Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation

Are you keeping up with the times? Chances are, if you’re a marketer, you’re still living in the dark ages (say, 2011) when it comes to how you use social media metrics to help guide your marketing decisions, writes Pernille Bruun-Jens in a recent piece for AdWeek.

According to the CMO Council’s State of Marketing 2014 report,  only 6% of marketers consider themselves leaders in using social analytics to shape their strategy, Bruun-Jensen reports. “Marketers are still overvaluing old social metrics and have not yet mastered the technological capabilities available to them,” she writes. “To successfully lead in social media—and hence in digital marketing—marketers need a strategy based on accuracy and speed using sophisticated real-time tools.”

The latest tools, Bruun-Jensen notes, show not just who is engaging with your brand, and what they’re engaging with, but also why they’re engaging. This deeper insight allows marketers to craft and adjust messages and otherwise fine-tune their campaigns in a more timely manner, she writes.

New cutting-edge metrics also help marketers zero in on what made the difference in a particular ad or placement, why something worked or didn’t work, Bruun-Jensen points out. They provide a fuller picture of what customers are saying about your brand across channels and what ultimately motivated them to buy.

Bruun-Jensen’s article is of course a plug for her own company’s services—she’s chief marketing officer for NetBase, a privately-held firm in Mountain View, Calif., with its own social analytics platform on offer. And she’s promising to share the secrets of next-gen social media marketing during a webinar on Tuesday. But if you’re feeling less than fully aware of how your marketing efforts are playing in the digital space—if you need to dig deeper and get more granular with your social media audience data—she might be well worth a listen.