By Liam Dowd - February 25th, 2014

There is so much social data you can spend hours analysing numbers that don’t actually matter to your business or products

This was one of the comments posted during our recent ‘Turn Social Data into Actionable Intelligence’ webinar.

Only 26% of the 575 webinar attendees stated that they were leveraging social data effectively.

The above poll, taken from the webinar, highlights that a large majority of companies are still working out ways to fully leverage their social data.

In response to the poll Natayna Anderson, Director of Social and Digital Marketing at Whole Foods, stated that “companies should be looking to find ways social data can inform the business, have an impact on the business and in some cases potentially change the business.”

Natayna went on to say “if you can’t tie social data back to elements of the business that are important then you’re not leveraging your data effectively.”

Finding and analysing the correct data is the crux of many social media executives. Only the right social data can provide companies with actionable insight that drives future business decisions and strategy.

Before diving into this pool of data, a lot of time needs to be spent on deciding what data offers valuable insight. Allocating both time and resources to flag the relevant data and analyse it is a must.

In the webinar Emi Hoffmeister, Senior Manager, Product Marketing at Adobe Systems, stated that there’s three types of social data:

  • Listening Data – This covers all the times a brand is mentioned, conversations that their customers are having, what industry key influencers are saying and what platforms they’re all using
  • Engagement Data – This covers all likes, comments, retweets, shares etc. This data helps determine what are the most effective messages and platforms. Correctly analysing this data can improve marketing messages and material
  • Attribution Data – This is tying the listening and engagement data with website analytics or CRM platforms. This data helps draw a correlation between social activity and its effect on the core business. For example, attribution data can help identify how social has impacted sentiment and/or sales.

It may be hard and time consuming but the wins are definitely worth it. Emi highlighted that Adobe has developed a multi-touch attribution model that has found “individuals that touch social, spend twice as much as someone that hasn’t touched social...”

This information is just a snapshot of the insight and ideas discussed during the recent 50-minute webinar. You can download, for free, the full recordings here
 

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