Accenture develops social media optimisation tool to drive engagement

Accenture Technology Labs has developed a tool to predict how brands can best optimise their use of social media in order to engage their audiences in the most effective way.

The Social Media Engagement Manager, which is currently in prototype form, analyses a company’s social media presence, measures how engaged customers are with it and then predicts how such interaction could be optimised. To date, the tool has only been employed with Facebook, but channels may be expanded over time to cover others such as Twitter.

Kelly Dempski, director of research for human-computer interaction at Accenture Technology Labs, told tech magazine ComputerWorld UK that social media channels were providing a new source of business intelligence.

"Businesses have been listening to social media for a couple of years. The next frontier is effective engagement, knowing exactly how to reach and resonate with your target audience," he said. "Specifically today, social media channels provide data that will allow brands to measure engagement and use analytics to predict the impact of future interactions with the customer."

Accenture has already tested the tool out with a number of customers and found that levels of audience engagement with postings on newsfeeds can be affected by everything from their location and gender to the time of day in which they see a message.

"We can slice the data to say ‘if you want to reach a certain group, here are the things you need to do’," Dempski said. "For example, if you want to reach women, you should post a testimonial on a Wednesday afternoon. For men, post a call to action on a Sunday morning. Over time, you should see a raise in engagement and a raise in sales."

The tool could not say why engagement was higher or lower at given times, however. It simply generated the results, he added.