Why does it matter?
In this digital age, flow of information is almost equal to all the players. It is how this information is utilized that makes the company competitive. Businesses need deep analysis to measure the effectiveness of previous decisions and get a complete picture of the present situation. Apart from that, businesses also need predictive analysis to make predictions about unknown future events. The insight gained by analytical tools can be used to
automate and optimize their business processes
optimize their finances
make decision-making process efficient
Analytics tools are gathering pace in every industry as companies are slowly realizing importance of constantly monitoring customer conversations and analyzing the data about their brand. But still there is a long way to go till businesses understand that this data collected can not only help them improve their marketing strategies but also other aspects of their business. Your customers are not the only one who are posting stuff about your business. Your exemployees, your vendors, your suppliers are also contributing to the chatter. This could prove to be very damaging if left unaddressed - but this also means that all your problems are laid out in front of you and now, instead of speculating, you can spend your time solving these problems one by one.
The primary problem faced by majority of the companies is the inadequate analytical know-how to make sense of the data collected. Cost involved in analytics is another concern for these businesses. Small business have often felt left behind considering that big business have more money to spare on analytical tools. Only 1% business feel that they insights provided by big data analytics are not useful for them. Some companies have actively maintained their presence in social media for some time now. But only a handful of companies are deriving insights, from these online conversations, for purposes other than marketing. Even a smaller percentage of them try to analyse offline opinions. Companies can not only gather feedback on current products but can also get insights on what kind of products the customers are asking for.
A lot of companies are using social media platform tools to get data relevant to their performance online. But just monitoring online chatter will not help a business get competitive advantage as their competition is monitoring the same content. Even companies who are spending extensively on SEO and digital marketing, have no clear metric on how good their performance is online. The sheer amount of data that many firms are encountering, currently due to the big data trend, can be overwhelming. The insights which could prove to be most beneficial to a certain business might be irrelevant to others and it is important for the business that these insights do not get lost in the clutter of content acquired by the social media analytics tools.