Social Analyst Playbook: Future-proof your social insights

These changes have led to unprecedented business opportunities, but also pose new risks that companies must anticipate and prepare for.

In our three-part series we spoke to leading consumer insights professionals innovating in the social analytics space to get their thoughts on this changing landscape:

1. Ben Donkor takes us through the foundation of the social analyst
2. Bex Carson explains the importance of a solid methodology
3. Dr. Jillian Ney rounds it off by describing social analysis in action and answering business questions

Providing narrative to a noisy, data-fueled world, these three experts offer tangible methods, frameworks and suggestions to bring all analysts closer to data-driven success.

This playbook offers key insights from each of their recent webinars in this series to help teams of any maturity make the most of social data.

1. The foundation: The people, tools and framework to succeed

The best place to start is at the beginning. So to kick off our series, we spoke with Ben Donkor, director of research and insights at We Are Social and a pioneer of social intelligence with experience with both brands and agencies.

He stresses the importance of a good foundation for companies just getting started with social analytics, or companies who aren’t yet getting the rewards. In this compelling webinar, Ben outlines clear steps that you and your business need to take to become a brand that succeeds with social intelligence.

One of his key points for businesses to take away was the need to invest in a social analyst to ensure your brand succeeds and gets the most of the social data. What that looks like at every company could differ depending on the companies needs or structure.

To learn the costs and benefits of two ways companies can approach hiring a social analyst, listen to Ben below.

To continue building your foundation, once you have a dedicated analyst it’s important to get a set of tools that fit your requirements..

Here, Ben takes us through the four things you need to consider when getting the tools a social analyst might need.

Ben went on to describe some of the most important questions to ask when assessing the needs and maturity of your brand, so you can build a framework that makes the most of your people and tools.

Once you have an analyst, the right tools and a framework in place to work most efficiently, how can a company ensure they’re getting the most out of social analyses?

According to Ben, that final piece of this puzzle is trust.

Organizations, and especially decision-makers, must trust the analyst to get the most out value from them.

2. The methodology: Keeping research methods sound at the speed of business

Once you have the foundations in place, we can then take a deeper dive into the role of an insight professional, how the role is evolving and the changes and challenges we face.

Our very own Bex Carson, VP of Social Insights Products here at Brandwatch, offers an interesting view into the role technology plays in social analytics.

Using the backdrop of the history of market research, Bex explains how change in this industry isn’t new. From its inception, market research has been changing and evolving with the times.

Now that analytics is becoming more and more readily available and easier to use, “self-service analytics” are growing in popularity as more people across the company desire to become “data-driven”. As Bex argues, this isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Bex describes how her own career has shifted along with her perspective. The transition from research analyst to managing products that do analytics meant Bex moved from doing the research to building the tools to enable others to do the research safely.

This gave her an important view of the market research industry, especially in the relatively new space of social listening analytics.

Mirroring concerns Ben described in getting businesses to trust and act on analysts expertise, Bex sees self-service research, used without the proper methodology, as an extremely dangerous business mistake.

Where traditional market researchers might likely be aware of the biases and compromises that come with every dataset, the average marketer might not be trained to contextualize the data.

Bex offers some solutions to the risks of self-service tools, including identifying where you can rely on repeatable, tested methodologies, giving analysts with the opportunity to continue inventing and solving the next big problems with confidence.

3. Social analysis in action: How to answer any business question with social analytics

With the right foundation and the right tools, you can answer any business question. No one knows this quite as well the UK’s first doctor of social media, Jillian Ney.

Jillian continues our social analyst series conversation by introducing a methodology that can be used to answer any question using social data.

Following her steps, you can harness the unstructured database of human thought that is social media with repeatable, scalable processes to answer questions like how customers feel about a brand’s website, and why they churn.

To start, she prefaces her talk by explaining that in order to properly analyze social data, researchers have to be logical, detailed and cognizant of external factors.

With this expert mindset, she dives into her nine step process for analyzing social data, from defining the purpose to interpreting the analysis. Anyone from first-time researchers to consumer insights experts can learn from her thoughts on the steps and considerations necessary for using social data to answer questions.

Below, you can watch her explain the importance of deconstructing the business question you aim to answer, and an exercise to help you do this yourself.