I interact with a number of clients on a daily basis and at some point in our conversations the discussion ultimately leads to calculating return on investment (ROI) around social media.
With the hyper-growth being experienced in the social collaboration space it is imperative now more than ever that organizational decision makers ultimately understand the value of the solutions that they are associating with their digital marketing campaigns as well as across their organizations.
One of the key trends that has emerged is the need to track social analytics vs. traditional web analytics. The days of tracking and calculating value through CTR, etc… has changed. It is still important to understand where your traffic is coming from but now more than ever it is imperative to understand how users are interacting with each other, your content and your brand.
With the right social analytics package you then have the framework to understand the patterns, behaviors and trends that can help an organization better understand how to interact with their customers and each other by providing insight into the sentiment and tonality of the community, forecasting future behavior based on current trends and understanding how users interact via social fingerprints.
Sentiment analysis is a very important piece of understanding social analytics trends. Understanding the tonality of users be it positive or negative tied to your products, offerings and your brand is very valuable as you can make practical business decisions based on the interaction of your customers.
With social collaboration solutions becoming the norm with how organizations will interact with end-users, partners and employees it is imperative that all of the unstructured data that is collected is then aggregated in a usable format that immediately provides the key insight necessary to drive business forward in the most efficient manner.