Social Media and Big Data: 5 Tips to Assessing Your Strategy

Social Media and Big Data – 5 Tips to Assess Your Strategy

Wednesday June 13th, 2012 // Blog

"If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there" - Anon

A social assessment can be a powerful tool to either set your social media strategy (in the unlikely event you don't already have one) or to periodically review and tune your strategy. A social assessment uses social business tools and big data to review and augment your social media strategy, ensuring you do stay on the right road towards the right business goals. A strategy is a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major goal or aim. It presumes two key pieces of information:

A. An understanding of the business goal you are trying to achieve or improve

B. An understanding of where you are now on your journey towards that goal.

Using social business intelligence to understand where you are will ensure your social media strategy is evidence based and properly defined, scoped, resourced and so on to achieve your key aims. Here are our 5 key tips on using social business intelligence for improving a social strategy :

1. Assess your Brand

The primary purpose here is to identify the places and spaces where the brand is discussed and to understand the Brand reflection and sentiment around the brand. Its important that you also assess your own team and their engagement in the social web. An important part of your social media strategy will revolve around how well you utilise brand managed places and team presence so be sure to include this in your big data review. When assessing the social data streams we believe you should utilise text analytics to identify key words and phrases used in conjunction with the brand and key products and services. You want to ensure your keyword strategy is working too.

2. Assess your Customers

We don't know why but many organisations forget to include customers in their social assessment. Big data is especially useful for finding relevant places and spaces by searching for your existing, previous or future customers in person. When assessing your customers; seek to identify your customers’ challenges, topics, excitement and frustrations, their issues and sentiment. In looking for people, you should also seek to assess how well you do with key influencers in the industry. Your social strategy must focus on people above all else and of those, customers are the most important

3. Assess your Partners

80% of companies in Asia Pacific use partners to take their products and services to market. Little point in having a great social strategy if your partners are not aligned - especially when they likely maintain the direct customer relationships. Use big data analysis to review the partners’ topics and their second degree ecosystem (the partners’ customers), those discussions and sentiments. And be sure to review links in your social architecture between your own presence and that of your partners.

4. Assess your Competitors

Big data can reveal the places and spaces where the competition is active and identify the competitors’ customers activity, discussion and sentiment. You should also seek to identify the key employees at your competitors and influencers. You should also confirm your own key word and campaign strategy by reviewing that of your competitors. The key point here is assist your social strategy to have a better differentiation component.

5. Results

What are we going to do with the results? You should seek to create a social business SWOT analysis. What does the market say are our key strengths; what appears to be a weakness; identify opportunities to improve and threats to deal with. We are going to use this assessment to define or refine our Social Strategy and our Social Business plan. And then we are going to go and execute the plan together with our ecosystem.

Will B - @wbosma

Join our next WEBINAR on Social business Intelligence for more insights!

Social Media and Big Data – 5 Tips to Assess Your Strategy

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