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TECH
SHINY | ONLINE ‘TREP | GEEK | THE FIX
| ASK A GEEK |
Social diver
Q: Do better social media
analytics really help?
There’s an ever-growing
range of companies offering an
A: array of social media analytics
tools, from entry-level platforms such
as Hootsuite and Sprout Social to
sophisticated stand-alone products
like Socialbakers and Radian6.
All of these products use an API
to capture data—the exact same data
already available to you and your business
for free from Facebook Insights, Twitter
Analytics and many other social media
networks. The only differences between
the native analytics and the more sophisticated—and
expensive—options are the
interface and the math used to calculate
ambiguous metrics like “potential reach”
and “engagement.”
As it turns out, the more you pay,
the prettier the interface, the sexier the
reports and the more complex the math.
How much “pretty” you need or can
afford depends on your budget, the scope
of your marketing effort and the nature
of your business.
To help you determine what’s right
for your business, we turned to New
Hampshire-based Katie Delahaye Paine,
author of Measure What Matters and selfdescribed
“measurement queen.”
—Mikal E. Belicove
Why should my company engage
in social listening?
If your customers are talking about
you, you want to hear what they’re
saying. If you’re spending good money
to talk at them, why not devote some
percentage to listening to what they
have to say? Research shows that the
conversations your customers have among
themselves drive about 13 percent of
business decisions and can amplify
your advertising by 15 percent. What
business owner wouldn’t want to be a
fly on that wall?
Are these expensive analytics tools
good investments?
You’ll first have to go through the considerable
time and expense to conduct
rigorous modeling ahead of time to ensure
that the metrics provided by a third-party
analytics program are meaningful to you
and your business. Otherwise, you’ll just
end up with a flood of data that you can’t
really do anything with or trust.
Assuming I do the modeling exercise
you suggest, what features would I look
for in a third-party analytics tool?
Because you want the right data—not
lots of data—you need a tool that filters
out spambots, auto-retweets and payper-click
results. Next, if the tool is
providing sentiment analysis (i.e., classifying
content as “positive,” “neutral”
or “negative”), you need to go into the
data to validate the sentiment. That’s
because sentiment analysis tools tend to
be keyword-driven, and a lot of keywords
mean lots of different things. And finally,
price is a factor. If you buy a cheap tool
but have to invest tons of time cleaning
up the data you get from it, you haven’t
saved yourself any money.
What’s next?
The most important thing to consider—
and then create—is a strategy to deal with
what you hear from your social media
feeds. How will you manage or redirect
customer complaints, requests for service
or sales inquiries? In social media time,
you have about three hours before people
start to get impatient and complain
because “no one is listening.”
Can I make do with the free metrics
provided by social media platforms?
Unless you’re doing the extensive modeling
mentioned above, it’s best to stick
to the free basic metrics provided by the
social media platforms you use. This lets
you easily decide which metrics matter to
your business. For instance, a restaurant
has very different goals for social media
than a bank or car dealership. Two places
to start are with revenue directly tied to
social media or audience size. Once you
decide which direction you’re going, you
can figure out the most important role
for social media. Is it to drive traffic to a
website, generate leads or build customer
engagement? From there, you can determine
the metrics that matter to you.
THE STAT: 18%
The number of American adults planning to buy a wearable tech device
such as a Fitbit or Apple smartwatch in 2015, according to market research
firm Ipsos MediaCT.
Source: Ipsos US Online Omnibus, October 2014
ILLUSTRATION © ROMULDO FAURA
56 ENTREPRENEUR MARCH 2015