Becky Brown, Intel director of media, views a display of the company’s social media data at the Intel booth during the 2014 Consumer Electronics Show. Photo credit: Intel Free Press
Social media relationship platforms, tools that help marketers manage social media accounts, fall short when it comes to providing useful data.
Marketers use the platforms to save time in managing multiple social media accounts and to obtain information about their social media posts. The relationship platforms don’t provide the important data marketers need to meet key business goals, Forrester Research concludes in a study that evaluates and rates 11of the vendors.
“Vanity metrics such as likes, follows, fan growth, views, and their ilk were all the rage while social media matured because they were ‘better than nothing,’” Cappy Popp, principal and co-founder of digital marketing agency Thought Labs, told CMSWire. “It’s much more compelling to monitor a customer’s journey on social media through a purchasing decision than it is to see how many times something was retweeted.”
Measurement was a major shortcoming of social relationship platforms in Forrester’s study last year. Most marketers using them don’t know what impact, if any, their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts have. Marketers also struggle to decide what type of content to publish and when to schedule publishing for maximum impact. Many say they don’t have enough human resources to handle the every tasks of social relationship marketing.
Dissatisfied Relationships
Forrester analyst Nate Elliott, the report’s author, previously wrote in his blog that marketers are dissatisfied with their social relationship platforms. Most would not recommend their platform to others, even though most were referred to Forrester by the vendors themselves. “In several cases, we were shocked by how little the reference clients thought of their technology partners,” Elliott wrote.
This year, Forrester asked 56 marketers using SRPs if they’d recommend their vendor to a colleague and found that overall, social relationship platforms have a “Net Promoter Score” of negative 16.
A Dedicated Solution
The solution to the shortage of worthwhile analytics is a dedicated social media monitoring and measurement service.
More brands are discovering they can obtain a goldmine of information on their customers, prospects, products and competitors through social media analytics. Almost two-thirds of marketers now aggregate data about social media marketing, according to a study by Demand Metric. Companies are beginning to understand the benefits of social media beyond direct revenue, such as cost savings and customer feedback and hope improved analytics can measure those benefits.
The challenge is deciding what social media content to monitor and what data to analyze. Marketers can feel swamped by the enormous amount of data from a social media monitoring service. Vanity metrics such as number of followers or likes are tempting to report but have little real marketing value. Instead, the measurement experts recommend focusing on meaningful, actionable metrics such as referrals and conversion rates.
Bottom Line: A new study by Forrester Research highlights the importance of social media metrics and analytics. Social media relationship platforms that help marketers run multiple social media accounts generally fall short in analytics. Dedicated social media listening and measurement tools can provide the vital data and key insights that can help businesses attain key business goals.
William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.
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