Social media has immense power to gather data about the entire purchasing process. From the first moments of consumer awareness to post-purchase customer care and everything in between, social media can record valuable data regarding user demographics and click-through rates. However this high level of powerful data collection is not being used to it’s fullest. The problem is a lack of robust analysis.

Social media analytics are an ever-shifting field with few best practices in place but one theme is common: each entrant wants to build out an all-encompassing platform that incorporates social listening, engagement and analytics reports to maximize revenues. Unfortunately, this protectionism has led to each platform only reporting the collected data in its own unique way. This leaves marketers who wish to do analysis of their efforts at the mercy of the reports programmed into the platform. The only alternative is to manually enter the data into programs like Excel which takes far too much time. This hinders the ability of marketers to find new correlations and gain an advantage in the field, furthering our understanding of how to best use these media.

I would argue that future succes of these platforms is to release their hold on the big data they collect. By adding functionality which exports to Excel or other robust, commonly-used software capable of enabling analysis of raw data (like the open source statistical software R), platforms will leave those with a handful of bespoke reports in the dust. This is particularly true for large multinational clients who have extremely large data sets. And as social media usage and data collection continues to increase, even mid-size organizations will soon feel the need for this same functionality.