Get deep into social media

There was a time when questions such as `who is talking about what brands, and why’ would seem like frippery of the highest order, but now it is a subject of vital importance. Now, the `talking’ is done on social media and the world can be listening.

For a business this can be a good thing, or perhaps a bad thing. The most important thing, however, is that they know what is being said, which is where Crimson Hexagon can play a part.

The company provides social media analytics software, and has just upgraded its ForSight social intelligence platform so that marketing professionals can identify the interest segments of the people talking about brands, products and companies on social media. This is achieved by using a new tool from the company, called Affinities, which can quantify what social media users like, what else they are engaging with, and what does – and does not – resonate with them. This information can then be leveraged by businesses in a number of different ways, in particular to plan and execute better marketing campaigns.

The ForSight platform is built on patented technology developed at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) and currently holds over 400 billion social media posts in its social media data library, adding an additional one billion posts to its database every two days. Using analysis tools capable of distilling raw data into insights allows analysts to go further in identifying specific patterns, spikes or trends online, and highlight exactly what is driving the conversation.

The company claims that Affinities can transform the big data of social media, digging deeper into the makeup of audiences, and revealing fresh marketing and advertising opportunities.

“ForSight has always been able to analyse conversation across social media to tell marketers what people are saying and how that conversation has changed over time,” said Curt Bloom, president of Crimson Hexagon. “But to gain real, actionable insights, marketers also need to know ‘who’ is talking about them and engaged with their company on social media. With Affinities, we’re introducing a tool that provides unprecedented insight into audience interests.”

That use of the words `who is talking” suggests that individuals could find themselves identified in some way, but according to Leonardo T. Nagata, SVP strategic analytics at advertising agency FCB Affinities is a technology that allows the company to segment the audience without compromising audience privacy. We have confidence that this new feature will push social analytics forward. In fact, one day after it was released to customers, we started implementing Affinities’ analyses for one of our major clients in the software industry, and the results look very promising.”