Quantifiable ROI for Social Media
Supplied by Brandtology
We all know the popularity of online and social media has grown exponentially. And now, smart companies understand the importance of listening before participating, and using social media to better understand their customers through accurate tracking and analysis.
This need to listen and understand what consumers are saying on social media has given rise to a plethora of social media monitoring and measurement tools - the technology that helps provide information like: the number of people using social media at a certain time, the profile of those people, their country of origin and most importantly their sentiments towards your brand. As most of these tools are very new, communications professionals need to critically assess the accuracy and relevance of social media monitoring and measurement tools. Greater scrutiny is being placed on the effectiveness of social media and its ROI, and a credible measurement tool is a key plank of any smart marketer’s social media plan.
There are a number of factors that seriously limit the usefulness of many of the social media analytical tools available today. Before looking at the problem of multiple languages, even in a single language, local idioms, sarcasm, variations in dialects and various short hand styles of writing and acronyms can make automated detection of unfavourable and favourable posts an impossible task. Language is a perpetually changing, organic form of communication. Therefore, the inclusion of human intelligence as a key component in the process to help us dynamically adapt to the ever-changing social media landscape.
When the complexity of language intervenes with technology, it becomes problematic. The way to disentangle this scrambling is through the intervention of Social Media Experts. Tests of a range of different automated sentiment software tools conducted by a research consultancy found that comments were, on average, correctly categorized only 30% of the time, in other words less accurate than tossing a coin and potentially highly misleading for any communications strategists. Expert intervention is needed to delve into the different levels of speech and make sentiment analysis a powerful measurement tool rather than a possibly dangerous gimmick.
The use of social media experts with the help of top-notch internet crawling technology makes it possible to find patterns and common themes and uncover the buying behaviour of consumers based on their comments, suggestions and “shout outs” in different social media channels. Technology combined with human expertise allows you to map out events in conversations that are relevant to your brand.
Accurate crawling technology allows Social Media Experts to go where our feet cannot. It helps in covering every social media channel relevant to your brand. Even beyond sentiment, expert intervention is often required. For example channel categorisation by countries needs to be done manually to ensure that the channels are country specific. Take www.kaskus.us as an example, although it is Indonesia’s biggest forum, in an automated system, it will be identified as a US website.
Once the realities of the factors required for accurate social media measurement are understood, we can confidently say thatusing social media as part of your communications strategy has a promising future. These forums are here to stay.
Social media will remain incredibly dynamic, and keeping up with customer demands seems an almost unachievable task, but with the right tools, accurate strategic decisions can be made and the Return on Investment is quantifiable.
Further to this, can you please add - For more information on online and social media measurement visit www.brandtology.com
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