Everyone these days is “doing” data. Or is at least attempting to. And we all know that “doing” data is not easy.

It takes time, patience, precision, skill, logical thinking, and that special sauce that magically helps you find the right information in the ocean of social mentions.

If meaningful and successful social analytics is what you’re after, here are the top DOs and DON’Ts of the business.

DOs

1. Dig into it

The most interesting findings will likely not sit at the top of the data pile, waving at you. You will need to put time and effort to find them.That is why it is crucial that you unleash your inner curiosity and dig, dig, dig.

Fair warning: you will need to ask a lot of questions and go to places you didn’t think you would go to (sometimes the data will take you there whether you want it or not).

2. Keep an open mind

It’s easy to analyze social media when you know what you’re looking for. I’m sure that no one knows your clients as well as you do, so you’ll most likely be tempted to go into the pool of data and look for things that prove your theories and beliefs.

However, that would be like meeting Newton and only asking him if he’s the guy who came up with the three laws of motion. There is so much more to it!

It is far more interesting to find out about the things you don’t know are there. So explore and try to learn more, rather than just settle and pat yourself on the back for being brilliant and coming up with a solid hypothesis that checks out.

3. Focus on little gems

While monitoring big trends is great using social media analytics, the biggest advantage that you have is access to the thoughts of actual people – people who care about you enough to talk about your company in their precious spare time. Take advantage of that.

4. Clean your data

One of the biggest downsides of social media is the insane amount of spam it generates. Most social analytics tools clean out spam (including ours – very well if we may say so!) but you’ll find that some might still sneak through, especially if you’re analysing a particularly spammy search term.

Depending on the industry you’re in, you’ll find anything from link farms to pharma advertising, counterfeit products, and adult entertainment pages. That, along with sorting through your data to make sure it is what you need, is why you can sometimes spend 60-80% of your time preparing your data set for analysis. It can be frustrating, boring and seemingly endless.

But whenever in doubt and on the verge of giving up, remember the golden rule – garbage in, garbage out.

5. Create a data culture

You can have the most amazing team of data analysts, but they will feel useless and frustrated if no one listens to them.

Very often companies invest in analytics because it’s the “thing to do”, but they won’t promote the analytics-driven culture. As a result, the C-suite, upper management, team leads (and pretty much anyone besides the analysts themselves) will be very hesitant to listen to the data and will most likely reject anything it says.

It is, without a doubt, a huge shift from the gut-feeling decision making to the data-driven decision making, but that’s why you need to teach people to trust and to appreciate data.

DON’Ts

1. Don’t try to measure everything

If you try to analyze everything, you’ll actually look at nothing. You need to focus on things that will help you make actionable decisions that are relevant to your business.

Define your needs and objectives right at the very beginning of your analytics journey. And of course, be aware that they might change. But it’s significantly easier to tweak things once you know what you’re doing, than to just wobble around with no clear direction.

2. Don’t focus only on the “big idea”

Many people in the industry believe that all you need to succeed is a big idea that will go viral.

However, you can be pretty sure that if your goal is to create a “viral campaign”, you’ll fail. Viral campaigns aren’t viral because they’re designed as such. They go viral because whoever created them was able to get the right insights about customers and build on them.

3. Don’t take your data out of context

You’ll be surprised how easy it is to manipulate data. And you’ll probably be tempted to do it at times. After all, you just remove a few mentions from the mix. And they weren’t even that relevant anyway, right?

Don’t.

All you do is lie to yourself and cut corners. You can be sure that it will backlash eventually.

Imagine you organize a focus group and tell people to leave if they say something you don’t like. Obviously, that wouldn’t be representative. Neither is manipulating data. Instead, spend the time figuring out why the data is the way it is.

4. Don’t confuse findings and insights

Long story short: findings are data, insights are the “so what?”.

Findings themselves are not good enough. They are a great first step, but then you need to match them with your business objectives, your SWOT analysis and a variety of other components before you can transform your findings into actionable insights that will help you make the right decisions and will help your company grow.

5. Don’t get discouraged

Sometimes it will take a while to dig through data. Sometimes, you’ll get really excited about a project and you’ll be sure that there will be a ton of traffic about it. But there isn’t.

Sometimes, you’ll have a theory about what people think about a specific topic. And the data will show the opposite or will show nothing at all. Don’t get discouraged.

You might need to refocus your search or simply admit that there is not enough evidence in the data to support your claim. Data is the way it is for a reason. Embrace it.

We hope these tips have been useful. Not using social media analytics but wish you were? Get in touch.