Social Media and Text Analytics
An overview of social media analytics
Practitioners and analysts alike know social media by its many websites and channels: Facebook,
YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and many others.
Social media analytics is the ability to gather and find meaning in data gathered from social channels to
support business decisions — and measure the performance of actions based on those decisions
through social media.
Social media analytics includes the concept of social listening. Listening is monitoring social channels for
problems and opportunities. Social media analytics tools typically incorporate listening into more
comprehensive reporting that involves listening and performance analysis.
These strategies affect a range of business activity:
Product development - Analyzing an aggregate of Facebook posts, tweets and Amazon product reviews
can deliver a clearer picture of customer pain points, shifting needs and desired features. Trends can be
identified and tracked to shape the management of existing product lines as well as guide new product
development.
Customer experience - An IBM study discovered “organizations are evolving from product-led to
experience-led businesses.” Behavioral analysis can be applied across social channels to capitalize on
micro-moments to delight customers and increase loyalty and lifetime value.
Branding - Social media may be the world’s largest focus group. Natural language processing and
sentiment analysis can continually monitor positive or negative expectations to maintain brand health,
refine positioning and develop new brand attributes.
Competitive Analysis - Understanding what competitors are doing and how customers are responding is
always critical. For example, a competitor may indicate that they are foregoing a niche market, creating
an opportunity. Or a spike in positive mentions for a new product can alert organizations to market
disruptors.
Operational efficiency – Deep analysis of social media can help organizations improve how they gauge
demand. Retailers and others can use that information to manage inventory and suppliers, reduce costs
and optimize resources.
Social Media Analytics Process
There are three main steps in analyzing social media:
data identification
data analysis
information interpretation.
Data identification
Data identification is the process of identifying the subsets of available data to focus on for analysis. Raw
data is useful once it is interpreted. After data has been analyzed, it can begin to convey a message. Any
data that conveys a meaningful message becomes information.
Attributes of data that need to be considered are as follows:
1 Structure: Structured data is a data that has been organized into a formatted repository - typically
a database - so that its elements can be made addressable for more effective processing and analysis.
2.Language: Language becomes significant if we want to know the sentiment of a post rather than
number of mentions.
3.Region: It is important to ensure that the data included in the analysis is only from that region of the
world where the analysis is focused on. For example, if the goal is to identify the clean water problems
in India, we would want to make sure that the data collected is from India only.
4.Type of Content: The content of data could be Text (written text that is easy to read and understand if
you know the language), Photos (drawings, simple sketches, or photographs), Audio (audio recordings of
books, articles, talks, or discussions), or Videos (recording, live streams).
5.Venue: Social media content is getting generated in a variety of venues such as news sites and social
networking sites (e.g. Facebook, Twitter). Depending on the type of project the data is collected for, the
venue becomes very significant.
Time: It is important to collect data posted in the time frame that is being analyzed.
6.Ownership of Data: Is the data private or publicly available? Is there any copyright in the data? These
are the important questions to be addressed before collecting data.
Data analysis
Data analysis is the set of activities that assist in transforming raw data into insight, which in turn leads
to a new base of knowledge and business value. In other words, data analysis is the phase that takes
filtered data as input and transforms that into information of value to the analysts.
The taxonomy and the insight derived from that analysis are as follows:
1.Depth of Analysis: Simple descriptive statistics based on streaming data, ad hoc analysis on
accumulated data or deep analysis performed on accumulated data. This analysis dimension is really
driven by the amount of time available to come up with the results of a project. This can be considered
as a broad continuum, where the analysis time ranges from few hours at one end to several months at
the other end. This analysis can answer following type of questions:
How many people mentioned Wikipedia in their tweets?
Which politician had the highest number of likes during the debate?
Which competitor is gathering the most mentions in the context of social business?
2.Machine Capacity: The amount of CPU needed to process data sets in a reasonable time period.
Capacity numbers need to address not only the CPU needs but also the network capacity needed to
retrieve data.
3.Domain of Analysis: The domain of the analysis is broadly classified into external social media and
internal social media. Most of the time when people use the term social media, they mean external
social media. This includes content generated from popular social media sites such
as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Internal social media includes enterprise social network, which is a
private social network used to assist communication within business.
4.Velocity of Data: The velocity of data in social media can be divided into two categories: data at rest
and data in motion. Dimensions of velocity of data in motion can answer questions such as: How the
sentiment of the general population is changing about the players during the course of match? Is the
crowd conveying positive sentiment about the player who is actually losing the game? In these cases,
the analysis is done as arrives. In this analysis, the amount of detail produced is directly correlated to the
complexity of the analytical tool or system.
Information interpretation
The insights derived from analysis can be as varied as the original question that was posed in step one of
analysis. At this stage, as the nontechnical business users are the receivers of the information, the form
of presenting the data becomes important. How could the data make sense efficiently so it could be
used in good decision making? Visualization (graphics) of the information is the answer to this question.
The best visualizations are ones that expose something new about the underlying patterns and
relationships contain the data. Exposure of the patterns and understating them play a key role in
decision making process.
Mainly there are three criteria to consider in visualizing data.
Understand the audience: before building the visualization, set up a goal, which is to convey great
quantities of information in a format that is easily assimilated by the consumer of information. It is
important to answer "Who is the audience?", and "Can you assume the audience has the knowledge of
terminologies used?"
Set up a clear framework: the analyst needs to ensure that the visualization is syntactically and
semantically correct. For example, when using an icon, the element should bear resemblance to the
thing it represents, with size, color, and position all communicating meaning to the viewer.
Tell a story: analytical information is complex and difficult to assimilate, thus, the goal of visualization is
to understand and make sense of the information.
Seven layers of social media analytics
Scraping data from text
Extracting and analyzing networks from social media flows
Analyzing behaviors as evidenced by social media posting patterns (Actions)
Analyzing location data
Analyzing hyperlinks and hyperlinked data
Analyzing app and mobile traffic and use
Search engine use
Scraping data from text
The process of extracting relevant data from text sources is known as text analytics. Text analysis can be
used to analyze any text-based range of data, such as posts on social media, surveys, news articles,
forums, call documents, and much more.
Data from social media is being used extensively by researchers in a variety of fields, including world
politics, communication services, investigative reporting, and commercial enterprise.
Extracting and analyzing networks from social media flows
Online social media represent a fundamental shift of how information is being produced, transferred
and consumed. User generated content in the form of blog posts, comments, and tweets establishes a
connection between the producers and the consumers of information.
Tracking the pulse of the social media outlets, enables companies to gain feedback and insight in how to
improve and market products better.
Analyzing behaviors as evidenced by social media posting patterns (Actions)
Personality and character have major effects on certain behavioral outcomes. As advancements in
technology occur, more people these days are using social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and
Instagram. Due to the increase in social media's popularity, the types of behaviors are now easier to
group and study as this is important to know the behavior of users via social networking in order to
analyze similarities of certain behavior types and this can be used to predict what they post as well as
what they comment, share, and like on social networking sites. However, very few review studies have
undertaken grouping according to similarities and differences to predict the personality and behavior of
individuals with the help of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Analyzing location data
one of the tools that can help them understand about their potential customer behaviour and the
market industry in general is using GPS and location data for their analytics needs.
Location based marketing helps to improve your insights about the local market and the purchasing
behaviour of your target customers.
GPS and location data provides some predictive behaviour of a customer involving their lifestyle and the
time of day where they tend to be active. This can be a marketing insight that helps marketers predict
customer behaviours and activity.
Analyzing hyperlinks and hyperlinked data
Hyperlinks are references to Web resources that users can access by clicking on them. From a Hyperlink
Analytics point of view, there are three types of hyperlinks: In-links, out-links and co-links. Incoming
hyperlinks are links directed towards a website originating from other websites. Hyperlink Analytics deal
with extracting, analyzing, and interpreting hyperlinks. Hyperlink website analysis examines the in-links
and out-links of a site or set of websites. Social media hyperlink analysis deals with the extraction and
analysis of hyperlinks embedded within social media texts. VOSON is a Web-based tool for hyperlink
network analysis.
Analyzing app and mobile traffic and use
Mobile data is constantly generated by our mobile devices, and there are two main methods to view
and analyze this data: mobile web analytics and apps analytics. Mobile Analytics focuses on
characteristics of the mobile devices and the activities that originate on them, whereas traditional Web
Analytics focuses on the activities that occur on Hyper Text Markup Language websites.
Search engine use
While social media and search engines are both trackable, the latter focuses more on analysing the
audience’s intent. Search engines go beyond knowing who your followers are and dig deeper into what
they’re thinking.
This explains why search allows for targeted marketing. Website analytics tools like Google Analytics let
you measure the total visibility and traffic. You could see what pages or content get the most traffic,
how long people stay on your website, and what actions they take on the pages they visit.
Accessing social media data
Social media data is any type of data that can be gathered through social media. In general, the term
refers to social media metrics and demographics collected through analytics tools on social platforms.
Here is some of the most important raw data you can collect through social media:
Engagement: Clicks, comments, shares, etc.
Reach
Impressions and video views
Follower count and growth over time
Profile visits
Brand sentiment
Social share of voice
Demographic data: age, gender, location, language, behaviors, etc.
A social media analytics tool like Hootsuite Analytics gives you a full view of your social media data
across platforms. This provides important context for your data, as you can see how your audience
responds on different channels and refine your platform-specific strategy.
Application Programming Interface (API) is a platform provided by the social networks allowing other
applications and websites to pull the social media data and integrate with their site
These are
Ebay released its first developer toolset in 2000 in the hope that it will expand its business but it was not
until 2005 that the API was fully open for the use.
Amazon released its first API in 2002 allowing developers to extract data regarding wishlist of a
customer, product reviews etc. Since then Amazon has also released API for its web services and Alexa.
Google has released first API for its search engine in April 2002 allowing developers to do approx 1000
automated search queries. Today there are thousands of API are available for different google services.
Thus, resulting in thousands of applications.
Facebook launched its API in the year 2006. Facebook Developer API was one of the first API to be
released as platform specific API. Today Facebook provides Graph API with the Open Stream API being
the latest.
YouTube first released it’s API in 2008. It lets you add YouTube videos to your website or application,
analyse a YouTube channels demographics. YouTube API includes YouTube Data API, YouTube Analytics
API, YouTube Live Streaming API and many more.
Twitter API was first released in September 2006. Twitter offers two sets of API: REST API and Search
API. REST API allows to access core Twitter Data and the job of Search API is to provide access to search
and Trends Data.
Instagram API was first released in April 2014. It allows developer to build applications that can analyse
user posts and help users to manage their own posts.
There are so many other social media sites like Pinterest, Flickr, LinkedIn etc. Each having their own
API’s, supporting developer to build application that can integrate data from these social media sites on
a website or in an application.
Key areas to use social media analytics
Many social media teams don’t know exactly which areas of their social media marketing can really
benefit from analysis, so let’s have a look into exactly where you should be measuring, and why.
Here are the key areas:
Audience analytics
Performance analytics
Competitive analytics
Paid social media analytics
Customer service and community management analytics
Influencer analytics
Sentiment analysis of your profiles and ad campaigns
Sentiment analysis for customer service
Audience analytics
Everything begins with your audience. Knowing your business’s target audience is critical. It helps you
build an effective, audience-first marketing strategy that helps you nurture your communities down the
funnel and deliver great customer experiences.
You must know what your customers want and how they respond to your efforts in attracting them to
your product/service.
Social media performance analytics
Measuring your own performance is key to understanding where your strategy is working and bringing
good ROI, and where it needs some fixes.
Key performance metrics to track:
An overview of interactions across platforms and over time to understand if the content you’re
publishing is effectively engaging your audience.
Look at both the cumulative number of interactions and the number of interactions per 1,000 followers
to see how big of a share of your community is responding to your messaging.
Zoom in on the number of click-throughs on your posts to learn how effectively you’re driving traffic
from social to web.
Monitor your follower growth over time to see if your audience is growing as a result of your teams’
social media efforts. You want to grow your customer base, so it’s important that you consistently gain
new followers.
Competitive analytics
To get a better understanding of your performance metrics, you need to view them in a competitive
context – that’s where competitive analytics and benchmarking comes in.
Comparing your company’s social media performance to the competitors is the best way of assessing
the effectiveness of your teams’ work and strategy. It also enables you to learn if your performance and
ROI are successful in relation to the market.
If there’s a specific company you want to get ahead of, you can run a head-to-head analysis of your
performance. But you can also compare yourself to multiple competitors to see how you stack up.
Paid social media analytics
A lot of money is being spent, so it’s absolutely critical that businesses know the effectiveness of their
social media ad spending. You need to be able to make efficient investments and ensure that every
dollar you spend on social media counts.
It’s all too easy to waste time and resources on promoting content that performs badly if you have no
idea what paid content your audience will respond well to.
Some key performance indicators (KPIs) to keep track of are:
Number of ads
Total spend
Clicks
Click-through rate
Cost per click
Cost per engagement
Cost per action
Cost per purchase
Customer service and community management analytics
These consumer expectations also underscore the need to ensure that your teams are doing an
excellent job handling customer requests. How? Look at your community management teams’ key
performance metric – average response time – and see how it looks for each team member and
platform.
By monitoring your community management teams’ performance metrics, you can ensure that your
business communication is appropriate and timely. This, in turn, translates to enhanced brand image
and stronger, lasting relationships with your customers and prospects.
