Best Social Media Analytics Software – By Industry Verticals

Social media analytics software comprises of analytical tools, which enable end-users to listen, monitor, analyze, and generate insights using data collected from blogs and social media websites. The tools also incorporate advanced analytic techniques, such as predictive, prescriptive, descriptive, and diagnostic, to enable collection, analysis, and interpretation of data across various social media platforms. The common use of social media analytics software is to understand customer sentiment to support marketing and customer service activities. It is useful in understanding customers, based on or influenced by economic, social, or political happenings. The application areas have been widening with the recent implementations of public safety, law enforcement, and risk management.

Banking and Finance

BFSI organizations have lagged other industry verticals when it comes to the use of social media analytics to generate insights due to internal compliance policies and security reasons. However, times are changing, and BFSI organizations are monitoring any mention of them on social media and responding accordingly using the measuring, monitoring, and analyzing functionalities present in the social media analytics solutions. Banks, such as American Express, have already started linking their customers’ social profiles to their Amex Card. Transactional data gives information about the customer’s habits, needs, and desires. However, after being combined with social data, it gives banks an incredibly detailed view of their customers. American Express is now able to deliver personalized offers directly while the customer is paying for his/her shopping. Amex has also partnered with Twitter, which enabled Amex’s users to sync their cards with their Twitter accounts and pay for products using hashtags. Social media analytics is expected to bring in a lot of opportunities to financial institutions. These institutions need to embrace this shift to reap the benefits.

IT and Telecommunications

The telecommunications and IT organizations are experiencing improved quality and minimized costs in business functions, with the implementation of social media analytics solutions. Telecom companies, such as T-Mobile and AT&T, are continuously monitoring new industry developments to provide the best customer support and be a leading player in the social media analytics market. These companies monitor every question and comment posted on Facebook, through which they decide their target market and create posts for the target audience to promote their products. The telecom companies have access to personal information of the customers, including age, gender, transaction history, employment status, call record, and location. This data provides opportunities to the telecom companies to have a deep understanding of their customers for meeting the customers’ requirements. Furthermore, the ever-changing preferences of customers and the increasing use of the internet, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones mandates the service providers to understand their customers’ preferences, behaviours, and trends. The market growth of the telecommunications and IT industry vertical is expected to increase rapidly due to the growing demand for the data persistence option (ability to survive the disruption of hardware)

Retail and Ecommerce

The retail and eCommerce industry is going through an immense transformation, as mobile eCommerce is gaining popularity and replacing the brick and mortar stores. Owing to the emergence of several eCommerce websites, the competition in online retail is on the rise. Organizations need to identify trends by analyzing the voice of the customer, generating insights using their choice preferences, and improvising their customer service management to attract more customers. Social media platforms provide a large database of unsolicited consumer opinions, which can help brands measure campaigns, identify growth opportunities, improve their products, and keep tabs on their competition. Most importantly, the audience must be analyzed to understand various segments, such as the age group, gender, and location. The other important information, such as knowing audience preference and time when the audience is most active on the social media platform, are expected to help online retailers in pitching relevant advertisements and improving the sales. The retail and eCommerce companies are looking for the fastest ways to understand their audiences. Social media analytics can be used by the retail and eCommerce organizations to attain retail-specific goals and answer the most important questions affecting their brand’s success.

Healthcare and Life Sciences

The healthcare and life sciences industry vertical comprises hospitals, which have an important responsibility to answer health-related queries and provide medical aid as soon as possible. Although most social media posts and messages contain a less informative value, integrating all such messages can generate important knowledge for the healthcare and life sciences industry vertical. For example, a single user posting a tweet that he/she has contracted flu may not be interesting; however, millions of such messages can be used to track the influenza rate in a state or country. Social media data can be mined for patterns and knowledge, which can then be leveraged, with the use of descriptive, predictive, diagnostic, and prescriptive analytics types to monitor the population’s health. It can also be used to monitor and control the effectiveness of public health monitoring and reduce latency. The traditional public health monitoring techniques (clinical encounters with healthcare professionals, sick leaves, and drug prescriptions) are not practiced anymore. To control the epidemic spread of diseases, real-time monitoring solutions need to be implemented. Hence, the healthcare and life sciences industry vertical has started realizing the importance of social media analytics and is swiftly moving toward its adoption.

Government and Defense

The government and defense industry vertical cover all the government organizations and agencies. The responsibilities of these organizations are to deal with tax collection, safety, public interest, and education. They have to consider various security measures while adopting new technologies. The social media platform is one of the best mediums to reach out to people. Social media helps improve real-time interactions with citizens, understand the trends of government behaviors, and modify the decision-making patterns in the governments. Social media analytics has added functionalities, such as user profiling and semantic analysis, which help the government and defense industry vertical to understand the behavior of people. Moreover, social media helps governments share and deliver services in an effective manner.

Media and Entertainment

The media and entertainment industry verticals include films, TV, printed media, gaming, radio, animation, and internet advertising. Among these sectors, internet advertising is gaining high importance due to the emergence of social media analytics solutions. The rise in technologies, such as Virtual Effects (VFX) and graphics, are the driving factors for the adoption of social media analytics software and services in the media and entertainment industry vertical. Organizations that deal with the media and entertainment industry vertical make decisions based on CX; however, due to the rapid growth of technological advancements, these organizations need to make real-time decisions. Social media analytics simplifies the analysis of customers’ requirements and identifies the opportunities to acquire a larger customer base.

Travel and Hospitality

The competition in the travel and hospitality industry vertical is stiff. To stay ahead of the competition, vendors are utilizing analytics tools to identify new prospects and are offering quality services to retain their existing customers. Customers in this sector compare the products and research on multiple options before purchasing through various channels (online, promotional activities, social media, or verbal communication). Airlines, hotels, and reservation sites are increasingly using analytics to improve booking ratios, boost the revenue yields, and improve customer satisfaction. Analytics can help maximize the value of services in hospitality by balancing the spending in marketing and sales and in staffing.

Other Industry Verticals

The other industry verticals comprise research and education, transportation and logistics, and energy and utilities, which are rapidly adopting social media analytics. The adoption is expected to help these industry verticals address several pain points, such as the increasing OPEX and Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) of social media, to generate insights. This is expected to ultimately lead to higher demands for analytics in these industry verticals in the future. In research and education, social media analytics can be used to create an appropriate education and research plan, depending upon the target audience. Social media analytics helps arrive at decisions with quicker research time, compared to the traditional surveys or study groups.

The transportation and logistics industries have benefited from the use of social media analytics solutions. The government agencies, including transportation departments, driver’s licensing agencies, and transit agencies are using social media analytics to keep their customers updated. They intimate their customers about schedule changes and waiting times to provide them with the best service. However, there are some challenges that restrain the growth of social media analytics solutions in the transportation and logistics industry vertical. For instance, the metro’s communication system is old and not upgraded as per requirement, due to which social media cannot be considered as a perfect solution for metro travelers. Professionals can use social media analytics as a key marketing platform in the transportation and logistics sector.

The energy and utility industry vertical is using social media analytics solutions in various Applications. Several utility companies have ventured into this space to discuss energy conservation and efficiency, customer education, branding and promotion, and outages. The utility sector can derive values from many unstructured texts, driven by conversations and sentiments expressed across social media platforms. Such views are expected to help align customer engagements.

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