Combining Business Intelligence with Social Media

As most businesses increasingly rely on social media networking, they begin to look strategically at big data as a way to improve their business performance, an important element of their efforts will be in the burgeoning capability of social analytics.

While many organizations understand the potential benefits to be gained from social media conversations, traditional business intelligence (BI) processes aren’t always built to access and aggregate unstructured data from blogs, forums, Facebook, and Twitter. Newer techniques are therefore required for social analytics as well as to handle the volumes of big data that result.

Popular opinion on products, services, market trends, and competitors is predominantly found as unstructured text in social media sites. The difficult part is efficiently gathering the right data at the right time, transforming it into actionable intelligence, and loading it into BI tools for analysis.

However, with more intelligent, more accurate real-time web data processing, new methods for working with business information are possible. Business analysts and decision makers can then spend their time extracting greater intelligence from the data and less time worrying about collecting or accessing it.

The social sphere has opened up a whole new world of business intelligence tools for us to use.  BI tools commonly used to gather, analyze and report specific types of data. Combining business intelligence with social intelligence can open many doors of business opportunities for you.

Assuming that one has social media BI capabilities, that person is able to understand how the strategies behind them would benefit small and large brands. These involve metrics and leading business initiatives. Everything from sales, customer service management, marketing communications, brand reputation, brand exposure and experience can be measured with social BI tools.

Most organizations really want to know if the information they see in their activity streams and social intranets is accurate and authoritative. Externally, they also want to be able to identify and keep tabs on influencers and experts. Social BI can be used to build and manage the large data sets needed to power apps that can provide these capabilities.

While basic social analytics can provide a lot of raw data about what customers are doing in your social channels, understanding where key events are for customer engagement and retention, what they mean, and how best to engage is where analytics turns into intelligence.

These days with all the negative online talk, brands need to be able to monitor and defend themselves on the internet. Small business owners can build up online reputations and become experts in their field. The future is brand management on the move, with built in intelligence in mobile apps.

We are constantly surrounded by social business intelligence.  You can find it on  social media platforms like Facebook, or have it built into business applications that you create for your company. The software package options that abound online are staggering. 

While many of these software programs are automatic, each of them may require a certain level of human interpretation. This will require some practice and learning on your part. You’ll need to get used to working with stats, percentages and data.

Most individuals these days are involved in the production, communication, and sharing of content—making this a disruptive time for traditional industries (such as advertising, news, and entertainment), consequently find themselves competing with consumer-created content for customers’ attention.

In order to compete effectively using this business strategy, organizations must monitor and analyze the conversations taking place over social media. This is where their customers are. And this is where they need to be—either participating in or monitoring those conversations. Companies that fail to do so are missing out on consumer insights and opportunities to heighten brand awareness.

The purpose to combining business intelligence together with social analytics, which can deal with the unique aspects of social media with big data, which can process vast, real-time information, flows quickly enough to matter. This results in a business module that is increasingly known as social business intelligence.