Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

Chapter 12

Social Media Analytics

By Judah Phillips

“Over the last few years, social media has turned marketing on its head. Everyone is rushing to ‘engage’ with their customers and potential customers in the social space. But social media is just like other forms of media. It can be measured. No matter what your business objective, your social media tactics can be measured, analyzed and optimized. Most importantly, you can, and MUST, measure the ROI of your social media activity.”

—Author interview with Justin Cutroni, analytics evangelist, Google

Social media analytics is a type of digital analytics (see Chapter 9) and represents a shift in the way analysts, brands, agencies, and vendors think about data, analytics, and research. Social media has also facilitated a shift in the way that people interact with one another through digital technologies. Social media analytics can help you make sense of the shift in order to focus on what is most important for your organization, as well as on how to generate economic value through analysis of the meaningful and relevant signals in social media data.

Social media, in the context of this chapter, refers to the massive directional change across the globe in how people are creating, producing, editing, sharing, exchanging, conversing, collaborating, befriending, and consuming information. Social media, such as blogging, and video sharing on sites such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and Kibits, has become pervasive across media ...