By Adam Wakefield
On Thursday, 11 August at NATIVE VML’s Johannesburg offices, around 120 people gathered to hear what social data insights firm, YouKnow Digital, and social analytics company, Crimson Hexagon, had to say about the future of social media analytics.
It was YouKnow managing director,
Kelvin Jonck, who opened proceedings, basing his talk on the five myths of social analytics.
The first myth is: “Social analytics is mostly about tracking your brand”.
“Unfortunately, that is not the extent of it because when you work with massive amounts of data, you can ask bigger questions. Measure your brand, but what other amazing things can you do?” Jonck asked.
The second myth is that sentiment is the only way to categorise opinion. According to Jonck, the paradigm of positive, negative and neutral sentiment assumes people speak in positive, negative or neutral terms. This is not always true.
The third myth is the idea that AVE is the best way to quantify value from social media. Jonck noted this is all well and good, but there is a big difference between those who, for example, are watching the Super Bowl to see the adverts, and those who are watching the adverts with an intent to purchase.
The notion that high engagement rates are good is the fourth myth. Jonck explained that if a brand’s social media channels are used as a customer service channel, they will have high engagement but does not make it a marketing metric.
Lastly is needing to pay for the amount of mentions that you track.
“Unfortunately, this costs a lot of people a lot of money. You don’t need to pay on a per a mention basis,” Jonck said.
Craig Hitzeroth, the managing director of
Ad Dynamo, followed Jonck with his presentation on how analytics should form the basis of any strategy on social media platforms.
Looking at the statistics, Hitzeroth said 1.5 billion loops are watched globally on Vine every day. A total of 40 years’ worth of live broadcast is consumed on Periscope daily around the world, while 500 million tweets are created and consumed every day.
“That amounts to a billion conversations every other day to listen to. The key thing for me is when I talk to any brand, it’s absolutely clear that every tweet is a signal of interest or intent.”
“Every morning I know that people tweet about coffee at a certain time of the day. These are all really predictable moments that brands should tap into. Through clever monitoring, you can actually pick up on everyday conversation where your brand can be relevant throughout the year, instead of waiting for your ‘Olympics’ moment.”
Hitzeroth also referred to four quadrants when it comes to social media; being response or reactive, live moments, campaigns, and the most important one, seize every day.
“Why is it important to seize the everyday? If you have a strategy that is always, instead of waiting for that Olympics moment, your brand will receives 2.4 times as many retweets and get double the mentions,” he said.
“If you have campaigns that run for a period longer than 90 days, your return on advertising spend doubles.”
The final speaker was
Marian Cramers, director of strategic alliances EMEA at Crimson Hexagon, who began by noting that while we are all focused on our own campaigns, the amount of insight social media provides into people and their lives is fascinating.
“I think it is very important that you keep seeing the bigger picture. That’s where the future is,” she said.
Cramers noted analytics is “definitely going past the point of sentiment. We are even going past the point of advanced emotion detection”. What is of consequence today is image recognition and analysis.
“Image-based social networks are on the rise and it’s no longer just the millennials,” she said.
A noticeable theme that ran through what Jonck, Hitzeroth, Moore and Cramers had to say was context. If a brand is able to understand the context in which they are mentioned, or their logo is used, the insights they can draw can make their social media marketing strategy that much more competitive.
While content is king to context’s queen, the future of social media might see that alignment shift rather noticeably.