If you are one of those social media data junkies who is still hooked on the hard stuff, with an expensive £1000 a month habit going out to some silicon valley dealer then read on – it’s never too late, we’re here to support you and get you back to your old self.


We live in the age of technological enlightenment. This has meant, as marketers we have been able to rub our eyes and for the first time actually see what activity is driving the best return for our brands. Seems kind of silly to say but for years we didn’t really know if our efforts were paying dividends. It was educated guess work to establish which specific efforts, channels or promotions were really driving the bottom line. But then we were freed from our ignorance by marketing analytics and the raft of suppliers and experts who could shine the light of truth onto our attribution models, channel strategies and content performance. Suddenly we knew what was driving conversions, reach and sales. It was euphoric, we felt like scientists, in short we got carried away.

Suddenly it was oh so cool to be talking about the latest social media marketing analytics platform by the water cooler (sad times). We each boasted about the KPIs, depth and interrogational data on offer. We mused on the power of being able to slice and dice huge datasets and glean powerful insights from the ether. However, there were cracks starting to appear. It would be the glazed over look in people’s eyes as you talked to them. It would be your own self-doubt; that actually you had no idea what you were talking about or what you were trying to prove. You would sneak around the office, praying with all your heart that Colin from Accounts didn’t find you and ask you why you had just spent £1000 p/m on Brand Watch or Radian 6 or any other such number of very impressive and powerful social media tools (that you had no real use for).

Then, the penny dropped. You didn’t need to know that 0.1% of people who visited your website last year were in fact 20 year old men from Ecuador who were interested in Reggaeton and Fishing. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t relevant. You sold power tools. You didn’t need to be told who your target market was. This is ultimately the problem with too much social media data, there seems to be a race to the lowest decimal point with the providers. They seem obsessed with being able to go as deep and as wide as possible but when you stretch data to the edges it becomes ever more useless, irrelevant and proves only to provide outliers and distractions. Simple, good old fashioned analytics is all you require. Google analytics does a fantastic job, what’s more it’s free.  Of course you need to be able to understand where your customers are coming from, how they are interacting with your channels and content and where they are dropping out from your sales funnel. But going too deep or getting obsessed with social media data actually just causes your business to become heavy, inward looking and dampens creativity.

The future for social media marketing and analytics tools is to be intelligent, light and agile. They will embody useful analytics that quickly tell a clear story and are actionable. They will push automation into the mainstream and help brands to intelligently automate elements of their day to day marketing (traditional, email, social and PR) activities which will free up time to worry about creating that next great viral campaign or piece of consumable content.

If you are interested in getting help and moving away from these debilitating tools please get in touch, we offer a solution that could wean you off your addiction and show you that there is a cleaner, cheaper better way to market.

Check us out to see how intelligent social media data automation can grow your online presence without the need for you to be at your desk.

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