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Social media feeds like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, serve as a megaphone for consumers. These outlets allow them to blast out their thoughts and feelings on just about any topic -- including businesses and brands. This constant, ever-growing stream of consumer generated content translates into a massive, open focus-group for businesses, allowing them a peek into the hearts and minds of their customers -- as well as their competitors' customers. 


While access to social data is a boon for businesses, relying solely on this data to derive analytics insights may not always offer a complete picture. Let's take a closer look at some pros and cons of social data. 

Pro: Tune into Conversations about Your Brand

When businesses gather customer experience data, they are no longer limited to customer surveys or call center transcripts. Social media allows brands to drop in and listen to the public's unedited conversation about their products, services, employees, and reputation.

This glimpse at how people view your business can deliver priceless insights. Without social data, it might take a CEO months or even years to learn that that an alarming number of customer complaints stem from a particular employee at one store location. 

Con: The Good, the Bad, and the Very, Very Bad

Social data can often trend toward the negative. How often do you fall head over heels for a new purchase, like a new app for your smartphone, and head to the Twitterverse to declare your undying love? Rarely. But if that new app drained your phone's battery life and repeatedly crashed, you'd want the world -- or at least the manufacturer -- to know that their product was a dud. Ideally, you'd hope for a response from the manufacturer, allaying your gripes. 

Of course, positive sentiment exists on social media, but it's often in the minority, overshadowed by streams of complaints. If a business only relies on social media data for its analytics, this appearance of negativity can yield biased insights. It's important for businesses to hire a vendor that can keep this perspective during their sentiment analysis. The vendor should use other sources of data, like contact- center transcripts or surveys, in conjunction with social data to deliver complete and accurate insights. 

Pro: Competitive Analysis Awaits 

Many smaller or midsized businesses lack volumes of social media data. Still, their larger competitors have a wealth of social data. This information presents smaller businesses with the opportunity to perform competitive analysis. Competitive analysis allows you to see what consumers perceive your competition's strengths and weaknesses to be, so you can position yourself accordingly. Plus, you can reach out to users who are complaining about your competitor, and introduce them to your services or products. 

Con: Real-Time Processing Can Throw Off Results

One of the most alluring qualities of social data is that so much of it is quickly and frequently generated. Many analytics vendors boast that they can analyze this stream of data in real time. Unfortunately, speedy analytics can yield low-quality results. 

Real-time processing often requires a narrow focus, and will look only at vocabulary. In this scenario, positive and negative words are identified and assigned a score, like +1 for a positive word, or -1 for a negative word. As social media data is analyzed, the engine adds up the scores for positive and negative words, giving you an overall sentiment. But these insights can be inaccurate.

For example, a tweet about a coffee shop that reads, "I love the new frappuccino, but the cookies are terrible," would earn a neutral score (+1 for "love," -1 for "terrible"). In fact, that neutral score doesn't tell the whole story. This tweet should have been analyzed to show a mixed bag of positive and negative sentiment about two separate items.

See the Broader Analytics Picture with Solution as a Service

Businesses that want to embark on an analytics project must hire a vendor that understands both the value and limitations of social data.

A new approach to analytics, Solution as a Service (SolaaS), embodies this perspective. SolaaS delivers analytics results that incorporate a variety of data types, giving businesses a complete picture of their customer experience. 

Through a single vendor, SolaaS joins a powerful analytics engine, proprietary visualization layers, and the industry's top data scientists. SolaaS's philosophy of collaboration means that these analysts work closely with clients to ensure an analytics project incorporates data from a variety of sources and delivers accurate, data-driven insights. Additionally, SolaaS's in-depth processing means you'll always receive high-quality results. 

Summary

Access to social data delivers valuable analytics insights.  But businesses must look at the bigger picture -- social data is only one piece of the analytics puzzle. In fact, social media data offers a limited perspective of customer experience. Businesses that want to receive well-rounded results from an analytics project must hire a vendor that incorporates multiples data sources into its projects. By using a vendor with a Solution as a Service approach to analytics, businesses will always receive high-quality, data-driven insights that reflect a complete picture of customer experience.