The streams of social media continue to grow exponentially, and these streams possess a hidden goldmine of information to help you engage your clients. However, a Harvard Business Review study reported than approximately 12 percent of organizations deem their analysis and utilization of social media data as less than effective.

Each day, 200 million Twitter users create 400 million tweets. On Facebook, users post 600,000 bits of content every minute. YouTube aficionados upload 72 hours of video each minute.

The streams of social media continue to grow exponentially, and these streams possess a hidden goldmine of information to help you engage your clients. However, a Harvard Business Review study reported than approximately 12 percent of organizations deem their analysis and utilization of social media data as less than effective.

Up until recently, social media analytics assessed the content of the tweets, posts and videos to glean consumer opinions. Indeed, sentiment analysis remains important; however, organizations will need to dig deeper for actionable knowledge, and the latest generation of metrics provides this capability. Push Intelligence is the leader in this new technology that analyzes big data to sift through and identify potential negative drivers and pinpoint the cause. For example, if one product experiences a steep drop off in sales, Push Intelligence will scour social media for negative tweets, posts or other problem data. Then it will alert you to the cause.

Whether your organization is looking to improve brand awareness, engage customers, or increase lead generation, intelligent social media analytics provides crucial data that you can actually use. This has lead to a new method: investigative analytics.

Data analytics has moved beyond the IT and CIO divisions. Decision-making driven by critical data is now in the realm of sales, marketing and business development, as well as any employee with a stake in the company's success. This involves staying abreast of negative data across the Internet in real time. With the rise of social media analytics, asking open-ended, iterative questions moves the company beyond traditional business intelligence tools, and Push Intelligence applies this method to alert you to potential obstacles.

With investigative analytics, tailored to the massive quantities of data flowing through social media, users can ask a series of evolving questions to determine the why and when of certain events, then use these results to optimize the outcomes. The brilliance of investigative analytics centers on the ability to drive customer and brand engagement, manage content, and perform real-time critical data analysis with fewer resources.

For instance, traditional analytics asks quantitative questions such as "How many blue belts did we sell online via XYZ website last month?" Investigative analytics asks more qualitative questions, and then integrates the answers with social media, click-throughs, campaign results, conversions and more.

An investigative series of queries would follow a path such as:

• Where are we getting the highest sales conversions in blue belts? Answer: 21 Pinterest boards generate the majority of leads.
• Is there a link between customers who paused a video advertisement then resumed? Is their conversion rate higher or lower than those who did not pause the video?

The open-ended, iterative queries of investigative analytics give you the ability to stay up-to-date on positives and negatives with critical data in the ever-evolving world of social media.

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