Social Media Analytics a Survey of Techniques Tools and Platforms

Social Media & Analytics: A Survey of Techniques, Tools and Platforms is a comprehensive and up-to-date reference on the state of the art on social media analytics. It describes how various techniques can be applied to collect, analyze, visualize and interpret social media data. It discusses methods that can help researchers make better analytic decisions in the analysis of social media data. In addition, it examines real world applications and their impact on society.

Over the past few years, there has been a growing interest in the field of social media analytics. Because of the nature of social media and its dynamic user-driven content, traditional analytics methods do not fit as well with this data. Researchers have adapted existing methods and formulated new approaches for analyzing social media in an effort to extract valuable information about business decisions. However, these approaches lack a unified framework that highlights their strengths and weaknesses. With improved accuracy, performance, stability and scalability continuing to be key goals for the community, we present a survey of techniques, tools and platforms in the realm of social media analytics to present a common ground to build upon going forward.

Social media analytics are an important topic for social media managers and businesses. There are numerous levels of audience engagement that can be tracked as part of a social media marketing plan. Each different level of engagement requires different data in order to be fully understood. The aim of social media analytics is to enable businesses to achieve the best for their customers across all platforms. Social media platforms have evolved since they have been launched and so have the ways in which businesses can measure the impact that these platforms have on the consumer loyalty and behavioral patterns.

Social media analytics is a new field of study that emerged as a result of the widespread adoption of social media technologies. Social media-enabled organizations use social media analytics to measure marketing performance, customer experience quality and business results.

Terminology

We start with definitions of some of the key techniques related to analyzing unstructured textual data:

Natural language processing—(NLP) is a field of computer science, artificial intelligence and linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. Specifically, it is the process of a computer extracting meaningful information from natural language input and/or producing natural language output.
News analytics—the measurement of the various qualitative and quantitative attributes of textual (unstructured data) news stories. Some of these attributes are: sentiment, relevance and novelty.
Opinion mining—opinion mining (sentiment mining, opinion/sentiment extraction) is the area of research that attempts to make automatic systems to determine human opinion from text written in natural language.
Scraping—collecting online data from social media and other Web sites in the form of unstructured text and also known as site scraping, web harvesting and web data extraction.
Sentiment analysis—sentiment analysis refers to the application of natural language processing, computational linguistics and text analytics to identify and extract subjective information in source materials.
Text analytics—involves information retrieval (IR), lexical analysis to study word frequency distributions, pattern recognition, tagging/annotation, information extraction, data mining techniques including link and association analysis, visualization and predictive analytics.

Research challenges

Social media scraping and analytics provides a rich source of academic research challenges for social scientists, computer scientists and funding bodies. Challenges include:

Scraping—although social media data is accessible through APIs, due to the commercial value of the data, most of the major sources such as Facebook and Google are making it increasingly difficult for academics to obtain comprehensive access to their ‘raw’ data; very few social data sources provide affordable data offerings to academia and researchers. News services such as Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg typically charge a premium for access to their data. In contrast, Twitter has recently announced the Twitter Data Grants program, where researchers can apply to get access to Twitter’s public tweets and historical data in order to get insights from its massive set of data (Twitter has more than 500 million tweets a day).
Data cleansing—cleaning unstructured textual data (e.g., normalizing text), especially high-frequency streamed real-time data, still presents numerous problems and research challenges.
Holistic data sources—researchers are increasingly bringing together and combining novel data sources: social media data, real-time market & customer data and geospatial data for analysis.
Data protection—once you have created a ‘big data’ resource, the data needs to be secured, ownership and IP issues resolved (i.e., storing scraped data is against most of the publishers’ terms of service), and users provided with different levels of access; otherwise, users may attempt to ‘suck’ all the valuable data from the database.
Data analytics—sophisticated analysis of social media data for opinion mining (e.g., sentiment analysis) still raises a myriad of challenges due to foreign languages, foreign words, slang, spelling errors and the natural evolving of language.
Analytics dashboards—many social media platforms require users to write APIs to access feeds or program analytics models in a programming language, such as Java. While reasonable for computer scientists, these skills are typically beyond most (social science) researchers. Non-programming interfaces are required for giving what might be referred to as ‘deep’ access to ‘raw’ data, for example, configuring APIs, merging social media feeds, combining holistic sources and developing analytical models.
Data visualization—visual representation of data whereby information that has been abstracted in some schematic form with the goal of communicating information clearly and effectively through graphical means. Given the magnitude of the data involved, visualization is becoming increasingly important.

TweetReach (Twitter)

Do you want to know how far your tweets travel?

TweetReach helps you see the number of impressions reach and overall engagement your tweets get. It also shows you who your top influencers are, and allows you to monitor Twitter analytics in real-time — helping you take faster marketing decisions.

Pro: You can quickly build reports based on keywords or hashtags and export these reports as PDF or XLS files.

Con: You cannot compare two Twitter campaigns against each other.

Price: $49 — $199 per month.

Falcon.io (Facebook and Instagram)

Falcon.io allows you to create organic and paid Facebook posts on one platform.

The tools will also help you understand how viral your content is on Facebook, the rate at which you spam your Facebook fans without realizing it, and then reach your content is getting you.

Pro: Falcon makes it really easy to manage multiple social media channels, allowing you to easily post, interact and create reports.

Con: You have to create your audience from scratch every time you set up your ads.

Price: Starting at $129.99 per month.

Rival IQ

Rival IQ offers brands four solutions. These are competitive analysis, influencer tracking, social reporting and social media audits. And while three of these features sound common, social media audits is one we hardly see advertised. Rival IQ performs social audits by gathering data from the web and social platforms. Data includes insights on competitors, the best and worst-performing content (think images, topics, and themes your audience may pay attention to), hashtag analytics, and social posts tagging. Together, this data is compiled to tell an interesting story about what’s working and what isn’t for your brand on social media.

Social Studio

Salesforce is famous for acquiring businesses that add value to its CRM solution. And today, with the extent to which social media has grown to influence the sales process, the roll-in of Radian6 makes for a smart strategic move. Social Studio integrates with Salesforce offering users the chance to publish content, manage conversations, listen to and gather intelligence on social media. As you’d imagine, it comes with some hard-hitting features that focus on the impact of social on sales. You can get feedback on service and sales campaigns, and tie it all back to social media accounts.

Minter.io (Instagram)

Minter.io helps you track your Instagram analytics so you get a deeper understanding of your audience.

You are also able to see when your audience is most engaged on Instagram so that you know when is the best time to post.

Top Social Media Analytics Tools - Minter.io

Even more, you can export your report as a PDF and share it with your team members and colleagues.

Pros: The platform offers deeper insights and analytics compared to what Instagram shows on their platform.

Con: Exporting information can sometimes be slow and it shows a limited amount of data on competitors.

Price: $9 — $39 per month.

Socialbakers

Socialbakers is an AI-powered social media marketing tool. It pools what we think are some of the very best features that help brands control and excel on social media. These features include AI-driven audience analysis, influencer marketing and campaign insights, content intelligence, and analytics and benchmarking across channels (paid and organic content).

SocialOomph

SocialOomph offers a wide range of features for multiple social media platforms, from typical features like scheduling and analytics to some interesting ones like automatically removing outdated Twitter DMs from users’ inbox. According to the statistics by Zendesk, SocialOomph ranks in the top 5% of social media management apps.

This tool has capabilities to manage your activities across many social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. For Twitter, it can automate direct messages to new followers to welcome and start building a connection with them. You can also look for high-influencing Twitter individuals by setting up keyword searches.

Zoho Social offers great support in growing your business, or even agency, by optimizing your brands on social media platforms. The tool features a cohesive function list that allows you to track your social channels’ performance seamlessly at ease.

With Zoho, you can flexibly schedule your posts with your own timeline, or use Zoho’s predictions for the times your followers are the most active to increase the reach rates. The tool is supported by a content calendar that enables you to visualize the posting timeline and organize your posts as you wish. Monitoring your posts on Zoho Social is no longer challenging as there are multiple listing columns provided to keep you updated with what matters across channels. Especially, you can grasp your audience’s insights with the comprehensive analytics tool pack including Facebook lead ads, CRM integrations, and advanced reporting features.

Zoho Social offers some quite affordable plans for individuals, businesses, and agencies, ranging from $15 to $400 per month. Each plan is provided with an equivalent feature list to satisfy specific market needs. You can try these plans for free in advance, and consider your payment later after the trial ends.

Ubercircle

Ubercircle will help to streamline your social media processes and deliver content to your audience effectively. You can save hours of planning, scheduling, analyzing, and reporting on social media networks. It takes only 10-20 minutes a day to get all tasks on set and ready to go live.

Ubercircle allows you to work straight from the web without having to download the app and install anything. That makes things more convenient!

Another noteworthy feature is the ability to organize photos and videos. All your photos and videos will be stored in one place accessible on any device. It’s easy to sync photos and videos from the phone, desktop, Google Drive, or Dropbox. From here, you can also edit your media with a few drag-and-drop operations.

Which tool are you going to choose?

Social media management tools vary in all types and capabilities. Choosing the best tool for your business depends on your social media goals and needs. And how you benefit from the above list is up to your hand. Visit the website you prefer and use your detective mind to find a tool that suits you best. If you know any interesting tool, please let me know!

Conclusion

Social Media Marketing is rising in popularity day by day and generating useful analytics of your brand’s performance on social media is an important task. An analytics tool helps you to track different activities performed by your customers or target audience on social media which converts into tangible benefits for your business.