Social Media Analytics: The Power of Data Mining and Analysis in Marketing
What is social media analytics?
Social media analytics is a powerful tool that is very new in the marketplace. It is the act of keeping tabs on what people are saying about your product or anything related to your company. Social media marketing campaigns are becoming more and more popular, and social media analytics is a way to collect metrics on how successful your campaign is. This is extremely important, because it is not only a measure of success; it gives a company a perspective on how they are perceived in the marketplace.
How does it relate to MIS?
In Data Analytics (MIS 2502), we studied the topic of Data Mining. This is the concept of using past data to predict data that will be collected in the future, opening the opportunity to try to influence the results. With social media analytics, the industry tools available to conduct the analysis all perform data mining on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Pintrest, YouTube, and LinkedIn. SAS Social Media Analytics includes a Data and Text mining module in it’s product offering. These are all real, practical uses of what we studied in Data Analytics.
Microsoft Bing: how they took advantage of it
Bing, who is in fierce competition with Google for market share or “mind share”, was struggling to make marketing campaigns that really spoke to their target segments the way they wanted to. They turned to Crimson Hexagon and used their ForSight product to conduct social media analytics. From this Bing was able to create marketing campaigns that spoke directly to customers’ thoughts about their service. Before Bing claimed they were “drowning in data” and didn’t know what insights to make from it. Social media analytics was able to give them an edge, saying, “Crimson Hexagon helped spark ideas for viral-marketing campaigns and identified ways we can connect more deeply with our target audiences,”. Data is meaningless until you give it meaning. There is an unfathomable amount of data out there, and those who are able to collect and interpret it successfully achieve success.
Works Cited:
“Microsoft Bing Team Enhances Marketing Efforts With Crimson Hexagon ForSight™ Platform.” Customer Success Story. Crimson Hexagon, n.d. Web. 10 May 2013. <http://www.crimsonhexagon.com/PDFs/CrimsonHexagon-MS-Bing-SuccessStory.pdf>.
“SAS® Social Media Analytics.” SAS, n.d. Web. 10 May 2013. <http://www.sas.com/software/customer-intelligence/social-media-analytics.html>.
“Social Media Analytics and ROI Tracking.” RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 May 2013. <http://socialmediatoday.com/brianna5mith/1421106/social-media-analytics-and-roi-tracking>.