How Samsung uses social media analytics to understand customers and guide strategy
The company uses Crimson Hexagon to analyse customer sentiment on social media
Samsung is in the midst of a fierce battle with Apple for smartphone supremacy. One of the ways in which the South Korean company looks to get an edge over its nemesis across the Pacific Ocean is by mining insights from its consumers through their social media activity.
The company uses an analytics platform from Crimson Hexagon to gain both instant insights into its customers and detailed reports on the conversations they’re having about its products, alongside those of its rivals. The findings help them tailor their marketing strategies.
Samsung has worked on 15 projects with Crimson so far. They include social media analyses around the Samsung S8 phone launch, identifying iPhone and Galaxy S audience profiles to help attract customers from their rivals, It also ran a campaign to assess the differing sales of its OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) and QLED (Quantum-dot Light-Emitting Diode) televisions.
“We found out that people who are more interested in QLED TVs are more environmentally-friendly,” says Amy Vetter, digital insights manager at Samsung Electronics. “We can see that on the affinities, and then we could actually market in the right place, or do display marketing, or target people due to that research.”
The insights also had a major impact on Samsung’s promotional strategy for the S8 smartphone. Samsung had been pushing its voice assistant Bixby at the time of the launch, even though the product wasn’t yet available. Crimson revealed that this was a major cause of contention for customers.
“We could find that really quickly, and then we switched our marketing,” says Vetter. “We stopped talking about Bixby and started more talking about the Infinity screen and the collaboration with [desktop dock] DeX.”
Using Crimson instead of a marketing agency has generated major savings for Samsung.
“Probably for the 15 projects that we’re doing, you’re talking easily $200,000 to $300,000,” Vetter estimates. “We got them effectively free.”
The Crimson tools
Crimson is used by more than 100 people in Samsung’s European team. They can analyse in detail what people are saying about the company across blogs, forums, or social media platforms.
Deep insights on trend sentiment feedback and purchase intents are uncovered by analysts using the vendor’s ForSight tool. The platform provides demographic data around audiences, their interests and influences, and the meaning and intent of each social media post based on specific emotions.
For faster insights, Samsung uses the HelioSight search tool to discover trends in social conversations, such as the key themes around the recent launches of Apple’s iPhone 8 and iPhone X by searching for the product names.
“It also works brilliantly if you’re in a meeting and somebody asks you a question. You can just quickly type it in, and it’s there. It’s a get out of jail free card, I call it.” Read more