To Increase Value of Social Media Monitoring, Deliver Results across the Organization

Although marketing and PR are seen the main users of social media monitoring, other departments can also benefit from the wealth of data it provides. The key to obtaining the full benefits of social media monitoring is to feed the monitoring results across department silos, concludes a new white paper from PR agency Waggener Edstrom. Chief financial officers are in the best position to work across departments as their jobs usually affect every business function.

The paper, Social Media Monitoring and Analytics for CFOs, recommends companies create centralized repositories of social media monitoring data to allow HR, finance, administration, sales, product management, security, and IT departments, as well as marketing and PR, to access the data.

“It may not be possible to eradicate business silos as a means to allow data to be shared across departments such as marketing and finance. But maybe a central intelligence unit can help build bridges that enable the flow of data across the business,” states Stephen Tracy, regional insight and analytics lead at Waggener Edstrom, in the report produced with the Singapore CFO Institute.

Social Media Benefits for CFOs

Social media data can provide CFOs additional insight into company performance and identify potential risks in consumer sentiment that could harm the brand, the report argues.

“The value of social media management is not limited to the marketing function as the data and insights generated by social listening can benefit almost any function within an organization,” the report states. “Whether SMM is used to increase sales, improve customer service experiences, or to provide an extra layer of insight to business performance reporting, the users of such platforms can come from any part of the organization.”

Benefits from data and insights derived from social media measurement are enormous, the paper concludes. Social media users share more than 500 million tweets on Twitter, 70 million photos on Instagram, and 4.75 billion pieces of content on Facebook every day. That creates huge opportunities for organizations to learn about their stakeholders and customers.

Examples of social media monitoring uses include:

∙ assessing audience perceptions,

∙ identifying trends and conversations,

∙ discovering audience interests or needs,

∙ competitor benchmarking,

∙ customer service,

∙ crisis detection and response management,

∙ threat assessment

∙ reputation management

∙ investor sentiment and

∙ lead generation.

The Right People Are Crucial

Most large and mid-size companies now monitor social media – but falter in sharing the results. Consequently, many organizations miss many of the benefits of media monitoring. The real value of media monitoring is found in the insights it generates. Insights cannot be automated. The right people looking through the special prism of their own job responsibilities must have access to the data. With more well-trained eyes viewing and interpreting the monitoring results, it’s more likely the content will produce insights and benefits. The white paper offers these recommendations:

Don’t rush. Before obtaining a monitoring tool first gather the relevant stakeholders and contemplate how a monitoring can help achieve business objectives.

Start with people. Invest in people first, especially if budgets are limited.
A strong analyst can deliver valuable insights.

Be creative. Seek creative ways monitoring can benefit the organizations. Thinking outside-the-box by going beyond the basic data and reporting offered within the technology platform will usually deliver the best results.

Collaborate. Consider a central intelligence unit that cuts across department silos. Some media monitoring and measurement services such as Glean.info can sort results according to the needs and specifications of different departments. Online media monitoring dashboards with a robust internal search engine can also help departments tease out content pertinent to them. If the media monitoring servicehttps://glean.info/ your business uses does not provide such cross-functional capabilities, find ways to work across business silos to derive greater value from social media monitoring.

Find the right monitoring tool. Determine your needs and requirements before meeting vendors. Review multiple tools to compare prices, features and trade-offs. Every tool is unique and has different ways to collect and mine.

The greater the number of departments that have access to social media monitoring results, the greater the benefit the organization will achieve – with little or no increase in cost.

Bottom Line: While data from social media monitoring can benefit many different departments, organizations must find a way to share the content and data efficiently in order to deliver those benefits. Some experts suggest companies from centralized units where departments can access social media data. While social media data promises enormous benefits, companies must find human analysts who are capable of interpreting the information to provide insights and recommend business actions.