4 Tips to Enhance the Marketing Value of Social Media Intelligence

Over the years, social media has morphed from a channel for basic communications to a forum for richer engagement with audiences that have a natural affinity for brands – as fans and followers opt in to keep pages part of their social activities.

Social as a channel is offering evolving ways for marketers to interpret more thorough insights about their audiences, and seize additional opportunities to learn more granular attributes about customers and prospects – on their terms.

But as a recent SiriusDecisions SiriusView report notes, marketing organizations are falling victim to more manual, labor-intensive methods of intelligence collection, which aren’t entirely scalable. The report notes that, “Investing in SMI solutions helps automate and scale social monitoring, response and analysis, allowing an organization to broaden its social intelligence capabilities to encompass more social channels and conversations, while deepening its capabilities by improving its analysis of social media data.”

Even when marketers do adopt a social media intelligence tool to improve engagement and measurement tactics, as with any significant technology rollout, it’s important to implement a strategy to maximize the value of the investment. Here are four tips to do so more effectively, and help your teams, and customers find ongoing value in your social media marketing efforts:

1. Record your engagement strategy. While the theme and frequency of your social campaigns may differ across various demand oriented programs, determining your objectives and anticipated results will help your social media monitors understand what to look out for, and how to respond. For instance, some keywords, phrases, and other qualitative insights will be more conducive to your campaign focus than others.
2. Listen and learn for business insights. Listen to what people are saying about your brand, analyze campaign results, and get engagement metrics. This will help you learn about customer preferences, what they like and don’t like about your product, so you can refine this information and use it to create products and marketing programs that sell. Audiences often take to social media to voice their hopes, desires, and concerns with respect to the products and services they use. Seize the opportunity to learn and grow.
3. Determine your targeting strategy based on response. As noted in the SiriusDecisions report. “If cross-functional organizational alignment is weak, social media intelligence is prone to the same deficiencies as the rest of the marketing program mix, for instance, a lack of audience insights, siloed approach, failure to present usable, actionable insights.” Highlighting your reaction strategy is a significant build on tip number one, to refine your engagement focus. This ensures that your team has parameters to effectively react based on proven methods.
4. Align tools and teams to conquer! To make the most of your social media intelligence across all organizational efforts, map out a plan to integrate the appropriate systems, as well as the insights being gleaned from them. This will help not only your team foster a more seamless execution focus, but create more meaningful customer interactions across touch points. For instance, you can better connect the communication messaging to your social audiences in a way that rewards their loyalty and interest.

For more takeaways on the state of Social Media Intelligence, as well as the technology landscape, download the SiriusView report, Social Media Intelligence 2015.