It’s no surprise that here at Brandwatch, we absolutely love social data! And we do share this passion with our clients across a large variety of industries and regions.

Monitoring the social web for brand mentions and interactions has become a common practice for companies across all industry verticals, allowing them to get valuable insights and analyze the volume and tone of online conversations.

The next and most challenging step for brands, though, is to take the vast social data that they collect and use it to boost their social business intelligence, informing business decisions across the enterprise.

The benefits are multiple, from increasing revenue opportunities and improved online customer service to better-customized marketing strategies.

But how do you get there? We’ve asked 10 top industry experts and these are their top insights on how social media can help you boost your social business intelligence. Let’s have a look!

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   1/ Ted Rubin (Social Marketing Strategist, 

   The Rubin Organization) 

 

 

‘With social, you can listen without having to worry about committing rapid-fire facts to memory. The information you need to listen effectively is already compiled—the person’s name, profile and a documented account of their question or comment is just a click away.

 

Take advantage of those things! Consider reading the information that your connections share in their profile. Look at the pictures they post and the links they share.

 

You can take the time to learn about your connection, and demonstrate that knowledge when you talk to them.”

 

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  2/ Christian Karasiewicz (Social Business

  Manager, IBM) 

 

 

“Social media isn’t just about getting likes, comments or shares on your content. It can be a valuable tool to help boost business intelligence as well.

 

For example, anytime you are sharing content be sure you add UTM parameters to your URLs.

 

This way you can see which content is performing the best and also which social network is getting the most traction. Once you have this information, you can make adjustments to either share more of you content on a particular channel or use this information to adjust the content you’re creating.”

 

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  3/ Martin Shervington (Consultant, Coach and

  Author, Plus Your Business!) 

 

 

“We all know that Social Media enables conversations, but it is through learning to communities that we can learn and then act quickly. Building a trusted group around your business, of all stakeholder groups – customers, evangelists, team – you gain new perspectives.

 

Through a considered community contribution you are able to include people’s voice in your future direction, adding fuel that will enable your messages to spread further.”

 

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  4/ Wes Schaeffer (Consultant and Lead Generation

  Specialist, The Sales Whisperer) 

 

 

“Social media lets you “spy” on your competition, “peek in” on your prospects and clients, detect trends and shifts in momentum for your areas of interest, and engage with those in your niche to a greater degree, on a more personal level, in a more timely manner than any other tool in the world.”

 

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  5/ Melonie Gallegos (Founder and Chief Social

  Strategist, Fandom Marketing)

 

 

“Social media provides big data on customer demographics, conversations and preferences. Most companies are by now listening to online conversations to spot customer service discussions and gather feedback.

 

The next thing in big data is combining the layer of rich data social networks provide with customer and marketing data.

This allows businesses to enrich their business processes and optimize marketing to improve the relevancy of messages to audience segments.”

 

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6/ Brian Carter (CEO, The Carter Group) 

 

 

 

“The obvious way social media can boost your business intelligence is monitoring what people are tweeting about you publicly. Is there a gap or a problem with your customer satisfaction? Is there a brand perception problem? Are customers giving you free ideas you could use to improve?

 

A lesser known data source is Facebook’s Audience Insights. You can get a ton of customer market research info with this free tool, including personas, affinities, purchase behavior, and household characteristics. It is a quick way to sniff out the most profitable directions in which to proceed.”

 

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  7/ Ralph Legnini (Senior Creative Strategist,

  DragonSearch) 

 

 

“Social media will greatly assist in identifying your core audience segmentations. Passion, engagement, potential & current brand ambassadors can all be tracked and analyzed, and there is high value in this information.”

 

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  8/ Daniel Rowles (Digital Marketing Trainer,

  Author and Consultant) 

 

 

“We rely on social media monitoring tools to identify popular topics of conversation and questions being asked about Digital Marketing related topics. We then use this information to decide the topics of our blog, podcast and video content.

 

This allows us to identify what problems our target audience is looking for solutions to, what content might be popular and what topics they want to know more about.

 

We then socialise this content as part of our content marketing efforts and this in turn has a knock on SEO impact in the long term.”

 

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  9/ John Lee Dumas (Founder,

  EntrepreneurOnFire.com) 

 

 

“The way that social media can boost your business intelligence is by asking intelligent questions. We love to use our social media to reach out and get into the minds of the people who engage with us, asking them; What are they struggling with? What are their number one pain points and obstacles and challenges?

 

So that we can then take that information, gather it, check it out, and then create solutions in the form of products, services, communities and free content as well.”

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  10/ Ian Anderson Gray (Social Media Consultant

  & Web Developer) 

 

 

“It used to be the case that conversations about a product, brand, organization or business happened behind closed doors. Not only were these conversations impossible to track, but they were private conversations with a very limited reach. Of course, with social media, the landscape has changed radically.

 

Many of these conversations now happen publicly to a potential worldwide audience where they are open to the scrutiny of others. With the right tools, you can analyze these conversations on social media to see what people are saying- whether it’s negative or positive and jump into the conversations.

 

Since the dawn of time, when it comes to doing business, humans have always interacted with other humans. Social media helps brings back that personal connection to business and allows businesses to become more personal which is definitely one way to boost your business intelligence.”

 

 

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We really hope you’ve found the experts’ advice on social business intelligence useful and you’re ready to put these tips into practice!

Watch out for our next article in the “Ask the Experts” series, but in the meantime, feel free to share with us your top hints and tips in the comments section below.

Feature image taken from: www.a2isystems.com