Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics is the process of gathering of information and data from social media outlets and blogs, and analyzing that data to make business decisions. Consumers of almost everything take to twitter or facebook to voice their feelings on a product. Whether it’s to a praise an item, talk about how horrible it is, or complain about a customer service encounter this data is thrown onto the web and social media analytics is all about gathering that information and using it to enhance their products and the customers experience overall. In a nutshell, social media analytics is like utilizing a focus group that is made up of everyone who uses social media.
Social media analytics is very similar to what we’ve been learning this year with the extraction, transformation, and loading of data to turn it into something that can be analyzed and help better a company. In social media analytics they take data that alone seems like nothing more than a grumpy customer complaining and compare it to thousands of other problems posted on social media sites which allows a company to see exactly what they are doing wrong, how they can fix it, and what the customers would like to see in the future. Another way it relates to what we’ve learned in data analytics is the process of taking data from a database to get useful information. Just instead of manipulating a database to get information, the data is taken from peoples posts on social media sites.
More and more companies are studying to utilize this technique to keep customers on their side. The latest would be the phone company AT&T. Over the past year they have been running into multiple connection problems around the United States, all of which were heavily voiced using the social media site twitter. AT&T wasted no time trying to fix the problem. Using social media analytics AT&T found all tweets that involved connection problems using AT&T phones and sent repair crews to the areas that were uploading the most complaints. This method proved to be 90% accurate with the areas where heavy complaints were coming from and helped AT&T speed up recovery time much quicker than using traditional customer service techniques.
Works Cited
Crosman, Penny. “AT&T’s Use of Social Media Analytics Is An Example for Banks to Follow.” Bank Systems and Technology. 10 Apr. 2014 <http://www.banktech.com/business-intelligence/atts-use-of-social-media-analytics-is-an/228200019>.
“Social Media Analytics (SMA).” Techopedias. 10 Apr. 2014 <http://www.techopedia.com/definition/13853/social-media-analytics-sma>.