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Using Social Listening to Determine Social Media ROI – Webinar Recap

Last week we had a great webinar with Social Media Today, focusing on the topic of Social Media ROI, or more specifically the question: Is social media worth multi-million dollar investment? The webinar featured social media influencer Neal Schaffer, Kim Celestre of Jive Software, IBM’s Ben Kay and our very own CEO Americas, Todd Grossman. The discussion crossed multiple sectors and covered numerous examples, all with the aim of understanding how social listening can help companies to determine the value of their social media activities across the enterprise.

In this blog post, we’ll summarize the key learnings from this webinar. If you want to see the full webinar, a recording is available on the Talkwalker Academy.

 

Using Social Intelligence across the company

Spending on social media continues to grow. While social accounts for about 11% of marketing budgets today, that number will most likely increase to 25% within the next five years. At the same time, 88% of marketers want to measure the ROI of their social media activities. Social listening can help them achieve this goal.

Neal Schaffer pointed out that social media is an infinite data resource to analyse buying trends, customer demographics and consumer behaviour. But at the same time, the vast amount of data complicates things when it comes to measuring impact.

The challenge is to maximize the impact of social listening and its value for the entire enterprise. Social data offers great insights to different departments, from Public Relations and Sales to Human Resources and Research and Development.

 

SMT Webinar Todd Grossmann

The above quote by Todd Grossmann was echoed by Neal Schaffer who said “C-Suite speaks the language of Excel and PowerPoint.” To prove the value of social intelligence, outlining its benefits for different departments across a company can help:

  • R&D departments analyse market trends
  • Product Managers keep track of product mentions or reviews, as well as competitor mentions
  • Marketers identify brand advocates
  • HR departments find new talent
  • Marketers measure the impact of a sponsorship on brand reputation

 

Mastering social data

“Marketers track social data, but they don’t measure it”, explained Kim Celestre, a Senior Director at Jive Software. Setting goals and measuring the impact of social data are some of the key challenges many marketers fail to master.

 

Kim Celestre SMT Webinar

Data is often analyzed in a silo and rarely tied to actual business outcomes – a grave mistake in a world where 1.7 billion people have active social media accounts. And social data affects the entire customer lifecycle, from discovering or researching a brand to buying its products and potentially becoming a brand advocate.

Ultimately, the goal of social media is to drive people back to a company’s website to boost sales. Kim’s example is sportswear brand Luluemon: the company embraces the idea of co-creating content together with its customers, which helps attract more visits to the website.

 

Kim Celestre SMT quote webinar

In order to generate positive ROI from their social activities, companies need to:

  • Respond in a timely fashion to improve brand sentiment
  • Engage with customers to increase customer loyalty
  • Implement customer ideas to grow brand advocacy

 

Delivering business value with social listening

Monitoring online conversations can help companies allocate resources more accurately, as IBM’s Benjamin Kay explained during his presentation. As one of the major sponsors of the Wimbledon tournament, IBM monitored the buzz around the event and kept track of its development. A social command centre on site allowed the software giant adapt their own content and social media postings to reflect the topics dominating social conversation. Tracking the volume of mentions also allowed the company to provision extra space on its servers to make sure they would be able to handle the increased social buzz without causing issues for users.

 

IBM wimbledon social media today

As internal issues at a company can affect its outside reputation, social listening should also include internal social channels. Benjamin Kay pointed to the example of an IBM employee launching an internal petition regarding the reimbursement policy for ridesharing services, such as Uber, at IBM. His petition found great support within the company, IBM analyzed the issues using internal social listening and the policy was revised, all within 24 hours. The petition and the HR’s fast reaction also created a stir on external platforms.

 

In short: Social Data matters for each department

From customers to employees, everyone uses social networks – making it an important source of information for all departments of a company. With careful social listening, companies can:

  • Track customer lifecycles to predict and reduce customer churn
  • Gauge new trends and consumer interests for product development to reduce costs
  • Identify brand advocates for effective social marketing
  • Involve customers in content creation to drive website traffic
  • Find issues that concern employees to increase employee satisfaction

 

What are your thoughts on how best to measure the ROI of social? Let us know in the comments below. And if you want to see how Talkwalker helps you measure your own social performance, sign up for a free demo here.


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