Social media has become a force to be reckoned with in nearly every facet of our lives. Its reach has affected the outcome of presidential campaigns, launched revolutions and spread worldwide debate. Social media has become so integral to our routine that by last count, adults set aside an average of 41.2 minutes a day for Facebooking alone, never mind the time they spend on the other popular social sites such as Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, etc.
It isn’t just the time we spend, it’s how many of us are doing it. Facebook currently has more than 1.4 billion active users and as such is known as the largest “country” in the world with more information on its “citizens” than the NSA. This wealth of data has empowered corporations, governments and other organizations with a tool to both read their demographic and engage them in a meaningful dialogue. As a result, social media marketing is a vital part of doing business for not only large corporations like Nike, but for mom and pop operations selling commemorative pipe cleaners.
As a result, social media analytics has become big business with expectations that it will hit $2.73 billion in revenues by 2019, but as social media matures as a space, companies providing insights into its complex world are having to adapt at speed in order to remain on the forefront of this rapidly growing trend. So what are the changing factors that will shape the face of social media analytics for the next decade?
First let’s discuss specifically what social media offers to the world of marketing. One of the main functions of social media is to act as a communications tool. It opens a two-way dialogue with existing customers, providing a tremendous learning opportunity in branding and product/service development. This role is beginning to expand.
In the beginning, social media marketing provided soft metrics that couldn’t be directly attributed to sales, so the marketers used social media as a brand awareness device and a tool to create buzz about new products or services. However, social media marketing is beginning to show its worth in more tangible ways. According to Statista, ecommerce sales that can be directly attributed back to social media sites are expected to reach $30.0 billion globally by the end of 2015. This number is even more fantastic if you consider that it is a 50% increase over 2014’s total of $20.0 billion.
It is of little wonder that Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are busy developing “buy” buttons to directly track any sales they may be responsible for. Such a move may allow these social entities to expand their revenue streams from the traditional advertising models to include a slice of the sales themselves. This may radically alter their relationship with marketing teams and the companies themselves.
Initially, social media was a desktop experience and marketing teams had a certain amount of freedom in designing their campaigns. However, smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices have effectively revolutionized the way we access the Internet. In fact, Facebook stated that in 2014, 30% of its then 1.32 billion users only accessed the site through mobile devices. Beyond this diehard group, over 1.2 billion users used their mobile devices throughout the month to get on Facebook. This means that social media marketing teams have to be keenly aware that any campaign they launch needs to be user-friendly in a mobile environment – less thumb swipes to the desired goal whether a survey or a sale leads to a greater conversion rate.
Social media marketers are going to have to become savvier in the world of audio and video. For instance, Podcasts are gathering steam. A survey carried out by Edison research in January, 2014, showed that approximately 39 million Americans had listened to at least one podcast in the space of a month. That trend continues to climb as smartphones and internet-connected cars become even more prevalent with approximately 49 million Americans expected to have listened to at least one podcast in a month by the end of 2015.
As well, marketers are finding that directly marketing their service/products through the podcast is providing a better revenue stream than using third party advertising, making a greater ROI on their marketing investment. At this point, metrics that can be mined from podcasts aren’t as complex as other forms of social media, but I am sure that as demand grows, analytics will catch up.
Content is key when it comes to marketing, but it’s becoming ever more important for brands to develop content that their audience will want to engage with and then distribute that content in the right places for its maximum effect, hitting your proper target audiences and for that, you need to know where your audience is hanging out.
Real-time response and abstract analysis are also showing themselves to be vitally important as the exciting new realms of predictive and prescriptive analytics begin to take hold and guide a business’ decision-making process.
So firms providing analytic services for social media marketing, like
Engagement Labs (
TSX: V.EL,
Forum), are constantly upping their game and refining their strategies to keep businesses and organizations on top of their demographic while enabling an optimal decision-making environment for not only marketing teams but executive management on the whole.
This requires analytical software to ride on the leading edge of the market. Engagement Labs feels their flagship eValue
TM Analytics platform does just that. eValue provides a score that is designed to offer on-demand intelligent data to elevate performance on social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Leveraging their eValue score brands can measure their effectiveness and evaluate performance to help guide their social media strategy.
As an illustration, Engagement Labs picked up a contract with Royal Bank of Canada in order to assist the banking giant reach out and engage millennials who currently make up approximately 66% of first time home buyers.
The result was a two-minute sci-fi trailer entitled, “
The Mortgage: The Future is Now.” Engagement Labs utilized social listening and RBC data to identify the distinct emotional sentiments of this upcoming generation known for consuming media in a totally new way. Having discovered the emotional ‘in’ for millennial first time home buyers, Engagement Labs set forward with the campaign to show this demographic that purchasing a home wasn’t science fiction, but a real attainable opportunity in the present.
Upon the release of the first three trailers, Engagement Labs used eValue to discover another piece of very important information. Viewers were dropping off 80% of the way through the trailer and missing the all-important RBC promo. Engagement Labs used this knowledge to understand that any future trailers would have to contain some jaw-dropping CGI or piece of incredible action every 10-15 seconds in order to keep viewers engaged until the end, thus solving the challenge of getting through to millennials and keeping them on the line for RBC’s full message.
Software suites aren’t the be all and end all, however, as marketers are searching for more value-added services to complement the platforms. Analytical firms are faced with having to expand their offerings and explore new areas of service provision that will further enhance their client’s marketing efforts.
For instance, Engagement Labs provides a service entitled eShare which addresses the aforementioned distribution issue that marketers need to be keenly sensitive to. As an example, Cineplex Odeon, one of Canada’s leading entertainment companies, needed to up its traffic to and its sales on its digital website between Black Friday and Boxing Day because it wanted to maximize the holiday shopping period. Engagement Labs crafted a unique approach, targeting specific blogs, online communities and forums it considered to be relevant to the cause. As a result of 360 strategically placed posts, Engagement Labs was able to generate just under 1.6 million impressions, driving over 13,000 consumers to Cineplex’s site and enticing 566 social engagements in the form of likes, shares, retweets, etc.
As businesses seek deeper and more defined analytical datasets, firms that provide those services are exploring both inorganic growth in the form of strategic acquisitions as well as complementary partnerships. For instance, Engagement Labs recently announced a partnership with Macromeasures, an audience intelligence data company, in order to enhance its eValue offering. As a result of the deal, clients could now segment their social audience into personas and demographics therefore guide content messaging to each of a marketer’s different personas. The partnership also gave clients a new data tool to help build strategies around paid, organic and content personalization activities.
More and more businesses are jumping on the social marketing opportunity, each with its own unique needs, making cookie cutter solutions virtually obsolete. Social media analytical firms are having to work more closely with their clients and develop original solutions based on real data, rather than pulling one from the box. Companies like Engagement Labs are putting more emphasis on building bigger intuitive client services teams in order to facilitate this enhanced client relationship.
As an example of the aforementioned concept, Travelocity, the well-known online travel agency, approached Engagement Labs to help the company differentiate its social content from the sea of its competitors. The company’s client services team then constructed a strategy to leverage the popular Roaming Gnome Travelocity is known for and by working with Travelocity, they were able to create a unique cheeky tone which personalized the company, generating brand loyalty and inciting wanderlust in the targeted demographics. As a result, Travelocity’s social channels experienced significant increases in organic reach and engagement that performed well above benchmark, proving once again the importance of teamwork in the solution process.
It is hard to say just where social media will end up and therefore how marketing across its channels will evolve, but one thing is for sure, companies like Engagement Labs will need to continue to enhance their products and services to continue to offer top-notch solutions to their clients as the social networking world grows to maturation.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Engagement Labs is a client of Stockhouse Publishing.