How to enhance a brand’s viral impact using social media analytic tools

While businesses continue to make use of social media to gain exposure and to build their online brands, social media analytic companies have nearly become imperative. By using social media analytic tools or software, brand managers, social media strategists, advertising agencies, public relations companies and marketers can have access to statistics vis-à-vis social media sites related to their brands.

Viral marketing still powerful

Electronic word of mouth (eWom) or viral marketing remains a powerful advertising medium and cannot be underestimated. People visit social media in order to communicate. If they communicate about their brand experiences, a business can gain much insight into the profile of its clients. In order to address consumers’ needs and concerns and for tailor-made corporate or marketing messages, it can be beneficial to establish what is being said about a brand by whom. Data mining or summarizing data from different perspectives into useful information that can be used by businesses has now become a useful strategic tool for analyzing social media platforms. Conversations about a brand matters, and by searching keywords using social media analytical tools, industry experts can establish the social impact of their brands in real time.

Popular social media analytic tools

Numerous social media analytic tools and software exist and are still emerging as companies are attempting to penetrate this seemingly lucrative market.

PeopleBrowsr, founded in 2007, is currently a much talked about social media analytic service that shows activity streams from various social sites including Twitter, Friendfeed, YouTube, Flickr, Seesmic, LinkedIn, and numerous other services. It also adds additional features to Twitter, such as grouping contacts. Similar to other social media analytical sites, PeopleBrowsr collects information about users, brands and events for real-time statistics and sentiment analysis (opinion mining). PeopleBrowsr has an online dashboard that allows users to track updates across multiple social networks. What perhaps currently sets it apart from other social media analytical tools, is its recently launched social search product ReSearch.ly. This new tool is designed to help brand managers and marketers find the 1% most important Twitter users related to their brands. ReSearch.ly in essence is a Twitter search engine which can give brand managers insight into niche Twitter communities.

Other well-liked popular social media analytical sites worth exploring are:

• Google’s Analytics and Webmaster’s tools as well as its Audience and Activity reports. Google recently also made it much easier to track social media usage using its tools.
• Reinvigorate
• Twentyfeet
• Socialflow
• Influencefinder

Why are marketers so interested in the social media behavior of its target audience? Marketers want to know what members of their target audience are thinking, doing and even need at a specific point in time so that they can adapt their marketing messages accordingly. Sharing conversations in social media platforms are like sharing your opinions to the world. Marketers need this information for better marketing strategies.