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You are probably all familiar with social media monitoring tools and many of you are
probably also familiar with stuff like sentiment analysis. These tools give you a good sense
of how your social media and online marketing efforts are doing and how your audience is
growing. However, most of the tools we are familiar with are REACTIVE or after-the-fact.
What about PROACTIVE tools? What if you are just starting out? What if you have no real
online marketing or social media efforts to measure? Is there a way to find out what sort
of content would appeal to your desired audience?
In a word: YES.
Kip: "yessssss!"
There are some new kids in town when it comes to social monitoring and these tools go far beyond
how many people like or retweet brand posts. Broadly, we call them Social Intelligence
Tools and they are all about figuring out who your audience is and what makes them tick.
Billie: "I don't know anything about you."
Today, I’m going to give a little primer on Social Intelligence tools, when you would
use them, and why they represent the future of data.
Hi, my name is Tara and this is ...Truly Social.
One of the many advantages of social media is being able to measure, but when it comes
to measurement, I take a few issues with how it’s currently done.
Number one, and as I mentioned earlier, it’s very reactive rather than proactive, but even
more unfortunate is that social media measurement usually revolves around the brand itself.
In most cases I’ve seen, the monitoring that brands are doing on social media is only
really about watching what people are saying about THEM and (maybe) their competitors.
As we’ve discussed before on Truly Social, having such a brand-centric point of view
is not very social at all. In fact, your customers are complex beings with multiple interests
and affinities.
"I'm complicated."
Brands may be pretty single-minded, but their customers are not. By taking this
brand-centric, single-minded point of view, you completely miss out on the huge advantages
that social data has to offer.
This is where social intelligence tools come into play. Social intelligence is about seeing
the world from a customer’s point of view. People are constantly sharing information
about themselves on social networks:
Patrick: "The inner machinations of my mind are an enigma."
what they read, listen to, what moves them, who
they admire, who they dislike, their worldviews, their brand preferences, what keeps them up
at night, what makes them smile…
By narrowly looking at only what they say in relation to your brand, you are missing
out on an incredible amount of information that can help you create more relevant content,
help you create new products and improve current products to solve their needs, give you keys
to messaging that will resonate with them, and help you understand where they’re at
to know where you can best approach them.
"Blah blah blah blah"
When I sit down to create a strategy, the first thing I do is get to know the audience:
who they are, what they pay attention to, where they ‘hang out’, what they need
answers to, what life stage they are at, what motivates them, and so forth. And how do I
do this?
I use amazing social intelligence tools like Affinio - an application that can pull a list
of people who are talking about a specific hashtag, brand, or subject, break them into
affinity tribes, and monitor the content, influencers, and subjects that matter to each
of these tribes - LittleBird - an app that can help surface influencers, subjects, and
influential content in any niche category you can imagine - Nexalogy - a tool that creates
conversation maps around brands and subjects that you can use to uncover insights into
people’s needs - and Klear - a tool that helps you find Twitter influencers in any
category.
I also use the Facebook Interest Graph and will link to a post I wrote on LinkedIN on
how to do this.
I sat down with the founders of Affinio, LittleBird and Nexalogy and created a podcast on the
subject of Social Intelligence. If you have an hour or so to kill, you should listen to
it. I’ll also link it in the description.
Patrick: "We have technology!"
And though the tools are amazing, it’s also important that you take the time to start
following people within the communities you want to speak to in order to really understand
what it is that makes your audience tick. Being part of the community you serve is still
the very best way to not only understand your audience, but to also build those essential
relationships.
Social intelligence is the next generation of data analytics and it is where the absolute
value of social media is being realized. Your customers have been practically handing you
the key to talking to them for years now.
John: "What else do you need to know?"
Social Intelligence is how you can start to make that scale.
My name is Tara and this has been Truly Social.