Do you want to want to know what Facebook users really think of your brand? What is your competition is up to on this social medium? Are you targetting the right audience and how successful are your competitors in this regard?
Socionomix, a social analytics platform, is just being launched for Facebook. It is the first in a family of products to blend together a best-of-breed business analytics tool from Qlikview with the power of the Facebook social media platform. This tool is aimed squarely at marketeers and professionals who use social media as an integral part of their organisation’s marketing strategy.
The product has been developed by Birkirkara-based iMovo, business intelligence and customer relationship management specialist, aimed at helping organisations make more effective and profitable use of their data.
“Social media can be confusing. It’s become such a vast scenario that most marketeers see the potential but simply can’t seem to articulate the benefits and quantify the returns that it brings,” iMovo managing director Pierre Mallia explained. “Whether it’s Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Flickr or YouTube, being able to give your board of directors or chief executive officer and chief financial officer a clear picture of what it all means in numbers can be extremely daunting.”
This challenge has inspired iMovo to develop Socionomix, a new social analytics tool which gives companies insights into their social media activity and engagement like never before and includes the activities of their competition on the market. The company is just releasing the first in a suite of products aimed at platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Analytics and Twitter.
“We saw that social media advertising platforms such as Facebook Insights gave a very limited view of what was going on. Yet there is a wealth of data in the public domain which companies using these platforms never get to use. Despite directing considerable investment to advertising, the intelligence garnered was miserably small. This lessens the impact of the marketing investment made. Socionomix changes all this,” Mr Mallia added.
Socionomix for Facebook allows organisations to not only benchmark their marketing programmes against the competition but also to analyse their numbers, traffic and gauge their engagement with customers and visitors. With this tool a company can measure up the performance of its social media platform with that of a number of competing brands. It provides graphical side-by-side comparisons and virtually every graph can be customised. It is possible to drill down to individual posts and comments to really get to the heart of a fan base.
This tool goes into such detail as identifying the most influential fans and customers both for a company and its competition, allowing for better engagement.
Mr Mallia explained that knowing what competitors are trying, failing at, and succeeding at at any point in time is a very powerful capability to have at one’s disposal.
By understanding what’s not working for a company but may be working for the competition, the tool helps organisations optimise marketing investment and social media resources to address the target audience more effectively. It provides information on age, gender make-up, marital status and even the location of Facebook fans for more effective advertising strategies.
Socionomix introduces a new concept based on ‘sentiment what users really think and how they really feel about a brand or company. The in-built analytic engine gauges the slant and mood of fans’ comments and posts and identifies just how favourably people interacting with a brand are towards it. This can be analysed through different dimensions, whether it is gender-, age- or geography-related.
“A sage once said that the number of people clicking “Like” on your Facebook page was no real measure of success unless you can turn those “Likes” into revenue,” Mr Mallia explained, illustrating how the number of “Likes” is no longer a measure of brand popularity on Facebook.
Socionomix can be deployed as an online tool and companies interested in using it do not need to install any software unless they want a local copy to play with. All they need to do is subscribe to the service, indicate up to four competing companies in their market with a presence on Facebook. iMovo will then ‘bake’ the customised ‘flavour’ of Socionomix and the tools begins to gather data within 48 hours.
Socionomix is totally based on public data on Facebook and iMovo has already built ‘flavours’ that carry out comparative analyses of banks, radio stations, hotels and even comparing the performance of the Facebook presence of the two main political parties.
“We exploited Facebook’s Insight application programming interfaces which are publicly available to developers,” Mr Mallia pointed out.
“The data provided on Socionomix is available to anyone who searches for it through Facebook’s developer tools. The data makes for some really interesting insight and some very surprising ones too.”