According to the projections put forward by Forrester in a new report, the future of social media marketing is all about data.
Although there are still obstacles and limitations with regard to the efficacy and efficiency of social media marketing, data may unlock the solutions to these problems.
It’s all about the smarter use of data, says Nate Elliott, an analyst with Forrester. And companies are catching on to the importance of data.
For instance, Elliott explains, leading social relationship platforms already use sentiment and influence data to help marketers analyze which customer questions and comments require attention.
“And some social vendors are now going a big step further,” he adds, “harnessing data to ease (and even automate) additional social marketing tasks. In the process they’re both reducing social marketers’ workloads and improving their output.”
Elliott says there is now a new breed of emerging social vendors that use so-called “data in, data out” practices:
“Data in” means bringing data into social platforms — and it will innovate social publishing. In the past 18 months, social sites have let marketers import third-party ad targeting data, and the result has been improved ad performance. Vendors that replicate these data import practices to power better organic posts will give marketers a big leg up.
“Data out” means pushing social data to other platforms — and it will innovate measurement. Measurement isn’t just marketers’ greatest social challenge; it’s social vendors’ greatest opportunity. The vendors that best help clients port social data into the measurement tools marketers trust (like attribution and marketing mix platforms) will emerge as measurement leaders.
So what other social marketing challenges can data help to solve? Check out Elliott’s full post on the Forrester blog here.
