to plan ahead and fix any issue before it turns into a bigger problem. Businesses can also figure out how to creatively use those insights to get ahead of the competition.

The Synthesio platform monitors shifts in conversation volumes around your brand and detects correlated online interests. So you can use this to predict changes in consumer needs or preferences and make smarter investments about brand sponsorships.

Showing the value of social data

Despite the proven impact that social data can have on the wider business, beyond the social media team, it can often be challenging to show the value of social data in a way that others can understand. Putting the analysis into context requires excellent data storytelling.

To make the business case for social data analytics, social intelligence experts need to build a narrative around relevant data points. Doing this well will help to highlight its positive impact in relation to specific business priorities. When business leaders see this connection, it will be hard to ignore the benefits of social data analysis.

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