Social Media Strategy And Development Target Australia †Samples

Question: Discuss about the Social Media Strategy And Development. Answer: Introduction Target Australia is a chain of departmental stores which is owned by Wesfarmers. The company is dedicated to provide fashion, style and quality products which is affordable by most of the population of Australia (Target Australia, 2017). The report is based on the evaluation and investigation of the range of social media metrics and analytic approaches with the set of recommendations to form an appropriate social media strategy for the organisation. Various analytical tools and the potential data mining approaches will be discussed. The report will focus on the comprehensive understanding of the social media landscape and an understanding on the customers and main stakeholders. Also, the social media plans and policies will be developed including the strategies of content and recommendations will be provided on the social media data. Analysis Social media analytics can be understood as the process of collecting data from the stakeholders through digital media and then this data is structured and converted into the meaningful information so that important decisions of the business can be taken. It helps in increasing the involvement of the customers and also in measuring the performance of the company (Stieglitz, 2014). Target Australia is the departmental store which adopts social media strategies in order to increase the popularity of the business and to increase the sales. The brands today, need social media to show their lively presence. But it is very important to analyse this in order to know whether it is working in favour of the organisation or not. Need of Social Media analytics Social media analytics is needed because it helps in supporting the marketing decisions of the business. With the increased usage of social media, it is very important to monitor how the company is performing and how many users are actually getting connected with the business through social media (Fan Gordon, 2014). For e.g. On Facebook, it is been analysed that the users have liked or joined any page of a company and saw interests in their advertisements. Benefits and challenges of Social Media Analytics The benefits of Social Media Analytics include: The increased number of posts and content It provides competitive benchmarking for the business. It helps in identifying the influencers of business. Cost saving on the marketing and advertisement activities Better optimization of the content and marketing strategies (Carver, 2015) It helps in providing better customer services due to the knowledge about the customer responses. SMA helps in completing the significant tasks like diagnose, Prioritize and Evaluate. Diagnose refers to assessing that how the communication strategies will be adjusted to improve the results of the companys strategy. Prioritize includes determining the content, users, the platform to be used and other factors on priority. At last, Evaluate refers to the analysis of data to which determines the success and value of your marketing strategy (Holsapple, Hsiao Pakath, 2014). On the contrary, it also has some challenges which are to be faced by the companies. The challenges for adopting Social Media analytics includes: The companies find it difficult to collect data from various sources. More of multimedia is involved rather than the related text. There is a need to develop different techniques so that the companies could identify and track the posts. There are problems in social media posts which have to be addressed. It is challenging to arrange the unstructured data (Hausman, 2014). As per Jackson (2016), Social media metrics can be referred to the data and statistics which provide insights to the business for its social media marketing performance. Target Australia can also measure the brand performance on social media on the basis of the responses which the content receives. On the basis of this, the analysis of the performance on social media can be measured for the competitors as well which helps the organisation to determine its own position in the industry. Tools used for social media analytics There are many tools which can be used by Target Australia to review its own performance. It is very important to find the right tool for the business because these tools vary as per the costs, prices, experience of user effectiveness. Some of the tools which can be used by Target Australia are explained below: Facebook Insights: Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms which help the company in knowing and keeping the track of the posts and likes received by the company. It also helps the company in determining the demographics and choices of the customers. It helps in letting the company know that which posts are helpful in getting success for the business (Sterne, 2010). Twitter analytics: The twitter analytics helps business in knowing that which tweets are succeeding and to what degree. The matrix will help in breaking the audience into the percentages which will be based on the gender, income, choices, etc. This helps the business in segmenting its customers so that the potential customers can be targeted. Pinterest Analytics: By creating a business profile on Pinterest, Target Australia can know that what users are loving about their pins or what kind of pins are most liked by people. It helps in gaining insights about the interested followers and here, half the battle is won. Instagram Insights: Here, free business profile can be created and the business could get the details about the profile views and also the demographic data about the followers or visitors. It also shows who are the active users on Instagram who visit the profile and promotions of the business (Sudarsanam, 2016). Some of the social media websites offers its own analytics like discussed above but there are some other tools as well which helps the companies to understand how their business is performing. Some of the tools are: Google Alerts: Here, the business get some alerts and whatever the business name is mentioned online, it get alerts. It helps business in knowing that which content is bringing it in headlines (Lovett, 2011). Hootsuite: It is one of the most used social mediamanagement system. It helps in organising the campaigns on many social media websites. It helps in recognizing the audience, targeting the audience and then treating them accordingly. It helps in providing weekly reports on the social analytics of the business as well (Berger, 2013). Data Mining Data can be referred to the facts and statistics which are collected for analyses. The companies use social media platforms to collect data to analyse it and find some meaningful information out of it. Data mining can be referred to the process of collecting the data for analysing it so that the information can be built and used for discovering the patterns and trends. Data mining in social media is designed to collect the data from the social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and more. Taking out valuable information from data from social media is social data mining. The social media platforms include Emails, chats, social news, opinions, reviews, etc. Data mining from social media is important because the World Wide Web is vast and millions of people share data over there. This data is helpful for advertising and marketing. With the help of this data, the companies can produce customised products for the customers. It helps in creating rich customer experience and also helps in design and development (Chen, Chiang Storey, 2012). Target Australia adopts data mining techniques like Graph Mining or Text Mining. Applications like Big data can be used for data mining. These services have to be purchased by the organisations like Target Australia to get the facility of data mining. Data Mining is a significant process for the analysis of social media for the organisations (Gandomi Haider, 2015). Evaluation and Recommendations: Evaluation After the analysis of the Social media metrics and tools for the analysis, Evaluation is done to choose the best social media analytic tool for Target Australia. The company should select the technology which best supports the business objectives and the nature of business of the organisation. The business has to choose among the different available features and select the ones which are required for the evaluation of then social media strategies of the business. The business could also use multiple tools providing they are in the budget of the company (Kurniawati, Shanks Bekmamedova, 2013). The business should evaluate the content used on the social media, sources used and how often they are been reviewed. For evaluating the success of these tools, Target Australia could conduct surveys and can evaluate the statistics to know how much change these tools can bring to the business. Calculation of ROI ROI can be calculated using the standard formula which is given below: ROI= (Total $ Earned- Total $ Invested)/ (Total $ Invested) * 100 ROI is just one measure of calculating the social business of the organisations but there are lot many evaluation tools which were discussed above (Etlinger, 2011). Facebook Insights Metrics Facebook provides complete metrics for the business. By using this, the business can keep a track of all its Facebook pages by clicking on them. Here, the overview of data will be given. This will be in the form of Number of likes, reach and visits of people. This shows the engagement of people with the posts on the Facebook page. For e.g. the Likes Tab will provide the details about the trends of likes on the page. According to Dawley (2016), the companies need to measure their ROI from the social media campaigns. There are some social media metrics which helps in tracking the trends of business and help Target Australia to take its business to next level. The organisation can track the bounce rate which is the percentage of the visitors who leave the website of the company after viewing only single page. The company can take further steps to make people stay on these sites and convert them into the buyers. Google Analytics The business can use Google analytics for this or any other analytics provider. For e.g. In Google Analytics, the business needs to go under the Acquisition tab and then click all traffic for the channels. Here, the business has to click on button of bounce rate and there the channels are ranked from the lowest bounce rate to the highest one. Here, the analysis can be made that which channel is more effective and which one is less effective (Jeffrey, 2013). The companies nowadays participate in the social media. Target Australia has its own website for providing a platform to the shoppers to buy the products and also have social media platforms where the customers can question or provide feedback and the businesses have to respond to this. The company have to measure these activities when they are engaging in social media. It is ideal for evaluating the value of traffic coming from various websites to the Target Australia. It evaluates that how many visitors are converted into the customers (Jeffrey, 2013). Cyfe CYfe is a tool which provides information and the content which is been shared on the social media about the business and it also shows what impact it have on the ROI of the business. The widgets are created as shown in the figure and the reporting on various social media sites can be reported like Facebook advertisements, engagement on Twitter, etc. It helps in tracking sales, invoices and customer visits (Gotter, 2016). Twitter Analytics Target Australia use Twitter to improve its customer experience from retweets. They have created a twitter page where they find out the general mention of their business and talk to people about their brand online. They also invite the customers to share their open feedbacks and experiences with the organisation and then develop the analysis to develop the future actions to engage customers (Smith, 2015). It helps in analysing the number of tweets, profile visits and followers. It provides month position and statistics to the business which helps in bringing improvements in the business. Steps to evaluate the social media analytic tools adopted by Target Australia Step 1: Identify the needs Target Australia is active on Facebook, Twitter and it also has its own website. The company is interested in tracking its social media activities through various tools like Google analytics, facebook insights and Twitter Analytics. The main objective of social media is to connect more and more with the potential customers. The company is facing a challenge in converting the visitors to the buyers of the companys business (Evans, 2010). Step 2: Make a list of top tools to evaluate Target Australia should make a list of the tools which provides best results to the business. This should be evaluated on the basis of online research, reviews by industry experts and recommendations from the professionals (Lawrence, et al., 2010). Step 3: See a demonstration A demonstration should be taken on the business to see the social media data and to understand the features. Step 4: Testing The company should keep the tools on trial for a certain period so that the effectiveness of the tool can be known (Cleary, 2017). This framework or the process will help the business to achieve their social media objectives. Recommendations There are some recommendations to the businesses to analyse their social media tools and make improvements in the business. First of all, Target Australia should use a framework for the social analytics so that a measurement program can be planned. The framework can be planned by setting the business objectives and strategies and then by identifying the business metrics supporting those objectives. There are advantages of the social media data but it also possesses some limitations. The business should educate itself about the limitations of the social data. The business should evaluate how the measurement of likes, visits and shares could help business to grow. The business should also set the roles and responsibilities for the analytical team and should determine that what all resources are needed and how the tools and resources should be used. The budget is also a factor which determines the selection of the evaluation tool. After the assessment of needs, the business should choose a vendor to buy the services as per their needs. If multiple tools are used, the business should consider how they will compliment each other. Some social media policy and plans should be developed which would make it easy to achieve the set targets and objectives. Conclusion It can be concluded that the company is growing in its presence on social media and it requires some analytical tools which determines the success or failure of the social media business of Target Australia. A competitive analysis is required and there are many options available like Facebook Insights, Google alerts, Google analytics, etc. which provides an opportunity for the business to grow its business. The company should not rely on one measurement tool but can try the other tools too as per the framework designed. References Berger, A A (2013).Media analysis techniques. Sage Publications. Carver, B (2015). 5 Reasons to Invest in Dedicated Social Media Analytics Tools. Social Media Today. Chen, H, Chiang, R H, Storey, V C (2012). Business intelligence and analytics: From big data to big impact.MIS quarterly,36(4), 1165-1188. Cleary, I (2017). The Social Media Analytics Compass: What and How to Measure. Razor Social. Dawley, S (2016). 7 Social Media Metrics that Really Matterand How to Track Them. Hootsuite. Etlinger, S (2011). A Framework for Social Analytics. Altimeter. Evans, D (2010).Social media marketing: the next generation of business engagement. John Wiley Sons. Fan, W Gordon, M D (2014). The Power of Social Media Analytics. Communications of the ACM. Gandomi, A Haider, M (2015). Beyond the hype: Big data concepts, methods, and analytics.International Journal of Information Management,35(2), 137-144. Gotter, A (2016). 5 Tools to Measure Social Media ROI. Retrieved from https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/5-tools-to-measure-social-media-roi/. Hausman, A (2014). 5 Challenges of Real-time Social Media Analytics. Retrieved from https://www.hausmanmarketingletter.com/challenges-real-time-social-media-analytics/. Holsapple, C, Hsiao, S H Pakath, R (2014). Business social media analytics: definition, benefits, and challenges. Jackson, D (2016). All of the Social Media Metrics That Matter. Sprout Social. Jeffrey, A (2013). Social Media Measurement: A Step-by-Step Approach. Institute for Public Relations. Kurniawati, K, Shanks, G G Bekmamedova, N (2013). The Business Impact Of Social Media Analytics. InECIS(Vol. 13, p. 13). Lawrence, R, Melville, P, Perlich, C, Sindhwani, V, Meliksetian, S, Hsueh, P, Liu, Y (2010). Social media analytics.OR/MS Today, 26-30. Lovett, J (2011).Social media metrics secrets(Vol. 159). John Wiley Sons. Smith, M (2015). Top 10 Retail Brands That Lead on Social Media Performance. Marketing eye. Sterne, J (2010).Social media metrics: How to measure and optimize your marketing investment. John Wiley Sons. Stieglitz, S (2014). Social Media Analytics. Business Information Systems Engineering. Sudarsanam, S K (2016). Social Media Metrics.Social Media Listening and Monitoring for Business Applications, 131. Target Australia. (2017). About Us. Retrieved from https://www.target.com.au/company/about-us.