Types of Best Social Media Analytics Software

Author: Sonali Gaikwad

Best Social media analytics software comprises a set of analytical tools, which enable end-users to listen, monitor, analyze, and create insights using data gathered from blogs and social media websites. The tools also include advanced analytic techniques, such as predictive, prescriptive, descriptive, and diagnostic, to enable collection, analysis, and interpretation of data across various social media platforms. The most common use of social media analytics software is to interpret customer sentiment in order to support marketing and customer service activities. It is mainly useful in understanding customers, based on or influenced by economic, social, or political happenings. The application areas have been widening with the recent implementations of public safety, law enforcement, and risk management.

Top 10 Social Media Analytics Software-

  1. Oracle Social Cloud
  2. Salesforce Social Studio
  3. IBM CORPORATION
  4. Adobe Campaign
  5. SAS Customer Link Analytics
  6. Hootsuite
  7. Clarabridge Engage
  8. Netbase
  9. BuzzSumo
  10. Digimind Social

Different types of Social Media Analytics Software

1. Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive SMA mostly considers the questions of "what happened and/or what is happening?" Descriptive analytics permits to collect and define social media data in the form of reports, visualizations, and gathering to understand a well-defined business issue or opportunity. Usually, social media user comments analysis, for example, falls into this analytics category. Comment analysis helps to understand users’ opinions or recognize emerging trends by clustering themes and topics. Presently, descriptive analytics composes for most of the social media analytics landscape.

2. Diagnostic Analytics

Diagnostic SMA analytics investigates the questions of "why something happened?" For instance, whereas descriptive analytics provides an overview of your social media marketing campaign’s performances (posts, mentions, followers, fans, page views, reviews, pins, etc); on the other hand diagnostic analytics can extract this data into a single view to check what worked in your previous campaigns and what didn’t. Inferential statistics, behavioural analytics, correlations & retrospective analysis are the enables of diagnostics analytics and fall under this category.

3. Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics includes analyzing huge amounts of collected social media data to predict a future event. Hence, it considers the questions like "what will happen and/or why will it happen?" For instance, an expression over social media (such as buy, sell, recommend, quit, desire, or wish) can be extracted to predict a future event (such as a purchase). On the other hand, businesses can even predict sales figures based on historical visits (or in-links) to a corporate website.

4. Prescriptive Analytics

Predictive analytics help to predict the future, whereas prescriptive analytics suggest the appropriate action to be taken while handling a scenario. For example, if you come across groups of social media users that exhibit certain patterns of buying behavior, how can you enhance your offering to each group? Compared to predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics is still far to find its way in social media data. Optimization and simulation modeling, multi-criteria decision modeling, group support systems, and expert systems are the main enablers who fall under the prescriptive analytics category.

Social Media Analytics & Software Integrations

It is necessary to use several types of tools and platforms in order to manage your social media analytics needs.

For example, social media management platforms like Hootsuite or Google Analytics for website traffic analysis. And for advanced data analysis, there are other platforms like Tableau, for creating specific data visualizations.It’s important that your social media analytics platform can provide easy choices for integration. In order to get value from data and social media, you need to be able to get connected and correlate your activities. You’ll waste time exporting your data between multiple platforms rather than monitoring, analyzing, and acting on insights.

Yes, this makes extremely appealing to choose an all-in-one solution but, many technology research specialists point out, it’s risky. This may end up with a solution that’s a Jack of all trades, but master of none.

Myths & Misconceptions

1. Social media analytics is only for social media

Incorrect!

Regardless of the misleading name, social media analytics platforms enable you to monitor and analyze more than the data on social media channels. For example, Talkwalkercovers more than 150 million websites from around the world as well as a large range of blogs and forum. That means you can find all the mentions of your brand across a whole stack of websites.

2. Social media analytics is meant to monitor only owned social channels

No! Incorrect again.

Social media analytics permits you to monitor the social channels of competitors as well, and the usage of keywords and/or hashtags across pages and posts that are public.

Note – Based on the social network, analytics platforms may have limited access to their data as this mainly depends on the API access the network provides.

3. Social media analytics platforms monitor private data

Generally, social media analytics platforms can’t monitor private data. This comprises non-public Facebook and Instagram pages for instance, as well as other social messaging apps. Talkwalkerjustmonitors data that’s publicly visible to all. It’s a completely personal choice whether posts on Twitter or online news. It’s entirely up to you what you want to do is add your own private data into a project if you’d like to see how it compares with social data.

4. Social media analytics is meant only for social media managers

Social media analytics is important for social media managers but they’re not the only ones who are benefitted.PR and communications professionals also use social media analytics to measure the impact and ROI of their campaigns.

Product managers use it to collect unwanted feedback about new and existing products.

It’s also used by news media to identify trending stories.

Even political groups can have a better understanding of the messages that are resonating with voters.

Social media analytics allows companies and organizations to get an understanding of what people think about almost any topic. Thus, the potential for use cases is so vast.