"Social Media and Strategic Communication"- Chapter 5

In our book “Social Media for Strategic Communication”, Chapter 5 was about researching in social media. This includes monitoring, listening, and analysis. I learned the importance of researching in social media and strategic communication. Research is the systematic gathering of information in a scientific or objective manner in order to help us answer questions. Research, specifically analytics, can provide us with evidence, which can potentially influence a certain “wave” or the conversations and dialogue in the community. However, data is the tool driving the entire plan. Without data, these waves are just entertainment for a single moment in time. With data, though, these stories have a shelf life and meaning for future implications, practices, and learnings for a company or brand. Data is the tool driving the “pay to play” game for social media professionals. Every time a sponsored post or ad comes forward, such as branded hashtags, it was paid for by the sponsored brand. Every kind of paid form of content is approached in a different way. One may be sponsored by third party endorsers, and the other could be sponsored by a movie studio, like Pixar. On the other hand, metrics can tell a very different story. One benefit of metrics for platforms on social media and third party services is to capture the essence of audiences on a level whom are extremely specific and detailed. The ability to have access to what people are willing to share about themselves on various platforms social media provides. This includes what they are doing to engage, react to and converse with. This really drives companies, organizations, and media outlets to specific social media platforms with established marketing or advertising budgets. With these insights, a very clear picture of a user’s personas, motivational factors, likes and other characteristics can appear and help categorize them into different segments. However, there are different kinds of metrics. There are click-through rates, which is are many times someone clicks on a link in order to navigate to another website. There are also behavioral metrics, which are the actions people take on social media. The final kind of metrics are vanity metrics, or the metrics known for making us all feel good, but they don’t tell us anything in the process. This chapter was very interesting and I hope to learn more in the upcoming chapters.