All You Need to Know About Social Media Intelligence: Why It Matters?

If you want to expand your market reach and have a thorough understanding of your customers’ behaviors, you must be aware of a term called ‘social media intelligence.’ It is all about using data available on different digital platforms wisely to drive meaningful insights. Let us dive into social media intelligence and understand it in further detail:

What is Social Media Intelligence?

Social media intelligence refers to collecting data from conversations across different social media platforms and using it to improve your future marketing strategies. Many people confuse social intelligence with social listening, however, the two are different. While social media listening is just about monitoring the conversations, social media intelligence also focuses on collecting relevant data. 

Brand owners and marketers use social media intelligence tools to track conversations on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc, to understand the sentiment of the audience around their products or services. They can further use this information to understand what their target audience likes and improve their marketing efforts accordingly.

Apart from this, social media intelligence can also be used to understand trends in customer behavior, analyze demographic data, and track competitors’ activities. All this information helps you create more effective content, improve your social media marketing campaigns, and increase your social media ROI. 

Why is Social Media Intelligence Important?

Social listening or monitoring without social media intelligence is just like having all the chess pieces but no chessboard to make the moves. Gathering data doesn't make any sense unless you analyze it to make informed decisions. And this is what you can do with social media intelligence. 

With the right analytics tools, you can drive meaningful insights from the collected data and use them to improve your business decisions, customer experiences, marketing campaigns, and overall brand image. 

Social media intelligence doesn't only help you connect with your audience but also allows you to understand their emotions. You can make meaningful observations after analyzing the data collected from different platforms and further use these observations to offer actionable solutions to your business problems. 

Key Components of Social Media Intelligence

Social media intelligence comprises four main components, including monitoring, collecting, analyzing, and taking action. These components are explained below in detail:

1. Monitoring

Your first step in social media intelligence should be to figure out which platforms your target audience is active on. With this, you can track what type of conversations are going on and how are people responding to your products and services. Monitoring helps you understand your brand’s image in the market.

2. Collecting

Collecting data from conversations is another crucial step of social media intelligence. Once you identify relevant conversations on social media platforms, you need to collect customer data to improve your decisions. From demographic information, such as age, gender, etc, to sentiment analysis, user behavior, and popular trends, you can gather every type of information that helps you understand your target audience.

3. Analyzing

After collecting all the relevant data, you need to analyze it in order to make sense of this information. You can use manual data analysis techniques or automated tools to gain meaningful insights into hidden trends, patterns, and customer behavior. Data analysis helps you get a comprehensive view of your target audience.

4. Taking Action

After understanding the interests of your target audience through data analysis, you can use the uncovered insights to take necessary action. It can involve actions like running a targeted campaign, optimizing landing pages, making changes to your sales promotion campaigns, etc. Your goal here should be to use the insights to make informed decisions and improve the overall experience of your customers.

Benefits of Social Media Intelligence

Social media intelligence can benefit a business in several ways as mentioned below:

• With social media intelligence, you can gather unbiased and honest insights. As customers are not forced to share their views on social media platforms, they are most likely to be honest while posting something.

• Social intelligence is much more than just monitoring the sentiments of your customers. You can understand what your target audience looks like and what your customers expect from your brand. Along with the demographic information of your audience, you can understand their interests and requirements. 

• You cannot just improve your ongoing campaigns but also spot new opportunities for your brand. If there is a sudden spike in positive sentiment around a particular topic, you can start running campaigns related to it.

• Using the right social monitoring and social media intelligence tools, you can track the social media accounts of your competitors and take the necessary actions to stay ahead of them. 

Social Media Intelligence Tools

From recognizing trends in customer behavior to sentiment analysis, you can find suitable social media intelligence tools for every need. These tools help you gain insights with minimal manual effort. You can use social intelligence tools to introduce special offers, improve ongoing offers, promote specific products or services, and gather customer feedback. 

To leverage the right social media intelligence tools effectively, you first need to identify your business objectives. Here are some popular tools that you can consider:

1. Google Alerts

It is one of the most efficient social media tools that helps you keep track of topics related to your brand or industry. You simply need to enter a keyword into it and you start getting relevant alters. Whenever someone mentions this keyword in their social media post, blog, website article, news article, or anywhere else, you get notified. This tool is completely free and very easy to use.

2. HootSuite

HootSuite is one of the widely used social media intelligence tools used by businesses. From data collection to analysis, this tool is a one-stop solution for all your social media intelligence needs. You can filter conversations using relevant hashtags, locations, keywords, etc. You can get a lot of its features under the free plan and the detailed analysis under the paid plan.

Apart from these two, other social media intelligence include Mentionlytics, Attributes, etc. Based on your requirements, you can use suitable tools and leverage social media intelligence for your business. 

Social Media Intelligence Across Different Platforms

Social Media is a broad umbrella term used for different platforms that operate in unique ways. From picture-posting platforms like Instagram to networking apps like Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., and video-posting platforms like YouTube, vast amounts of data are available across different social media sites. 

You can use several algorithms and automated tools to analyze these massive amounts of data available on different platforms. These apps and sites even have their own metrics to measure the success of your social media account. Each of these platforms can contribute to the success of your marketing strategy in a unique way if used effectively.

However, you must understand that social intelligence is not just about collecting and analyzing data from these platforms. Any digital information, such as product reviews, blogging sites, etc, can be relevant for social media intelligence. 

Even though Facebook and Instagram are two of the biggest social media platforms, these can not be used to gather a lot of data due to the strict regulations. However, you can still analyze the comments and posts of your customers to understand their views about your brand.

Talking about Twitter, it has become a popular platform for gathering customer feedback and improving their overall experience. Many brands have a dedicated Twitter account for customer service, which is managed by their customer relationship management team. Mentions, comments, and retweets are a good way to understand what your customers think about your brand and how you can improve.

The Future of Social Media Intelligence

Social Media Marketing has become a powerful tool for businesses to expand their market reach and promote their products & services. Artificial intelligence plays a vital role when it comes to the future of social media intelligence. With a lot of data being produced on a regular basis, it is becoming more and more difficult for humans to manage such massive amounts of information. 

This is where AI automation and data analytics tools come into play. Therefore, we can expect that the role of artificial intelligence in social media marketing is going to be even more important in the future. 

The social media team at MadHawks has access to some best social media intelligence tools along with the proper knowledge of how to use these tools efficiently. If you are looking to take your brand to another level using social media marketing services, we can help you achieve your goal using the right strategy.

FAQs

1. What is social data intelligence?

Ans. Social data can be defined as the publicly available information on social media platforms, web pages, blog posts, etc. Social intelligence is about gathering this data, analyzing it, and using the collected information to improve business decisions.

2. Is social media intelligence the same as social listening?

Ans. No, social media listening and social media intelligence are two different terms. Social listening refers to monitoring the data available on different social media platforms. On the other hand, social media intelligence is not just about monitoring this data, but also about collecting it and analyzing it to understand trends, customer behaviors, etc.

3. Is social media intelligence the same as social media analytics?

Ans. Social media analytics is one of the key components of social media intelligence. Social intelligence involves four components, including monitoring, collecting, analyzing data, and taking action. The third component, i.e. analyzing data, is related to social media analytics.

4. What is the acronym for social media intelligence?

Ans. The acronym for social media intelligence simply is SMI. 

Also Read - Never Underestimate The Power Of Social Media