Social media analytics are a very important part of your social media marketing campaign. They can tell you where you’re successful, where you need improvement, and where you should abandon ship. Where you should spend more, and where you should tighten budget. Certain software can also link profits to certain social media efforts.

I read an article—“Mining social networks: Untangling the social web”—recently about different ways that social media analytic software can impact societies. The following is an interesting example:

Party plans turn out to be a particularly useful part of this picture. Richmond’s police have started monitoring Facebook, MySpace and Twitter messages to determine where the rowdiest festivities will be. On big party nights, the department now saves about $15,000 on overtime pay, because officers are deployed to areas that the software deems ripe for criminal activity. Crime has “dramatically” declined as a result, says Mr Hollifield. Colin Shearer, vice-president of predictive analytics at SPSS, a division of IBM that makes the software in question, says it can largely replace police officers’ reliance on “gut feel”.

I find this completely fascinating. We give out enough information on social media sites that analytics software can predict where we’re likely to get rowdy and break the law.

We’re always talking about the ROI of social media. Well, now we can see the ROI of social media analytics. The city of Richmond clocks in at $15,000 saved from being able to predict where crime is most likely to happen. Not only that, but crime has decreased. How’s that for ROI?

Photo by x-ray delta one