Introduction to Social Media, Social media

landscape
Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the creation and sharing of
information, ideas, interests, and other forms of expression through virtual
communities and networks. While challenges to the definition of social media arise
due to the variety of stand-alone and built-in social media services currently available,
there are some common features:

• Social media are interactive Web 2.0 Internet-based applications.

• User-generated content such as text posts or comments, digital photos
or videos, and data generated through all online interactions is the
lifeblood of social media.
• Users create service-specific profiles for the website or app that are
designed and maintained by the social media organization.
• Social media helps the development of online social networks by
connecting a user’s profile with those of other individuals or groups.

Social Media and Business

Since the turn of the century, social media marketing has become a focal point of the
advertising and marketing campaigns of companies both large and small worldwide.
Communicating with existing and potential customers through social media offers
numerous advantages to businesses.

First, compared to traditional avenues of advertising, social media marketing is much

less expensive. The costs for social media marketing often involve only the creation
of advertising content and the compensation for the employees charged with posting
material on the various social media websites.

Second, businesses can instantly communicate information to their entire database of current
and/or potential customers. They also have the ability to tailor advertising to certain demographic
groups and then communicate that content only to the targeted customer segment.

The ease of connection and communication through social media platforms enables companies to
much more deeply and effectively engage with their target market. They can converse with
customers at length and in-depth, obtaining valuable feedback about their company and its products
and services, and then use the feedback obtained to craft future marketing campaigns. Through
social media sites, a company can also provide its customers with easy access to customer service,
24/7.

Social media makes it possible for companies to “humanize” their company and to much more
quickly and easily build, establish, and maintain their brand identity and public image.

Types of Social Media

Social media may take the form of a variety of tech-enabled activities. These activities include photo
sharing, blogging, social gaming, social networks, video sharing, business networks, virtual worlds,
reviews, and much more. Even governments and politicians utilize social media to engage with
constituents and voters.

For individuals, social media is used to keep in touch with friends and extended family. Some people
will use various social media applications to network career opportunities, find people across the
globe with like-minded interests, and share their thoughts, feelings, insights, and emotions. Those
who engage in these activities are part of a virtual social network.

For businesses, social media is an indispensable tool. Companies use the platform to find and engage
with customers, drive sales through advertising and promotion, gauge consumer trends, and offer
customer service or support.

Social media’s role in helping businesses is significant. It facilitates communication with customers,
enabling the melding of social interactions on e-commerce sites. Its ability to collect information
helps focus on marketing efforts and market research. It helps in promoting products and services,
as it enables the distribution of targeted, timely, and exclusive sales and coupons to would-be
customers. Further, social media can help in building customer relationships through loyalty
programs linked to social media.

Benefits of Social Media

Social media has changed the way we all interact with each other online. It gives us the ability to
discover what’s happening in the world in real-time, to connect with each other and stay in touch
with long-distance friends, and in order to have access to endless amounts of information at our
fingertips. In many senses, social media has helped many individuals find common ground with
others online, making the world seem more approachable.

According to a survey by Pew Research Center, the use of social media is correlated with having
more friends and more diverse personal networks, especially within emerging economies.6 For
many teenagers, friendships can start virtually, with 57% of teens meeting a friend online.

Businesses are also using social media marketing to target their consumers right on their phones and
computers, building a following in order to build a loyal fan base, and create a culture behind their
own brand. Some companies, such as Denny’s, have created entire personas on Twitter in order to
market to younger consumers using their own language and personas.

The Dangers Posed by Social Media Platforms

Social media has exploded in popularity, among all types of people, all across the world. In the
developed world and emerging market countries, nearly everyone is a user of at least one social
media platform. However, social media’s widespread adoption and use have created significant new
threats to things such as people’s privacy and mental health.

Recent studies by psychologists have uncovered the facts that people engaging with others through
social media has led to measurable increases in depression, stress/anxiety, suicides (especially
among young people), and problems of low self-esteem.

In addition to the threats posed to our mental health, the widespread use of social media has also
created and/or amplified threats of a more practical, tangible nature such as stalking, identity theft,
invasion of privacy, and political and social polarization.
The very real and substantive potential dangers posed by social media are even the subject of two
recently-released Netflix original movies “The Social Dilemma” and “The Great Hack.” The subject
explored in the 2019 documentary, “The Great Hack”, is the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Social media landscape shows how media’s world is divided and which particular media platforms
are reigning supreme in the digital world at this moment.

Social media landscape

Connecting with customers and potential customers positively impacts your relationship with
customers, as well as increases brand loyalty.

It is beneficial to build a presence online that is communicative, connects with your customers,
shares your content and highlights your skills through the different platforms of social media.

The social media landscape is constantly growing, changing and improving. Is your business present
and active in the social media landscape?

It is an area of marketing that you should definitely start exploring. Being able to engage with your
followers puts you at a huge advantage over your competitors.

Simply it’s the social “ecosystem” where we can distinguish tools for:

• Publishing (with blog platforms),

• Sharing (videos or music platforms),

• Discussing (like quora and comment platforms),

• Collaborating,

• Messaging (mobile, visual and webmails)

• And networking (with dating and meeting platforms)

Social Media Analytics & its Need

Social media analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing data from social networks such as
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. It is commonly used by marketers to track online
conversations about products and companies. One author defined it as “the art and science of
extracting valuable hidden insights from vast amounts of semi-structured and unstructured social
media data to enable informed and insightful decision making.”

There are three main steps in analyzing social media: data identification, data analysis, and
information interpretation. To maximize the value derived at every point during the process,
analysts may define a question to be answered. The important questions for data analysis are:
“Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How?” These questions help in determining the proper
data sources to evaluate, which can affect the type of analysis that can be performed.

Attributes of data that need to be considered are as follows:

• 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. The unstructured data, unlike structured data, is the least formatted
data.
 • Language: Language becomes significant if we want to know the sentiment of a post rather
than number of mentions.

• 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.

• 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).

• 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.

• 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.

Need:

Track the efficiency of marketing teams

Most organizations strive to streamline workflows and enable team members to be more
productive. A lesser known, but still important, feature of social media analytics is its ability to
improve efficiency with your marketing team.

Improve strategic decision-making

Social media analytics can improve a marketing team’s ability to understand what social media
strategies are working and which ones aren’t as effective.

However, the analytical results can also provide insight that can be useful for making business
decisions about other important aspects of the business not necessarily directly related to the
marketing campaigns.

Paid social analytics

Ad spending is serious business. If targeting and content isn’t right, it can end up an expensive
proposition for unsuccessful content. More advanced analytics tools can often predict which content
is most likely to perform well and be a less risky investment for a marketing budget.

For best results, an all-in-one platform is the preferred choice to track performance across all social
media accounts such as Twitter analytics, paid Facebook posts or LinkedIn ads. Important metrics to
track include the following:

• Total number of active ads

• Total ad spend

• Total clicks

• Click-through rate
 • Cost per click

• Cost per engagement

• Cost per action

• Cost per purchase

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is an important metric to measure as it can indicate whether a campaign is

gaining favorability with an audience or losing it. And for customer service oriented businesses,
sentiment analysis can reveal potential customer care issues.

Competitor analytics

To obtain a full understanding of performance metrics, it’s necessary to look at the metrics through
a competitive lens. In other words, how do they stack up to competitors’ performance?

With social media analytics tools, social media performance can be compared to competitors’
performance with a head-to-head analysis to gauge relative effectiveness and to determine what
can be improved.

Most modern tools that include AI capabilities can benchmark competitor performance by industry
to determine a good starting point for social media efforts.

Audience analytics

It’s important to clearly understand and define the target audience, as it is the most important
element of a social media strategy. Understanding the audience will help create a favorable
customer experience with content targeted at what customers want and what they’re looking for.

In the past, audience data was difficult to measure as it was scattered across multiple social media
platforms. But with analytics tools, marketers can analyze data across platforms to better
understand audience demographics, interests and behaviors. AI-enabled tools can even help predict
customer behavior. They can also study how an audience changes over time.

The better targeted the content is, the less advertising will cost and the cost-per-click of ads can be
optimized.

Social Media Analytics in Small and Large organizations

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 is broader than metrics such as likes, follows, retweets, previews, clicks, and
impressions gathered from individual channels. It also differs from reporting offered by services that
support marketing campaigns such as LinkedIn or Google Analytics.

Social media analytics uses specifically designed software platforms that work similarly to web
search tools. Data about keywords or topics is retrieved through search queries or web ‘crawlers’
that span channels. Fragments of text are returned, loaded into a database, categorized and
analyzed to derive meaningful insights.
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.

The job of social media analytics tools is to make this content useful and effective for business:

• Grow the business and evaluate the impact of marketing campaigns

• Make better business decisions and build a strong strategy

• Improve customer experience and satisfaction and build brand awareness.

Uses in Business:

Social media analytics can increase engagement and responsiveness: A marketing software company
increased the leads generated through social media by 47% over last year, thanks to a complete
picture of what its customers are saying on the web.

Social media analytics helps organizations understand their targeted audience. An American gaming
and media streaming website used social media analytics to analyze and define the segments of its
audience that were most interested in certain types of video games in order to offer insight and
more effectively support its clients’ ad strategies.

Brand awareness has a major impact on consumer choices. A British non-profit that needed to
amplify its message and increase fundraising used social media analytics to measure and improve
brand awareness through deep insights on what consumers were saying about its brand and the
success of its promoted hashtags.

Social media analytics can help you learn from the competition. Monitoring and analyzing
unstructured information help companies stay informed about the latest from competitors, as well
as the reactions customers and the activities to avoid. One of the most important European
supermarkets analyzed social conversations around the home delivery service of its biggest
competitor in order to understand who its key customers were, how the customers described the
service and customers’ “level of trust” in the company.

Social media analytics can highlight problems and weaknesses to discover new trends and avoid a
brand crisis. A large brewing company found that one of its products had a 25% negative sentiment
rating. Thanks to a constant social media analytics and monitoring, the company was able to control
the crisis and quickly recover.

These strategies affect a range of business activity:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.