28 Mar 12 Accenture v/s Cognizant Infographic reveals the Twitter truth
The latest buzz word in the sphere of online marketing is return on investment (RoI) on social media marketing. Marketers and top management want to know the effectiveness of their social media strategy to promote brand awareness, and how it compares with their competitors. However, they lack the ability to accurately calculate their RoI, as a measure to estimate the success of their social media strategy. The first step is to define the end goals of social media marketing. It could be:
- Increase in sales (%)
- Increase in click-through rates (%)
- Decrease in customer complaints (%)
Once the end goal is well-defined, the next step is to monitor, and analyze the social media sphere, and if needed, change their game plan. One method to estimate if their strategy is effective is to compare it with their competitors. To know this, they must turn to web analytics, an emerging trend in the avenue of online marketing analytics. It includes:
- Online traffic analysis
- Path and conversion analysis
- Text mining and buzz analytics
Let’s turn to two IT outsourcing service providers, Accenture and Cognizant Technology Solutions, to illustrate the use of web analytics.
The infographic below depicts data gathered from their Twitter accounts, @accenture and @cognizant.
Source: visual.ly
A quick glance at the infographic above reveals:
- Accenture has almost four times the number of followers as Cognizant
- Accenture’s level of tweet engagement, calculated as the number of mentions of their handle, is at least 2.8 times that of Cognizant
-A mention of their handle refers to the number of times tweets were posted with @accenture or @cognizant
- An examination of the mentions per tweet volume for each account, calculated as handle mentions divided by the total number of tweets, discloses:
-Accenture lags (6) slightly behind Cognizant (6.3)-Thus, Accenture is not matching up to Cognizant when it comes to RoI on effort
More valuable insight would be forthcoming through an investigation of the interactions with customers on their Twitter accounts. In an infographic by J6Design, ‘7 reasons to embrace online culture ’, 71% of complaints on Twitter were not responded to. When the 29% who did get a response were contacted, 83% reported that they liked that they got a response and were satisfied with it. For a company which measures RoI in social media as a decrease in customer complaints, this would mean a threefold return on effort.
This is where web analytics comes into play, turning the numbers into key actionable insights for the companies. An examination of online traffic to reveal the number of replies, buzz analysis to reveal which sectors are being targeted, and conversion analysis to reveal how many posts resulted in click-throughs, all feed into a company’s social media metrics.
A particular organization’s online marketing strategy requires a thorough investigation of their brand on both corporate and social platforms. This includes any material released on their corporate website and blog, and their official accounts on the various social media platforms, which include and are not limited to, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Slideshare, and Flickr. An outsourcing service provider seeking to entice buyers of web analytic services should provide an analysis of content on all these platforms, so that their clients may fully understand the realizable return on social media marketing.
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