March 18, 2018
Attracting and engaging customers through social media platforms is not a new tactic, but a business must take it a step further to gain a competitive edge. Social media intelligence involves analyzing the online behavior of your audience. It’s a tad more than simply setting up social accounts and engaging with people.
Social media intelligence listens to your audience, examines the conversation, and gleans social insights based on the data. Social media provides the map for social intelligence and creates “experts” out of your audience. Market analysis is in the hands of your consumers.
The key to formulating robust social media intelligence starts with calculated social monitoring. You have to put your ear to the rails to locate an audience first. Social campaigning will open up engagement and get the conversation started. Over time, brand loyalty will give way to deeper social insights regarding your business. That’s called social intelligence and there’s a variety of reasons why it’s important.
Social media intelligence is one of the main routes to identifying gaps in the market. The first step to decision making is social listening. A recent survey established that 83% of B2B brands are using social listening to improve exposure, 69% to boost website traffic, and 65% to provide better insights into their target markets. That’s because listening to customer needs helps you meet them faster.
Data-driven decision making is the modern way of doing business. Social intelligence will give way to greater insight that can help you make more informed choices. For example, you may want to stop production on a product and shift gears if your audience is predicting they will hate it. Social cues can drive business and help a company save a lot of money in the long run.
Social media and the internet allow you a thousand ways to study your competition. It’s called “competitive intelligence” and it’s right there for the picking. Social intelligence will allow you to not only know what your competitors are planning, but have open access to their successes and failures too. This isn’t about espionage because the data is public. It’s simply about intelligence.
Advanced social intelligence allows a company to study their entire business sector. It permits the opportunity for a broader study that encompasses social data points like:
These social outcomes can then be used to develop crucial influence tactics. This creates the blueprint for reputation-enhancing signals and content strategy like blogs, press releases, social media posts, etc…
Once you identify exactly what your audience is looking for, it’s easier to give them what they want. The unmet needs of consumers can help drive new business ideas and encourage the development of products. Your customers may have thought of enhancements or new ideas that your brand may never have considered.
Social intelligence is about active communication with your audience. Consistently running metrics and engaging with a community is a mutually beneficial process. The consumer tells you what they want and your business, in turn, knows exactly what to give. It’s a collaborative progression that takes a lot of the guesswork out of marketing and product development.
Social intelligence is key for business because the root of the method involves listening and actively engaging with consumers on a frequent basis. Personalization is the type of attention people crave and social intelligence is the key to greater insight.
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