Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics is the gathering of information from blogs, websites and social media pages which helps track and analyze data to make business decisions. Once a business decides on a goal they would like to achieve, business owners can take advantage of many of the social media analytic tools available for use, targeted at different areas of Social Media like: mentions, likes, new fans and more. Social media analytic tools can be broken down into different groups for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social sites. Some popular tools used today include: Klout, Followerwonk, SproutSocial, Hootsuite and Social Mentions.
Like much of the material in MIS2502, using social media analytics requires the ability to read and interpret data from various graphs and charts. Similar to SAS, many social media analytic sites provide users with bar graphs, pie charts and other types of graphs which requires the ability to interpret and extract the data. Social media analytics builds on the concepts of database systems, pattern recognition and statistics, which are all often use in data mining. Additionally, predictive analysis is key with social media analytics. Based off of past patterns and trends, business owners used sites like Sprout Social and Facebook Insights to predict future trends of their followers/fans. Social media analytics sites also have the ability to cluster users based off of age, demographic, income and more.
Personally, I use Social Media Analytics everyday at my internship as a Social Media Manager at Wolters Kluwer Health. In this position, I am responsible for driving likes, retweets, favorites, shares and more over the the social platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. With the help of Tweriod and Hootsuite, I was able to help drive retweets and favorites on Twitter by adjusting posting times. By changing when tweets were sent out from information provided by theses Social Media Analytic sites, I was able to increase traffic, retweet and favorites on the page.
Work Cited
Barker, Ian. “Best Social Media Analytics Tools: 8 of the Best to Use.” TechRadar. 1 Feb. 2014. Web. 23 Apr. 2015. <http://www.techradar.com/us/news/software/applications/best-social-media-analytics-tools-8-of-the-best-to-use-1151220>.