Social Media, is it a good or a bad thing? That would depend on whom you ask. Judith Aquino, a reporter for CRM Magazine, describes social media as a marketing tool. Something to be mined for data and used to further the strategies and goals of a business. Americans spend just about 53.5 billion minutes on Facebook every month.[1] I don’t know about you, but to me, that is a lot of time. Every minute could mean a potential customer for any business. How exactly do you use social media in the best possible way? Well for starters, be careful what you write. It is easier to make incredibly simple mistakes.
Mistakes and the Negative Effects of an Uniformed Decision
Social
media is, of course, based on a community. That means anything that is posted is there for the world to see, and the world will see it. I am sure many of you
have seen this tweet.
For those who haven’t, this was posted the same day as the shooting in Aurora,
Colorado. It is obviously an unfortunate mistake, one that probably cost the
business dearly. The marketing team did not take the time to find out why
#Aurora was trending and simply assumed it must be because of their Aurora
dress.[2]
The point is, that a tweet such as this one could destroy a business.[3]
In the analytical sense, it is ok to make mistakes. Mistakes tell you what
works, and what doesn’t work. So what is the moral of this story? Pay attention
to what you have in front of you. Do not make uninformed decisions. Make sure
you are looking at your data and going through it thoroughly before making any
decisions based on it.
Uses of Social Media Data
Now
that we have established the fact that social media can have negative effects
as well as positive effects on a business, lets talk about the analytical side
to social media. What exactly is social media data good for? That is an
incredibly good question. Lets take the show Teen Wolf
as an example.[4]
According to CRM Magazine, this TV show by MTV, had many issues in the
beginning. Too many people thought it was like the old Michael J. Fox classic,
when really it was an entirely new show. How did they figure out what was
confusing their viewers? By using comments made on social media and analyzing
the information.[5]
The marketing plan to pitch the show as a “remake” of the original film
backfired. The viewers were more interested in the romantic relationships
between the characters. Those who chose to watch the show in hopes of it being
like the original ended up being disappointed that so much about the show was
different than the old movie. Comments on social media websites, like Facebook,
can give a business a large amount of information about how their customers
think and what they may be interested in. The problem is tracking this kind of
data. For one, there is a lot of it, and for two, it is not as easy to track as
other forms of data, such as a bounce rate.
Social media is definitely an important
part of web analytics. It helps a business understand their customers better
and as a result help them market their products better. There is always a
chance for a mistake in any kind of analytics. Mistakes that come from valid
sets of data will serve as a learning tool. Those made without adequate
information can have disasterous
effects. Regardless of any mistakes made, social websites are stock full of
information ready to be extracted and analyzed.
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