Customers do online and offline research, take the recommendations of friends and family and go through product reviews before buying a product . This is where social media plays an important part in marketing. Brands find social media analysis necessary to quantify purchase intent. The three ways to get richer insights are

1. Analyze social media to understand the number of buyers interested in the product.

2. Buzz around the launch of a product reflects the purchase intent of the product.

3. Conducting a competitive analysis of the brands with the help of social media can help the brands to be better.

Read more at http://marketingland.com/social-shopping-use-social-media-analytics-quantify-purchase-intent-214173

Before we start discussing about Tools for Social Media Analysis, first of all we have to know what social media analytics is? Instead of thinking it as a noun, take it as a verb. Precisely, it's gathering data from social platforms to help guide marketing strategy.

# the process begins with the prioritizing goals.

# The second step is determining key performance indicators (KPIs) i.e. likes and shares your posts receives, replies and comments, and more importantly the clicks your links and content earn analysis.

Now, as the definition is clear, we will directly come to the social media analytic tools. To read more, follow: https://keyhole.co/blog/list-of-the-top-25-social-media-analytics-tools/

Nowadays, the only goal of any inbound strategy is to educate the consumers with relevant information. But, the challenge is to figure out how to create content which will be interesting to target audiences. An inbound marketing content to be successful must speak about what the target audience likes the most. Social monitoring also helps companies to create more customers. Columnist John Donnelly III, writes in his article about three ways that social media analytics can transform boring inbound campaign into the dynamic, lead-generating tool. Read more at: http://marketingland.com/social-media-insights-goldmine-inbound-marketers-131015

The sole motive behind existence of social media is that it helps to bring people together. Mostly people do not use social media for purchasing goods and services but for boasting about festivals. The ideal media campaigns provide the customers with the relevant and valuable information. Social media analytics helps enterprises to interact with customers and this is highly beneficial in regard to targeting content and promotional activities. In case of directly selling to the existing customers there is comparatively less pressure than selling to new customers and hence there is a sublime line to walk upon while dealing with them. However the most crucial aspect of sales in social media is building trust through engagement with customers, creation of a personal account and sharing quality content.

 To know more about customer engagement, please follow the link: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/what-are-the-most-effective-ways-to-engage-with-your-customers

Predictive analysis helps in analyzing the choice and behavior of the viewers. This in turn helps in finding the target audience as well as optimizes revenue. Combination of system dynamics and agent based modeling can be used to predict the profits from the shows or movies. Proper techniques along with real time analysis can assess the content precisely and accurately.
Social media analytics or sentiment analytics allows the industry to understand the perception of the audience and the critical reviews that they give.
“Bag-of-words opinion analysis” approach can help in evaluating the tweets from various social media sites. Cost efficiencies can also be achieved with proper efficient use of data analytics.
Read more at: http://sites.tcs.com/blogs/agile-business/analytics-entertainment-industry

According to David Loshin (Knowledge Integrity Inc.)," big data and analytics is helping organizations to gather and analyze data in search of valuable business information and insights that can help them improve their products and services." Cost, Simplicity and Performance are the three factors helps to lower the barrier of entry for analytics and motivate organizations to adopt a big data analytics. The organizations which are planning to integrate analytics tools into their organizations need to have a data driven culture, recognize the potential of information. Key stakeholders are aware of the benefits of big data analytics and include agility in making decisions for adopting the technology. Types of big data to analyze:

• Transaction Data
• Human-generated Data
• Mobile Data
• Machine and Sensor Data.

Big data analytics tools help you in managing all these data with a reasonable investment. Helps you in analyzing these applications:
• Customer Analytics
• Sales and Marketing Analytics
• Social Media Analytics
• Cybersecurity
• Plant and facility management
• Pipeline Management
• Supply chain and channel analytics
• Prize optimization
• Fraud Detection

Read more at: http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/feature/How-to-determine-if-big-data-analytics-tools-are-right-for-you

Movies are big businesses where a lot of money needs to be spent so that box office hits. Prediction of this hit is an impressive science. So studios nowadays depends on its blockbusters by making early prediction to carry their less profitable films. So, companies uses a number of different metrics to predict the sentiment towards a movie. Analytics has spread its arms from Hollywood towards the World’s Biggest Film Industry, Bollywood. Social Sentiment Index (SSI) reveals measures about successful films. It is argued that it might hamper creativity and risk-taking factor in the movie industry. Thus it might affect small films to even take a chance. Read more about this interesting article at: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/can-social-media-analytics-help-end-box-office-flops

The evolution and advancement of modern technology has led to a remarkable development of how business is done. With this rapid progress, the complexities in terms of how these technologies are used, has increased largely. Often the names and terms are clubbed together, and it becomes difficult for non-technical business leaders to understand and identify the independent usage of these technologies. "Big data analytics", "marketing analytics", "social media analytics", "audio stream analytics", etc. are some of them. It seems that analytics are often clubbed with other words, many of which are associated with storage and inflow of large volumes of data. If the volume of the sample is adequate enough to give a statistically valid output, then analytics can be executed without resorting to big data .To know more read: http://www.mytechlogy.com/IT-blogs/7973/does-analytics-need-big-data/#.VXE5WM-qqko

Nowadays companies need to know to about their customers very well because customers collect information from many channels and there is vast amount of data to analyze and little resources to map the insights against business goals. Social media analytics gives us that opportunity. By listening to the voice of the customer and analyzing, filtering and organizing the data, we can create customer segmentation that would benefit any brand. It allows us to go beyond CRM and audience targeting techniques and find out what is important to consumers. To know more, follow Ekaterina Walter (Bestselling Author; International Speaker; Global Evangelist, Sprinklr)’s article link: : http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/social-media-analytics-key-knowing-your-customers

Social Media Analytics has become important nowadays. But, what is Social media analytics? It collects data from social media platforms and blogs, and do an analysis of the collected data to extract information which in turn will help any organization to take the right step. It also facilitates marketers with a detailed understanding of the consumer and also helps to analyze the sentiment of customers to augment marketing, branding, and customer service. MarketsandMarkets (a global market research and consulting company based in the U.S), have recently published a report about GLOBAL SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYTICS MARKET - MARKET FORECASTS AND ANALYSIS (2014-2019) which will help the market leaders or new entrants in many ways. To know more about this, follow: http://www.fastmr.com/prod/871700_global_social_media_analytics_market_market.aspx?afid=302

Social media now holds a place alongside print and broadcast as a major, essential marketing channel for businesses. As such, social media now should be held to the same standard as those channels: your social media ROI needs to contribute to your bottom line. To prove that your social media investment is truly warranted, you need to track how social is influencing every interaction you have with your clients.

The first step involves setting social media goals that complement existing business and departmental goals. If you have set a specific number of leads you’re trying to attain this quarter, set the number of leads you want to specifically be driven by social media. If one of your goals is to increase landing page conversion by say 10%, ensure that you’re tracking the conversion rate of people who land on the page through social channels. Audit your existing social media performance to establish baseline targets, and then set appropriate goals for improvement.

Once you’ve established your social media goals, you’ll need to identify and implement the tools and processes required to measure the ROI on your social media. This may involve adding tracking codes to URLs, building custom landing pages, and more. There are a variety of social media analytics tools which service to track the diverse metrics you are after.

Once you’ve identified what works and what doesn’t work on social, it’s time to adjust your strategy. The point of tracking your social media ROI isn’t just to prove your social campaigns are valuable, it’s to increase their value over time.

Due to the short lifecycle of social media campaigns, a failing campaign should be changed and improved as soon as possible. Social media is never static. To meet your social media ROI goals, you’ll need to constantly update and adapt your strategy taking into account the analytics data you’re tracking. To read the full article visit:http://blog.crazyegg.com/2014/02/10/social-media-roi

The strength of social media is that it can answer questions you had not asked and perhaps had not even thought of. Its weakness is that it can't answer most of the questions that market researchers' clients ask. There have been some successes and a couple of examples are

• Assessing campaign or message breaks through.

• Identifying language, topics and ideas.

• Outside market research.

But the key problems are:

• Most people do not comment in social media, and most of the comments are not about clients’ brands and services.

• Social media deals with the world as it is, brands can’t use it to test ads, to test new products and services, or almost any future plan.

• The dynamic quality of social media means that it is very difficult to compare two activities. Thus the accuracy of social media measurements become limited.

• Good social media usage requires people, which tend to make it more expensive and slower.

• It is very difficult to attribute the comments to distinct groups.

Read more at: 

http://www.greenbookblog.org/2014/04/25/why-has-social-media-analytics-met-with-limited-success-in-market-research/</a

Online social networks give vital information. If someone posts something on Twitter, Facebook, they generate a digital footprint. If someone reads it, or watches a YouTube video, they add to the data trail. We can analyze it to take business decisions. The information that we look for depends on business goals. Some companies use social media to increase sales, some concentrate on brand consciousness, others are focused on brand trust, or increasing customer satisfaction. An analyst records keywords which customers are discussing, use them into status updates or tweets to be more relevant to customers. They check which messages attract readers most so that they can reach new customers. There are different social media analytics tools. Some are Hoot Suite; span multiple channels, Twitter etc. Some tools include workflow; they allow social media managers to connect information to others. Customer feedback raises sentiment analysis. Read more at: 

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jun/10/effective-social-media-analytics

Big Data! While you are reading the two words and also this blog, you may be not aware that you already have Big Data right in front of you.

Many small businesses think Big Data to be very expensive to analyze. But, let me tell you one thing – we are analyzing Big Data freely for years! Sounds unbelievable right? Okay, so here’s the thing.

Nowadays, social media has become a great means of communication for every business. Many of them have their page on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Plus, profiles on Twitter, etc. The social media platform can provide valuable insights about their products or services and also about their target customers. With low investments, you can get to know your customers’ behavior, know their demographics and much more. But seeing large volumes of data can make you puzzled.

Nicole Fallon from Business News Daily writes about some tips to get you started. Read them at http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/6190-smb-big-data-tips.html