Why Implement Social Media Intelligence in Your Business

Companies are implementing social media analytics at an accelerated pace to gain insights into their online presence across different social networks and understand their audience's behaviour and preferences better.

 

Social media intelligence is an emerging social media analytics technique that uses artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and machine learning to study and interpret social media data. It helps companies analyse market niches, customers, and competitors more deeply and accurately and make even more intelligent business decisions.

 

In this article, AI consulting experts from Itransition cover the concept of social media intelligence, highlight its use cases, and describe the main implementation challenges.

 

What is Social Media Intelligence?

 

Social media intelligence implies collecting and analysing vast amounts of social media data using technologies like NLP and ML for automated data gathering and interpreting. With social media intelligence, companies can discover patterns in customer behaviour, analyze competitor activity, and identify overall market trends efficiently.

 

Social media intelligence is often confused with other analytics concepts, such as social media monitoring and social listening:

 

• Social media monitoring helps track mentions of a specific company across various social media platforms to identify customer questions, requests, or complaints and timely address them.
• Unlike social media monitoring, which focuses on what people say, social listening enables companies to explore why they say that, which helps segment audiences more accurately, tailor marketing strategies, improve product positioning, or generate new ideas for future product lines.

 

Although social media intelligence can include elements of social listening and monitoring, these notions still aren't interchangeable because social media intelligence is a more large-scale and complex analytics concept.

 

With social media intelligence, companies collect data not only from social media, such as Twitter or Facebook, but from many additional channels as well, including gaming platforms (Steam or GOG), forums (Lemmy or Reddit), and visual content discovery platforms (Tumblr or Pinterest).

 

Also, companies study not only user-generated content but also their profile information, contacts, interactions with other users, and even metadata, as it can highlight the exact time the message was published or reveal the type of device from which it was sent.

 

Four Use Cases of Social Media Intelligence

 

Customer Analytics

 

Marketers can use social media intelligence to track and analyze customer comments and conversions to identify changes in customer behavior, better determine their interests and preferences, and highlight their key pain points. Companies can use this information to elaborate more effective marketing and customer engagement strategies and thus increase sales.

 

Market Analysis

 

Marketers and analysts can use social media intelligence to not only better understand consumer preferences but also identify emerging markets and market niches. For example, specialists can analyze the volume of tags and keywords used across various social media platforms to identify new target markets, assess their sizes or growth rates, and understand if market demand is sufficient for making a profit.

 

Competitor Research

 

A company can monitor social media to run a comprehensive analysis of its competitors and improve its own business strategies based on the findings. Specifically, by using social media intelligence, a company can gain answers to the following questions:

 

• Who our direct and indirect competitors are?
• What are our competitors' unique selling propositions? How do they position themselves in the market?
• How do our competitors expand their digital presence? How fast do their audiences grow?
• How popular are their social media posts? What makes competitors' content efficient—vivid colours, original fonts, or large text volume?

 

Product and Service Improvement

 

Social media intelligence can also be helpful for product and manufacturing specialists, as it allows for collecting and analyzing customer feedback that helps identify product improvement and innovation opportunities. In turn, market analysts can use social media intelligence to identify a growing demand for specific types of products, prompting a company to develop up-to-date product lines.

 

Potential Challenges of Social Media Intelligence Adoption

 

• Gathering high-quality data

Using incorrect, irrelevant, or duplicated data can distort the results of social media intelligence analysis, leading to inadequate business decisions. Companies can improve data quality by adopting software with functionality for data reconciliation, cleansing and normalization. AI-powered software would be preferable for larger companies, as it can increase the speed and accuracy of data cleaning and normalizing.

 

• Ensuring Data Privacy and Security

Suppose a company doesn't comply with legality, necessity, and proportionality when collecting, storing, and analyzing data. In that case, it may be accused of data privacy violations, harming its business reputation. To avoid this issue, companies should use robust data storage and analytics software that is compliant with GRPR, CCPA, and other data security regulations.

 

• Overcoming the IT Skill Gap
  

Implementing the right social media intelligence toolset requires IT specialists well-versed in software development, AI, and data analytics. Since nurturing AI developers in-house takes too long, companies can consider augmenting their internal resources with third-party IT professionals.

 

Final Thoughts

 

Social media intelligence is an emerging and powerful social media analytics technique. It allows companies to run more comprehensive and accurate analyses of customers, competitors, and market conditions, which helps tailor marketing strategies, discover promising business niches, and create better product lines.

 

However, a company requires AI-powered solutions to run an efficient analysis, as these technologies streamline data collection, processing, and interpreting. A company can resort to third-party AI consultants to help them choose the right social media intelligence technology from those available on the market or build a custom solution from scratch that fully covers its specific business requirements.