Social Media Analytics Research
What is Social Media Analytics?
Social media has enabled consumers to quickly express their likes, dislikes, interests, and concerns about a particular company/product. Social media analytics (SMA) is the process of leveraging data collected from blogs, forums, and other social media channels to make better business decisions. Having the ability to capture, analyze, and understand customer data is vital to the success of any business. As the number of users of social media increases, businesses will have to increase their efforts to better identify consumers and the impact social media has on current and long-term business.
How does it relate to MIS?
Social media analytics relates to data analytics because it leverages data mining to provide useful knowledge for decision makers. SAS Social Media Analytics offers an array services including: data and text mining, cluster analysis, and data visualization, which provides a wide scope of information. Furthermore, social media analytics uses past data to help predict future behavior. The idea of behavior predication is a key concept in decision trees. With predications they can better classify consumers and how to target groups of consumers. This enables a business to gauge customer responses to a particular product/service.
American Red Cross: How they took advantage of SMA
The American Red Cross isn’t new to social media, they’ve been using social media as a way to increase the amount of blood donation they receive. Recently, they teamed up with Dell to take advantage of social media analytics to help better identify new blood donors. In addition to blood donors, the Red Cross is engaging new social media channels to drive interest in the next generation of volunteers and donors. By implementing social media analytics the Red Cross has been able to increase brand awareness by creating new digital marketing campaigns that speak directly to consumers about the services they offer.
References:
BRAULIO MEDINA, B. (2013, June 28). Clustering, Analysis and Visualization of Social Media Big Data – Insight Innovation. Retrieved April 24, 2015.
Lambert, R. (2015, April 21). American Red Cross takes advantage of new Dell social analytics solutions. Retrieved April 24, 2015.
SAS Social Media Analytics. (2011, January 10). Retrieved April 24, 2015.
What is social media analytics? – Definition from WhatIs.com. (n.d.). Retrieved April 24, 2015.