The surge of social medial networks is tightly coupled with the varied challenges when it comes to analyzing social media, especially for business needs. Businesses have to muscle its way out of these challenges to fully benefit from this human network colossal, which is poised to replace emails and other means of communication in the future. These challenges if clearly understood and unlocked are guaranteed to bring a potential and profitable channel for business promotions and marketing. So let’s look at some of the major challenges faced by social media analysts
1. Too much qualitative data: Imagine you have 10,000 tweets on twitter about your product. How do you even start to analyze these tweets? There are applications that could automatically tell you the sentiment. But if you want a better view, you will have to dig deeper to come to some kind of an actionable conclusion, now that’s time-consuming and real hard work, however extremely fruitful
2. Social media is huge, unavoidable and growing: Today, all social conversations about your product might be happening on one or two most popular social media sites like twitter or Facebook. Tomorrow this ever growing trend may give you an entirely new and maybe more effective platform for social exchange. And this is no guess work as social media experts are predicting this to happen around 2015. So here’s our next challenge, keeping track of multiple social media sites to track our brand and market our stuff.
3. Cutting through non-qualitative data: Major problem with loads of data is unsolicited, disguised and unreal data. Tools and technology cannot weed out this unnecessary stuff; this is where pure human acumen should be applied in pruning data and getting the real pulse.
“When surveys are used for data collection, users may be reluctant to provide accurate responses. When automated tools perform the analysis, users may resent knowing that software is analyzing their behavior. For these reasons, social network analysis may remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.”
- Gartner
4. Proliferation of tools: No one tool can answer all your questions and support all your analysis. You have to use multiple tools and maybe make them work together to get your data. This may require both experience and keeping track of more and latest tools.
5. No known framework: There are different articles on various Web sites on how to measure social media effectiveness and how your product is doing on the social media zone. But the frameworks they are proposing are yet to mature. You have to understand your need and build your own social media analysis goals.
6. Need for expertise: As the complexities grow businesses have to look for experts who can effectively handle social media analysis. Imagine this, if today’s scenario is almost demanding experts to handle social media analysis then what will the situation be like tomorrow; more data, more sites, more tools, more platforms, more dependencies and of course more profitability. So this may become a specialized job and mandate engaging social media experts, who can obviously deliver you more profits through this channel of exchange.
Final thought: These challenges are evident and pressing, there may be even more to follow as this phenomenon is only growing. However, remember to overcome them as there are more profits on the other side.