Last month, Edelman Intelligence’s lead digital analyst, Simon Quinton, was invited to speak at NetBase Live London 2019. NetBase is one of worlds leading social insight tools and used by digital experts across the globes to inform campaign and measurement work.
The event was attended by a mixture of agencies involved in using social insights and clients that either use them, or who are looking for tips on how to best use them in the future.
Simon was part of a 3-person panel this year, joined by fellow social insights experts from other agencies (Anna Zaikina, Head of Social Media Insights, Digital Media Services & Mike Hatfield, Social Media Insights Executive, Wavemaker), all tasked with sharing their experiences and advice around how teams and clients can help build a repeatable framework for their respective social listening programs and needs. Simon top tips to achieve this are below.
Some of the challenges we face in getting the most from social insight…
- A lack of experience or understanding around what social insights can provide
- How to extract that insight in an efficient and meaningful way
- How to make best use of the insights from social data
… and the top 3 tips to success…
- Ask yourself what it is you are trying to look for. For instance, insight around your own brand, a competitor, a whitespace opportunity or to monitor current advocates/detractors
- Seek education around best practices and how to get the most out of the social platform or tool you use to find the data
- Work with an expert social analyst or team to help develop both in-house skills, and understanding, in order to increase ‘buy-in’ around what social can provide internally
Simon also discussed how best to measure success once the use of social data and insight has been increased. Below are three main elements that can help to build a successful framework for an organization or team.
- KPIs – Make sure to set yourself KPIs that are both relevant to your business or communications objectives, but that tie back to one or two key social data points (e.g. If an objective is to raise awareness of a new film release, then tracking the number of mentions and views of a trailer is more important than comments).
- Processes - Making sure key stakeholders are bought in early and taken on the journey when establishing a new way of working. Also identifying one or two ‘power users’ of a social insights tool can really help a team or client better integrate the insights into their day to day planning.
- Replicability – Whatever you end up doing, make sure that you can do it again in a similar manner to begin adding consistency in both data gathering, which in turn helps to set benchmarks, but also so that it becomes easier each time!