Janette Speyer, Web Success Team

Sometimes as a brand, you don’t have all the answers as to what our audience is actually looking for. As marketers, you already know how to position and target client products and services. Past sales are indicators what your customers are looking for. However, social media responses and interactions always throw us that curve ball.

The Brand We Think We Are

Let’s say we have a brand “Y” and research shows that our users are between ages 34 to 50, have an income of $60K+ a year and live in metropolitan areas. Our branding and positioning will target people meeting these criteria.

We now create content relating to this brand “Y” to post and circulate in our social media channels. We also “test target” people that don’t meet that criteria just to explore possible opportunities and to see if there is a marketplace out there that we can capture.

The Brand Others Think We Are

We have found that more often than not that new information crops up from the social platforms. Sometimes this information does not necessarily fall into the category of what our carefully crafted marketing plan tells us. This is when we have to rely on social analytics to tell the rest of the story.

Many brands do not give enough weight to social measurement applications. These are the platforms that will give us this information we cannot see with a naked eye, your gut or with traditional analytics. For one: social engagement and interactivity with your messages will determine audience sentiment and your brand’s influence in the community. Some examples of these include Sprout Social and Viralheat.

The Brand We Aim To Be

This valuable information will help you make important branding decisions. Say we have a new product on the market that targets men ages 40 and our messages on Facebook and Twitter target this audience. A few weeks later we are finding that our reports are showing that most of the engagement is coming from women even though this is a male oriented product and even if our offline campaigns are clearly showing that the responsive audience is a male. Without social measurements we would be missing a valuable part of this segment.

The Brand Finale

Social media coupled with good tracking and testing measurements offer great benefits to marketers. Today we have moved way beyond well-crafted branded messages and we are swiftly moving towards messages controlled by your audience. A good set of social media analytics will help you along the way get the results you want.

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