Vox Pop: How can we ensure that social media intelligence research is focused on business outcomes?

When it comes to social media intelligence, we often hear that people find “nice to know insights” or that they find the insights hard to use, so we asked our experts “how can we ensure that social media intelligence research is focused on business outcomes?“, here’s a selection of the best responses.

Manos Androulakis, Digital Insights Senior Analyst, People Data Centre, Unilever

There’s three clear areas that we have to consider when making social insights relevant to business outcomes:

Speak the language of the business: Familiarise yourself with your industry’s business model, understand what drives growth and think about how your social data fits in. Can you anticipate moves in market penetration from increasing social mentions in specific areas?  Could you link your brand equity to online sentiment?

Focus on actions: When identifying trending topics from social conversation, ask yourself what this means for your business and propose actions that fit your brands and your target audience.

Indicate what is about to happen and how can this affect your business: In the social listening world we focus too much on what is being said, but it’s more important to focus on why something is being said and who said it. These are good indicators that show what is it of what is going on out there and what is about to happen.

Tara Beard-Knowland, Head of Social Intelligence Analytics, Ipsos

In the first instance, involving insights professionals in the brief can help enormously. These excellent people are trained in translating business questions into research questions and in ensuring that results take into account desired business outcomes.

As with any type of research, the devil is in the details…of the set-up. If you get that right and are focused on aligning to the questions you want to answer, then you’re much more likely to get an answer that is useful to the business. There is so much data out there that you can end up being swamped by it all. This can distract from the ultimate aim. If the business question is clear and the intelligence is well-designed, you can keep revisiting it to ensure you’re on track. It’s important not to go haring off after something that sounds as if it might be interesting, but in reality, is totally off-brief.

Tim Wilson, CEO, Qutee

Whether looking at better retention rates, improved acquisition increased revenue or reduced costs a 360° understanding of consumer sentiment at its most granular is imperative.

Market research, social listening and traditional forms of focus group research are now constants but what if we could amplify those insights further by getting closer to the consumer voice at scale and free of the restrictions of legacy social media platforms?

Instead of just passively listening you could actively engage consumers on an industrial scale and provide a friendly mechanism for them to make their voice heard and provide rich and accurate qualitative feedback across all of the most valuable issues.

Social Asking makes this a reality and brings the strategic relevance of consumer insights to the fore, by directly tying critical strategic decisions and outcomes to consumer sentiment in a manner that is under complete control and direction of the brand.