What A Social Media Analyst Needs

This is a geek rant on how my ideal social media tool would look like. If you do not work in social media/online communication hit the close button — this will get long and technical. But it needs to be said (OK,OK, I need to say it!)

Background: I’ve done social listening since I started working in online advertising four years ago. I’ve used online tools to help me collect and analyze data on the online conversation around my clients ever since. And tools to evaluate performance of said clients efforts on social media (oh, the golden days of organic reach on Facebook!). I’ve done the free Google alerts, manual check-ups and email alerts. But I have also used local Romanian tool ZeMonitor, international Radian6, Social Studio, hash-tracking tools and content discovery platforms. I’ve tested blogger outreach tools and continue to investigate and test every tool I can get my hands on — right now I am researching Sprinklr, one of the market leaders.

What am I looking for? The Knight in Shinning Armour of social media tools. A Swiss army knife I can use, quick and easy, one I can customize according to my own needs and whims.

It’s utopia and I know it. But, as with finding a soul mate, I know there is someone out there for me. Not perfect, but at least trying to be.

Let’s proceed. What do I need my knight to do? Collect, process and present data on three main areas: what people are talking about (earned media, the holy grail), what my client is talking about (owned media — be aware, I also include paid media here) and how all social activity around my client translates into results for his business — ROI. Here it comes, the heaviest listicle I ever wrote online.

Data, data, data!

• Crawl online conversation across all social channels — Facebook including, even if it is just quantitative. Yes, I know they have privacy restrictions and you only get restricted access to their API. But, honestly, I do not care. It engages 1.7 billion users as of June 2016, please do not tell me I have to decide where to invest my marketing budgets without having at least the quantitative data on if such a large audience is talking about me. And if I do pay for a social listening tool, I want it to be able to give me at least that. Otherwise your data might prompt me to make the wrong decision for my client and ultimately lose money.
• Make sure language is NOT an issue. In other words, do not promise to crawl all possible languages, but only deliver English conversations.
• Crawl results as fast as possible. If I do a monthly report on the 5th of the month and at the end of the month results are fundamentally different, it is not only frustrating, but most of the time useless — I cannot make decisions in real time and that has high costs. My client loses trust in me and I lose part of his budget. See how it all comes down to money?
• Integrate owned and paid media content in the social listening section of your tool. I want to be able to have the broad picture and assess whether my branded content influenced online conversation or not. Is promoted content driving social buzz or not? Can I see an increase in Share of Voice during and after my campaigns?
• Have extensive lists of influencers in main industries and make sure you crawl all their mentions. Provide data on trending topics on their social channels to instruct content marketing and PR efforts.

Help the Analyst analyze

I hate exporting data to Excel files and generating graphics out of these. Why do I even have a tool if I have to manage it all through Excel? So please, please make sure you do check out the following if you want to qualify as my Knight in Shinning Armour of social media tools.

• Help me deliver analysis and insight over long periods of time, more than 1 year. I want to look at industry seasonality, trends, not just numbers for quantitative research.
• Make it easy to use — UI, UX, have you heard of those guys? Maybe you could ask them for advice before you ask me to click seven buttons to generate one graphic I need for the presentation to be delivered asap.
• Make it easy for me to create customized reporting.Get inspired by Google dashboards and make sure the information there is live, dynamic.
• Help me integrate social listening reports in other Business Intelligence platforms. I am interested in looking at the entire digital landscape in just one quick click. I want to correlate social media data with web analytics, sales analytics other offline research.

Help me prove ROI – a perfect tool will:

• Help me optimize social media paid amplifications campaigns and cut costs.
• Help me have foresight into trending conversation topics with customized researches done for the industry/vertical my client is part of. Do these researches regularly and share recommendations with me. I might even have the budget to pay extra for those as long as you can prove their value.

That being said I am still looking for my Knight in Shining Armour. And as with all fairy tales I expect happily ever after.