Transcription in the age of social media presents both unique challenges and opportunities, including the ability to analyse massive chunks of data for research and insights – as you deal with issues like informal language, slang, and the sheer content volume being generated on different platforms.
This makes accurate transcription a rather complex task, although by identifying some of the challenges and opportunities, we can certainly make our work easier!
What are the challenges in transcription in the age of social media?
Data volume
Social media platforms generate a very high volume of data each day, which demands powerful processing capabilities in order to transcribe fairly large datasets with a high level of efficiency and accuracy.
Complexity of language
Social media is chock full of abbreviations, non-standard grammar, slang, and emojis, making accurate text conversion very difficult for most automated systems.
Concerns around privacy
The ability to access and transcribe private social media data has raised and continues to raise a number of concerns around user privacy.
Lack of contextual understanding
Without the right context, interpreting the underlying meaning behind specific social media posts can be very challenging, thus, leading to potential transcription misinterpretations.
Misinformation & bias
Social media being “social media” is prone to both biased opinions and misinformation. This can make it quite difficult to accurately identify and interpret data during transcription.
Platform variations
Every social media platform boasts its own features and format, which necessitates platform-specific transcription tweaking, a task which can prove to be challenging for many systems and pieces of software available today.
What are the opportunities in transcription in the age of social media?
Brand monitoring
By tracking online conversations around your brand, you can identify potential issues or even positive feedback. This can help improve brand reputation management and also allow for more proactive crisis management.
Market research insights
The transcription of social media conversations enables businesses to better understand customer sentiment. Not only that but they can also identify trends quickly, often faster than their competitors, and gain highly valuable market research insights as a result.
Content analysis
Transcribed data can be analysed through multiple text analysis methods in order to identify key patterns, themes, and sentiment within conversations on social media.
Accessibility
By transcribing social media content, you can make it accessible to those individuals among your target base who have learning disabilities or hearing impairments, for example.
Live monitoring
Aside from the brand monitoring aspect, the transcription of live social media feeds allows you to monitor public discourse, where you can respond quickly to trends as they emerge.
Social science research
Your research team can take advantage of social media transcriptions to study as well as analyse social behaviours, public opinion, and cultural trends on a major scale which, in turn, can enable you to make better business decisions.
The high-end automation transcription workflow software by EQ Transcription Services lets you quickly transcript data and have it emailed straight to your inbox. Get started now!
