Social Media Management Metrics for Business Analytics: Investigating Managerial Challenges

Organizations are increasingly required to make use of the considerable amount of data that is left behind as persistent digital traces in all social media. Consequently, IS researchers contributed first frameworks to structure the social media analytics domain. However, so far there is a lack of attention to the actual managers’ views on the use of social media based metrics and related approaches of business analytics for their decision making requirements. In this article we aim to develop a more realistic picture of this context and its challenges by exploring the experiences and views of managers that intensively work with social media in a very large international organization that is very invested and proficient in its online business. Our research reveals five organizational business analytics challenges that relate to the local contextuality of the analysis, the related difficulties with combining insights from different departments, a poor connectability with existing organizational KPI. Further, from the managers’ perspective, the measures itself were found to lack continuity and comprehensiveness. Based on these findings, we develop and offer the 5C framework as a first step towards better integrating the important needs of users and managers into the social media analytics research discourse.