What is Social Analytics?

1 simplymeasured.com
Introduction
Despite popular belief, the advent of social media hasn’t fundamentally
changed digital marketing. Tactics, nuances, and roles are different,
but the basic principles of marketing remain.
Where social media has most impacted digital marketing is in the
tremendous volume of public data it produces and the potential of
that data to provide marketing insights, much like we’ve seen with
web data.
Social analytics – the ability to discover and communicate meaningful
patterns from this social data – gives social marketers the opportunity
to grow and develop their programs, fuel the entire marketing
organization, and challenge assumptions more easily than they’ve
been able to do with other digital mediums. The vast and disparate
amount of data available to social marketers may make the process of
analysis more complicated than it is in other areas, but its breadth and
volume is also the reason it’s so valuable.
In this paper, we’ll define social analytics, how it fits into the social
marketing process, and the components needed to develop an
analytics-fueled social media strategy. We’ll explain where marketers
often miss an opportunity to both plan and strengthen their social
strategy by analyzing the necessary components.
Introduction | 01
The Social Marketing Process | 02
Why Marketers Need Social Analytics | 03
The Two Core Functions of Social Analytics | 04
Planning: Defining a Social Strategy | 05
Audience Analysis
Conversation Analysis
Competitive Analysis
Measurement: Optimizing Social Tactics | 11
Brand Activities Analysis
Audience Engagement Analysis
Business Impact Analysis
Turning Insight into Action | 15
Conclusion | 16

The Social Marketing Process
Optimizing a social plan starts with analyzing tactics and execution,
as it would in any marketing channel. Modern marketers don’t have
to make purely qualitative decisions. The data available for any digital
channel arms marketers with the ability to quantify their entire social
marketing process.
Social marketers have three distinct needs to address in order to
develop effective programs and campaigns. These needs are not
unique to social marketing, but instead mirror the needs of any other
type of marketing:
1. The ability to define and plan a social strategy.
2. The ability to execute on that strategy.
3. The ability to measure and optimize campaigns and tactics.
No marketing strategy is complete without coming full circle from
planning to measurement. In order to execute tactics, marketers have
to plan a strategy and, in order to plan, they have to understand how
their tactics make an impact on their plan and goals.
PLAN
EXECUTE
MEASURE
WHAT IS SOCIAL ANALYTICS?

Why Marketers Need Social Analytics
Social analytics is a critical step in the social
marketing process, allowing marketers to plan
and measure the actions they take to execute on
their social strategy.
But, creating an effective process for analysis in
both the planning and measurement categories
remains a challenge for most marketers.
According to a recent CMO Survey, social media
budgets are expected to increase by 128% over
the next five years, but only 15% of marketers
report that they know how to show the impact of
social using quantitative approaches.
A complete social analytics process helps
marketers understand the impact of their
social strategy. It gives marketers access to the
information, analysis, and insight necessary to
plan their strategy, measure their performance,
optimize their tactics, and tie social activity to
larger business outcomes. In addition, it helps
them understand how to use that insight in
constructive ways.
PLAN
EXECUTE
MEASURE
A recent CMOSurvey.org poll found that only 15% of
marketers believe they can qualitatively prove the impact
of their social media programs.

The Two Core Functions of Social Analytics
As the CMO Survey suggests, most marketers don’t have a well-
defined approach to social analytics. They haven’t had access to the
information and insight needed to plan and measure correctly on their
social marketing tactics, so their process has simply been to use what’s
readily available, or ignore the process of analysis all together. This
isn’t optimal and wouldn’t be acceptable in other marketing channels.
As the category of social analytics has formalized, the expectations
of what the process should cover has grown to include a wider set of
needs and enable both the planning and measuring components of
the social marketing process outlined above.
Social analytics informs the planning process with intelligence from
several different components of a brand’s social ecosystem, and the
measurement process by enabling a brand to understand the impact
of its own activities on its audience and business objectives.
For the purposes of this paper, we’ll look at the full scope of social
analytics and how it enables marketers to find success in both the
planning and measurement processes.

Planning: Defining Social Strategy
Executing effective social media programs and campaigns requires
data-driven planning. Analytics in the planning category involves
collecting insight and intelligence about a broader social ecosystem,
focusing outward instead of on your specific brand activities to define
strategic initiatives.
Planning within social media marketing is composed of three key types
of analysis.
Using just one of these components as a basis for social strategy is
an ineffective way of operating and leaves out crucial information.
By combining all three, marketers gain a holistic view of their social
landscape.
The outcome of the planning process, when done effectively, is a set of
goals and tactics that relate directly to business objectives and follow
the S.M.A.R.T. criteria, first introduced by marketing thought leader
Peter Drucker in 1981.
S.M.A.R.T. defines an effective goal as one that is specific, measurable,
attainable, realistic, and time-bound. In the context of social analytics,
each goal and outcome of the planning practice should fit into the
S.M.A.R.T. framework.
Is the goal well-defined? Does it align with overall
business objectives in a way that is clear to leadership?
How is success or failure of this goal defined? What
are the tactics associated with this goal, and what is
the point where a pivot or optimization is needed?
Specific
Measurable
Audiences Conversations Competitors

Each of the three categories of analysis - audiences, conversations,
and competitors - has unique components but, in concert, they are
essential to forming a social strategy, including tactics necessary to
achieve those goals.
Is this goal even possible? Is the goal aligned with an
understanding of the audience and interest around the
product or initiative?
Does this goal fit with overall business objectives in a
scalable and manageable way?
What is the time frame for this goal? When have other
brands in the same space reached similar objectives?
Attainable
Realistic
Time-Bound

Audience Analysis
Audience analysis is the process of profiling, segmenting, and grouping
people by demographics, interests, and behaviors.
Audience analysis can be broken into two main categories with a
variety of analysis types that can inform strategy and tactics:
Behavior Analysis: Collecting insight about most influential
followers, engagement patterns, and sentiment, such as
negative feedback, for example.
Demographic Analysis: Collecting insight about user
characteristics by analyzing keyword and profile data.
Audience analysis can help marketers answer several questions:
• Who is engaging with their brand or a specific topic?
• What are the characteristics of their ideal follower/fan?
• How are their audience members engaging with their brand?
Socialanalyticsallowsuserstotargetpeopleforoutreachoradvertising,
align a social audience to the ideal customer, and craft the right content
at the right time to align with audience preferences.

Conversation Analysis
Conversation analysis is the process of identifying and understanding
conversations surrounding your brand, specific topics, or any selected
area of interest.
Conversation analysis can frame the way marketers speak about
their own products and brand, how they interact with consumers by
leveraging the topics that are already being discussed, and which
tactics or conversations to avoid altogether.
Conversation analysis can help marketers answer a variety of questions:
Volume: How many people engaged in conversation about
a specific topic?
Sentiment: Were interactions positive or negative?
Relevance: Were the conversations able to give pertinent insight?
Influence: Were the people involved influential enough to push
the conversation to a broader audience?
Social analytics allows marketers to pull out aggregate and specific
findings from conversations, benchmarking and analyzing details to
help create and deliver a relevant brand story in the most meaningful
context.

Competitive Analysis
Competitive analysis is the process of looking at specific companies
within a chosen industry or segment, focusing on competitor activity,
benchmarks, and tactics to gain critical strategic insight.
Competitive analysis should be conducted on at least one of the
following sample sets:
Industry Competitors: Companies competing for the same
market share, customers, and dollars.
Aspirational Social Competitors: Brands from the same space,
or a similar one, that are operating effectively and can provide
guidance.
Once the set of companies is established, competitive analysis can
be used by marketers to answer specific benchmarking and tactical
questions:
• What is their brand’s share of audience or engagement within
the competitive set?
• Which tactics are competitors using that marketers can learn
from and use to set benchmarks?
Social analytics allows users to analyze and benchmark the competition
to pull out successful areas of focus and tactics that can be integrated
into a brand’s strategy.

Turning Insight into Strategy
Armed with insight about their audience, competitors, and relevant
conversations, a social marketer is able to transform their social
planning into a more sophisticated process than the current status quo,
simply by organizing the information gleaned through their analysis.
They are now ready to complete the following these steps, which help
them sort through their findings and develop a complete strategy and
action plan.
Aggregate: Compile the insights gained from each of the three
areas of analysis. For example, marketers can organize and group
information about conversations with similar insights about
audience segments and competitors.
Align: Align this newly aggregated insight with overall business
and marketing objectives then develop tactical roadmaps based
on the desired outcomes, best practices, and realistic goals
gleaned from the analysis.
Prioritize: Prioritize the goals and tactics based on relevance to
company and department objectives, the amount of resources
needed, and the likelihood of a desired outcome.
Implement: Equipped with data-driven goals and tactics that
are aligned with company objectives and weighted for optimal
success, begin acting to the newly developed plan.

Measurement: Optimizing Social Tactics
Measuring tactical execution is essential to understanding and
optimizing social media programs.
Social analytics in the measurement category involves understanding
the relationship between our brand activities, audience engagement,
and business results.
The outcome of the measurement and optimization process, when
done effectively, is a complete understanding of how brand tactics
impact audience engagement and drive real business value. This
insight can then be used to alter, improve, or change the tactics and
execution decided upon during the planning process.
When analyzing social execution, it’s important to start with what the
brand controls.
Brand
Activities
Audience
Engagement
Business
Results

Brand Activities
Brandactivitiesincludetheactivitiesyourbrandconductslikepublishing
content, responding to users, and promoting brand campaigns or
initiatives.
There are many types of analysis to be done around brand activities,
including campaign execution, posting volume and frequency, content
type, content attributes, network distribution, and audience targeting.
The goal of analyzing brand activities is to help marketers answer
several specific directional questions:
• Are they executing to plan?
• Are time and resources being dedicated to areas that are
aligned with the insight and intelligence gathered during
the planning process?
• Can they bring these activity metrics into their audience
engagement analysis as tactical baselines?
Social analytics needs to fulfill a specific use case here, helping
marketers measure, compare, and optimize the tactics being used.

Audience Engagement
Audience engagement in the social analytics framework is the analysis
of how your brand activities and earned media are received, interacted
with, and amplified by your audience, both at a content-specific level
and a brand level.
When engagement analysis is used as a KPI (key performance indicator)
for a successful tactic in concert with analysis of brand activities, it
can provide valuable insight in several areas, including content and
campaign performance, amplification and reach, sentiment, network
performance, or volume and reach.
The goal of analyzing engagement is to help marketers answer several
specific directional questions:
• Are specific brand tactics working less effectively than anticipated?
• What can we change to increase audience engagement?
• What are we doing well, that our audience is responding
positively to?
• Are time and resources being spent on the right content,
networks, and audiences? Does the strategic approach need
to be adjusted?
Social analytics allows users to gain insights about how their audience
has interacted with their brand message, benchmark against other
companies and time periods, and gain understanding about their
tactics and content performance.

Business Results
The most difficult, and most valuable, component of social analytics is the ability
to measure social’s impact on both direct outcomes like engagement and traffic,
broader marketing outcomes like brand loyalty and customer lifetime value, and
business outcomes like revenue and sales.
The topic of “Social ROI” has been a hot one for some time now. Marketers feel
unequipped to define the ROI of their social programs, but the ability to integrate
social data with other channels is growing and, while social marketing at many
companies may not equate directly to a revenue figure, there are many ways to tie
social programs to business results. These include measuring website traffic, foot
traffic, customer lifetime value, brand loyalty, brand awareness, customer support,
and other sales metrics.
The goal of analyzing business impact is to help marketers answer several specific
questions:
• What tactics and campaigns are most effective for the business?
• Does the business see the right return on the investment of these tactics
and campaigns?
• Can marketers prove the value of social media to the organization, and how
does it stack up compared to other marketing channels and tactics?
• Is this strategy the right one for the impact their trying to make?
In this regard, social analytics needs to integrate social data with other marketing
and sales channels, tying social media initiatives directly to down-funnel activities,
workflows, and sales metrics.

Turning Insight into Action
Armed with insight about their brand activities, audience engagement,
and business impact, a social marketer is able to understand the impact
of their brand’s social programs, simply by organizing the information
gleaned through their analysis. Social marketers are now ready to use
this insight in a variety of ways:
Prove Success: Both within the social team, and to the broader
marketing department and organization, social marketers are
now able to quantify whether or not their social programs are
successful.
Discover What Works: By analyzing audience engagement and
business impact, marketers are able to identify successful tactics
so they can invest more in specific areas.
Discover What Doesn’t Work: On the other side of that coin, this
analysis allows marketers to understand what isn’t working so they
can abandon those tactics and focus on other areas of their social
plan.
Develop Additional Hypotheses: When something hasn’t worked,
the data and insight now available gives marketers the ability to
develop and test new tactics and actions.
Modify and Execute Again: Above all, this process allows
marketers to make the necessary changes and execute the plan
again so they can measure it once more and continue to optimize.

Conclusion
Social media is a core component of digital marketing and, as social
marketers are under mounting pressure to show value, tie activities to
business goals, and drive results with their programs, the emerging
category of social analytics is at the core of the social marketing process.
Using social analytics as the basis for planning a complete strategy and
measuring the outcomes of that strategy’s execution is now a fundamental
component to developing successful social programs, understanding the
value of those programs, and driving real results.

Simply Measured is the most complete social analytics solution,
empowering marketers with unmatched access to their social data
to more clearly define their social strategy and to optimize their
tactics for maximum impact.
About Simply Measured
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