Social listening technology easily provides quantitative metrics for total volume, mentions by time period, information shares, potential reach and many other numeric outputs. They also dabble in the analysis of qualitative data with sentiment scores, word clouds and trend clusters. While these can be helpful as a discovery function, there is no mistaking these outputs for the real analysis a true Natural Language Processing (NLP) capability would generate. Social listening technologies capture data; making meaning of it is the job of its interpreter.
While there have been a whole host of new metrics proposed to help understand what is going on in social media, it is best to tie the data to existing business KPIs. A few of the common social KPIs are: sentiment, impressions, volume, share-of-voice, conversation percentage, cost deflection and response rate.
While both Twitter’s and Facebook’s back-end analytics provide impression data, many social listening technologies also provide an estimate of impressions. Typically for Twitter this is done by summing the total followers who tweeted or re-tweeted a conversation. This leads to impressions often in the millions. With this formula, whether or not a consumer actually saw a message is unknown.
Sentiment is also tricky to accurately access. Sarcasm, irony and increasingly, pictures, make it difficult to sometimes understand the intent that motivated a social post. Additionally, defining what is positive, neutral and negative is subjective and sentiment classification may have different meanings to various teams. And, lastly, the manner in which something is classified at one time may change over time. Overall, the nuances of language’s powerful, yet sometimes cryptic symbolic system result in relational dialogue that is not fully understood by the rudimentary text analytics capability of social media listening technologies.
The power of social media intelligence isn’t flashy dashboard or powerful technologies that ingest the Twitter fire hose. Continuous Improvement – more compelling marketing messages, intuitive product design, an effortless customer experience – is the power of social media. It is not the data itself, it is what is done with it. Positive action is the true KPI of social intelligence – and possibility, the hardest to measure.
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