Social Media Analytics (SMA)

What is Social Media Analytics (SMA)?
Social Media Analytics (SMA) refers to the approach of collecting data from social media sites and blogs and evaluating that data in order to make business decisions. This process goes beyond the usual monitoring or a basic analysis of retweets or “likes” in order to develop a profound idea of the social consumer. This is a basic requirement to enable companies to:
- Do focused engagements like one-to-one and one-to-many

- Enhance social collaboration across a variety of business functions such as customer service, marketing, support, etc.

- Maximize the customer experience

Social media is a good medium for understanding decisions, intentions and feelings in real time. The predominant use of social media analytics is to get to know the customer base on a more emotional level in order to better target customer service and marketing.

The first step in a social media analytics program is figuring out what business goals can take advantage of the data that is collected and evaluated. Standard goals include maximizing company profits, reducing spending on customer services, getting feedback on services and products, and improving public opinion about a line of business or product. Once the business goals are set, key performance indicators (KPIs) must be outlined to objectively evaluate the data.

The benefits of implementing social media tools include:
Competitive Advantage: SMA tools give organizations a competitive advantage over their competitors by providing a much better understanding of their brands. This usually includes an understanding of how customers use certain services or products, what problems customers have when using those services or products, and how customers' views about a particular company or product are understood.

Learn From Customers: In many cases, customers have effective solutions to some of the problems an organization faces. For example, if a product is on the market without proper documentation, the likelihood of application errors increases. Some users can use trial and error to resolve these issues and then post their results on forums that can help the company determine if better documentation is needed and what users really need to know.

Improving products and services: That is the central goal of SMA. There are tons of tweets, blogs, comments, and complaints about products and services. This vast amount of information contains consumer sentiments that can be used to evaluate the user's experience with a particular product or service. This information can then be used to help companies improve their performance.