Mass campaigns and the role of analytics

Social media analytics can help campaign managers decide the timing of campaign activities and relevant themes

While the power of social media is not lost upon many, only a few are using this channel in an effective manner. Effective use of social media can help achieve extraordinary reach, response and resonance at a fraction of cost of traditional channels. Using certain advanced analytical tools and techniques, marketers can gain valuable insights on elements that can contribute to effective marketing and customer oriented campaigns through social media.

What follows is a construct on how social media analytics can be applied to understand and enhance effectiveness of mass campaigns. Our data science team applied this construct on the recently launched Clean India campaign, which generated approximately 3,000 tweets and retweets per hour during the eight hour trending window for the 'Swachh Bharat' hashtag.

Step 1: Understanding reach: At the outset, timing of tweets and retweets generated through a campaign can be used to monitor and measure campaign performance.

Step 2: Understanding resonance: The torrent of conversations generated through a campaign can be a valuable source of insights on themes that have resonated with the audience. The discovered themes need to be understood by the marketing managers in the context of campaign objectives.

Step 3: Understanding consumption channels: With multiplicity of campaign channels to choose from, an understanding of how the audience is consuming the campaign message could translate both in a more effective and efficient campaign. For instance, for Clean India, andriod and desktop users dominated other devices. Such insights can be used by campaign managers in driving decisions around advertisement spend and developing relevant apps.

Step 4: Understanding sentiment: A near real time understanding of audience sentiments for a specific campaign can be a critical input to the campaign management team. A variety of text mining methods are available to attach sentiment score to tweets and texts extracted from various sources. The above fundamental construct could be further enriched by adding other dimensions such as metro versus non-metro chatter volume and audience sentiments etc. Also, beyond Twitter, there are many other forums, such as blogs posted by columnists, which can be analysed.

Analytics can help develop a roadmap for future campaigns based on an objective understanding of what's working and what's not from current campaign results. As illustrated above, social media analytics can help campaign managers derive valuable insights that can feed into decision areas such as timing of campaign activities, suitable channels and relevant themes. In a country as diverse as India, effective use of a mass channel such as social media will be a key element of the marketing toolkit going forward.

By Satyakam Mohanty, chief executive, & Pradeepta Mishra, manager-data science, Ma Foi Analytics