The Business Alignment of Social Media Analytics

Many companies have realized the immense potential of Social Media (SM) insights and have started to use concepts of Social Media Analytics (SMA) to reveal them. However, despite the importance of SMA, executives frequently hand off the topic to IT departments, instead of being actively involved in the business alignment of SMA. While existing SMA literature frequently identifies this need, it only addresses individual steps of the business alignment rather than suggesting comprehensive approaches. In order to contribute to the scientific discussion, we adapt a framework from the requirements engineering field to structure the field of action and enable decision-makers to define the SM insights beneficial to their individual goals. To help practitioners with the application of our work, we show a practical example of how to use the framework, and present possible SMA concepts based on current literature that can be used to collect the required SM insights.