Empower my brand
Empower my brand

How can Social Listening help Schools?

An extensive amount of research into a school’s reputation precedes any decision made by parents (as well as the students themselves) when it comes to choosing a school these days. This is why we see most schools trying to put their best foot forward. They try profiling glowing testimonials from their students and offering a 360-degree virtual tour of their infrastructure. The students, however, rely less on all these and more on what is being said about the school on the internet! This is why social listening to the chatter around their brand becomes absolutely essential for schools to avoid a PR disaster.

According to an IBM executive report on B2B marketing, 69% millennials said they would post a positive review on social media platforms only if they are happy with the service. In this age of technology, positive opinion travels fast and misinformation travels faster.

All this makes social listening essential for schools and other educational centers. This is especially so because most of the students today are tech-savvy. They are the generation who were born into a gadget-filled world which makes them innately curious. Almost all millennials are active on social media. They like to record all their daily experiences and encounters on social media.

Social Listening - Schools

Schools today need to monitor their social media reputation diligently if they are to impress or attract millennials. There is help at hand as there is a plethora of social listening tools. These tools provide insights, tailored to the specific needs of that industry.

How does Social Listening for Schools Benefit You?

Every year, before the academic year starts, students and parents discuss schools and colleges. Topics range from the kind of school they want to join, the subjects they are planning to opt for, and also, which institutes they think are the best. Knowing which schools are being talked about and whether your brand stands in the chatter is important. If your institute is being mentioned, how do you know if the general perception is positive? And if it is positive, how do you use that fact to draw in more students?

Social listening for schools is a great way to know about the industry standards and benchmarks and to understand what parents value the most, and what students like the best. Social listening for customer feedback and competitor analysis is done by every industry and schools are no exception. A caveat though! As the customer here is a child, barging too much into their personal lives or violating their privacy is not ethical.

Millennials on social media

Monitoring your brand’s performance online can seem to be a long drawn process. Here’s what social listening helps you achieve.

  • Listen to all the chatter and buzz around your brand
  • Analyze sentiments to tell you how well your brand is perceived
  • Learn about industry standards and benchmarks
  • Track Industry trends and news of any changes to regulations
  • Perform competitor analysis

Key Insights using Social Listening for Schools

Social listening makes it possible for you to know what your prospective students are looking for, from a school.  By listening to keywords like ‘campus life’, ‘faculty’, ‘school infrastructure’, you can gain insights into the kind of campus life desired by them.

There’s now no need to rely on guesswork anymore, as you can actually listen to the negative chatter around your competitors’ brand. As unhappy students post about their negative experiences, you get to know about the issues, derive insights on how to build your brand, and also market it right to convert some of these students to your own.

Build a Stronger Alumni Base with Social Listening

One of the best features of social listening is that it helps you find the influencers for your domain. You can consider having your own students act as campus ambassadors. What can be better than an alumnus advocating for their school? It doesn’t mean you actively get students to vouch for you. You could use social listening to hear what your students think about your school and choose the ones who loved their time at your school and share their posts onward. Their posts are your live marketing testimonials, which vouch for your brand’s credibility and can bring it visibility.

social listening for schools

Feedback and Crisis Management

Like in any other industry, educational institutes will have people who are unsatisfied with the quality of service, question the safety of their child or the overall management. Social listening is helpful in containing such incidents If you stay responsive and make the necessary changes when warranted. Such alertness to negative remarks and feedback on social media can protect a school’s reputation and avoid a potential PR crisis.

The safety and security of their children at school is of paramount importance to parents. To deal with this, The Orange County Public School in Florida tracks keywords like cyberbullying, threats of suicide et cetera to prevent the possibility of any looming crisis.

There’s no doubt that social media monitoring helps you keep a check on the wired world every second, in real-time, to buy you enough time to douse the fire before it turns wild.

How to Create a Social Media Report?

You may feel great about your social media campaign and think its success is assured. But unless you analyze the numbers for insights, you would never really know how your content is performing. To really know that your campaign is doing well, you would need numbers which prove that your content is converting prospects into leads. We are talking about social media reports, which hold a mirror to your brand.

It’s not hard, because social intelligence tools generally enable you to create your own social media reports. However, you would need to know some basics to steer through the functions of such a tool. Here is your manual to creating impactful social media reports.

What is a Social Media Report?

A social media report is a consolidated statistical sheet which helps you understand your performance on various social media sites using analytical data and stats. Use your social intelligence tool to set performance goals for different sites. The tool then works to gather the necessary intelligence to gauge your performance and presents the inferences to you as a report.

Social media reports

Learning about the “total likes” or “total retweets” garnered by the campaign is like wading into the shallow end of the pool. To dive deep, one needs an analysis of the increased/decreased percentage of audience engagement, followed by a clear identification and review of the root cause of such an increase or decrease.

Why do you Need to Create a Social Media Report?

If your company is investing in social media marketing, your top management would want to know the ROI derived. As a manager, it falls upon you to educate your stakeholders about it. There is no better way to do it than by presenting the facts and figures in a visual form.

Also, a social media report helps you pinpoint the key points in the company’s performance, throwing light on what’s working well and what’s not. This vital information enables you to improve the company’s processes. Let’s say your company’s social media monitoring report shows up your customers’ negative sentiment towards your customer service department. You may delve deeper into the report to understand that the slow processes of your IT department are in turn slowing down your customer service department. Instead of simply demanding a superior performance from your IT department, you could actually demonstrate to them how their negligence is affecting the business. Reports with numbers make it easier for your employees to understand the situation.

Most reports consolidate data to present a benchmark – and offer a comparative study between your brand and others in your space. This means that you have a competitor intelligence in the form of a report, as it also offers a live comparison with your competitors.

How to Create a Social Media Report?

We are assuming that if you have read this far, you really want to know how to get started:

Stakeholders

A social media report impacts the overall business and all the stakeholders. Your clients and investors want to know how well you are doing on your digital strategy. Your senior management wants to get key business insights for their operational strategy and decision making. Also, as stated earlier, the report helps you identify any glitches that might be plaguing your organization and its performance at the departmental levels. When sharing the report, identifying your key stakeholders is key. Your social media report could be the answer to all their questions and worries.

Set Goals

Creating a social media report can become cumbersome if you are not clear about your goals. Having a defined set of goals is vital – the metrics you want to measure, the time needed to publish a report and your primary aim in gaining business intelligence from the report. You may just want to measure your social media marketing ROI or gauge the public sentiment about your product. Whatever the goal is, you need to chalk it out clearly before you start with the social report.

Setting goals

Metrics to Measure

A social media report is a collection of analyzed data. Your report can be customized according to your needs – which metrics would you like to track and so on. Examples of some of the standard metrics available in social media management tools are:

  • Reach and Impressions: Reach is the number of people who saw your content. This tells you the truth about the performance of your content, not just the number of likes received. Impression gives the number of times your content was displayed, clicked or not.
  • Click Through Rate and Leads: Measure the number of visits to your site from social media, search or paid ad campaigns. Also, the number of visitors who actually converted and signed up for your product or a trial.
  • Feedback and Engagement: Sentiment analysis lets you know the kind of opinions prevalent among your audience and the specific pain points that are bothering them. Analysis of how engaging your content is, can be derived from stats like how many clicks, comments and shares it received and also, which of the platforms you’re on is drawing the most traffic.

Time Frame

Following a fixed timeframe helps to track all these parameters, regularly. Decide the intervals at which you would want to review your company’s progress and performance and create these reports. It can be generated randomly at will or at daily, weekly, monthly, half-yearly or yearly intervals.

Presentation

A well-presented report needs to be easy to comprehend. Everyone does not have the time or patience to go through numerous pages of textual reporting. Use tools which offer options for graphs, word clouds, illustrations et cetera. Minimal text about what the viewers see, in the form of key takeaways, can be included. Your report needs to present a brutally honest picture of the organization’s performance and results. If it includes actionable insights too, it would have served the primary purpose of making your brand do better and set it on its path to success.

Report Presentation

Creating a resourceful report is a work of art indeed. Fret not; there are plenty of tools to help you. Moreover, if you are clear with the idea, social media reporting will only simplify your job in the future.

Conducting Market Research using Twitter

Social media, especially Twitter, offers a hidden bounty which can be tapped into with the right tool. For any marketer looking for business intelligence and consumer insights, social media listening can be the ultimate tool. With the wealth of first-hand information flowing through social media, why would someone want to spend even a cent on survey kits and secondary research? Market research using Twitter helps you gain consumer insights at ease.

The power to isolate the relevant nuggets of information from the vast quantities of social media noise is the strength of social listening. The essence of this process lies in the tool’s ability to source as much data as possible from various social platforms. You can then gain actionable insights, by zooming in on the feedback, community chats, and general perception comments specifically relevant to you.

Market Research using Twitter Comments

On average, more than 500 million tweets are sent out on a daily basis. Once you let that number sink in, you will realize the vast amounts of data waiting out there to be listened to and of course, analyzed. A report from Statista ranks Twitter as the Twelfth in the list of most popular social networking sites. With over 330 million active users, Twitter makes listening to its data quite impactful for your business.

Market Research using Twitter

Facebook tops the charts when it comes to the number of active users. However, Facebook is relatively a closed system. Facebook is majorly perceived as a platform more for family and friends. Twitter, on the other hand, is more public and data can easily be searched.

3 Key Uses of Twitter in doing Market Research

As we mentioned earlier Twitter is a goldmine of data. With the right set of tools and techniques, you can unearth crucial insights. Without much ado, let’s take you through the three main ways to use Twitter for market research.

Social Listening

Every marketer wants to know how their brand is performing online, the total impressions, the likeability of the brand, the general perception and so on. To get a sense of all this, tracking your brand mentions is key. The right social listening tool makes it easy to derive insights from social listening.

Social listening also helps you stay informed of the possible threats and opportunities lying within your industry. Tweets which refer to the shifting norms or laws within your industry can sometimes reach you much ahead of the actual announcement. Tracking industry news helps you prepare for the change in advance.

Tracking Trends and Feedbacks

While you focus on tracking mentions for your brand, you may miss out on a lot of other news related to your sector. Market research using Twitter should adopt a multi-pronged approach. While you track your brand mentions, you need to also listen to the trending topics and events affecting your business.

Are you wondering how to find the correct trends to follow? The most efficient way to do that is to take suggestions from the general trends bar on the side, or you could start with tracking hashtags with the most popular topics within your industry. Go through the pages of influencers, and other industry people to get an idea of who or what they follow.

Know Your Competition

Any comprehensive market research report tells you about your competitors. Social listening to Twitter comments will help you gain the same knowledge without having to buy separate reports. Twitter is quite public; hence you can search through your competitor’s profile, see their followers, their content and marketing strategy, the likes and retweets they attracted and their engagement level.

Also, a social listening tool will help you track their brand mentions alongside yours. This is a great way to gauge the public perception about their brand’s health against yours.

Twitter provides a wholesome experience if you are invested in knowing about your company’s health on social media, the industry, and your competitors. It is like a digital diary keeping a check on your progress with real-time feedback. This process helps you set benchmarks for yourself and work towards achieving them. These insights surpass what painstaking market research can achieve for you, mainly because of the emotional involvement and voluntary nature of the opinions expressed on Twitter, when compared to the opinions shared with a researcher.

Social Listening Helps Track Event-Related Social Mentions

Is your company planning a gala event or a tradeshow? It is quite customary to plan activities which keep your audience engaged during such events. Companies are solely hosting online events as well. Tracking the offline and online arena for social mentions and brand-related conversations is challenging at the best of times and can become even more so during events.

Social Gathering

Social listening tools can be your escort for the event. Listening for social mentions is a fundamental function that such tools perform. Think of measuring campaign success, online reputation management, business insights, consumer feedback and all of it on one platform.

Social Listening – Your Complete Event Partner

The planning that goes into hosting an event is immense, and social listening tools can actually help lessen the stress. Here is how you can have a successful campaign executed perfectly with the invaluable support of social listening tools:

Event Idea/Topic Ideation with Social Listening

Capturing the buzz around every top grossing hashtag or topic on social media is a significant way to keep track and choose an event theme from. Delving further into the analysis, you can see whether the chatter leans towards the positive or the negative. Constant monitoring can help you eliminate some of the noise around the buzzwords.

Buzz Creation

An event without the right audience is a dull one. Creating a buzz around your event is the next level in the process. Tracking your theme topic on social media, you can identify the ambassadors for your event. Selecting your candidate gets easy with the influence score social listening tools provide you for each individual who comments about the topic/hashtag you chose. Also, keeping a check on your event hashtag before the event can help decipher if your buzz is going viral. If not enough, you can plan for more.

Social Media Monitoring

As is evident from the previous instances, social media monitoring is key to the success of your event. Both pre-event and post-event chatter and its analysis can tell you the precise ROI story.

The buzz, top performers, most engaging posts, most number of shares and likes all help to infer how successfully the campaign is running. Analyzing post-event chatter guides you to take actions at an urgent level and plan for future events too.

Feedback and Business Decisions

Once your event is concluded, social listening helps you reach out to the attendees, engage with them about their experience and collect real-time feedback. Say your event has a car ride demo. Post-event feedback comes in claiming the management failed in the smooth operation of the demo car rides. Your counter-action can be to reach out to establish contact and send them on a complimentary demo car ride after the event and ask for their feedback again. Formulating business decisions for customer service and other functionalities of the company become greatly assisted and smooth.

The overall success of your event depends on the balance of both online and offline activities during the event. However, social media and monitoring the chatter and the buzz around your event all give you a unique opportunity to understand consumer perceptions better. Especially when your event has a specific tagline or hashtag – that is when the chatter generated is uniquely for you and the quality of the analysis is guaranteed to be genuine, a

Tracking the Buzz around Met Gala 2019

One of the most awaited events of the year – the Met Gala is considered the Oscars of fashion by many. Held every year on the first Monday of May, it’s the opening ceremony of Costume Institute’s annual fashion exhibit. This fundraiser’s financial collection gets donated. Every year’s event is marked by a theme.

Met Gala: Camp Notes on fashion
Image Credit: @metcostumeinstitute (Instagram)

Met Gala 2019 – Camp: Notes on Fashion

Following last year’s theme “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination”, 2019 put forth an unusual theme. This year’s theme “Camp: notes on fashion” drew inspiration from Susan Sontag’s essay on “Camp” which talks about the love of unnatural, artifice and exaggeration.

The event is hugely followed on social media and is hit among the Twitterati and we decided to check on the buzz.

Met Gala 2019 and the Social Buzz

This year’s Met Gala event received over 40000 mentions and over a billion impressions. Met Gala 2019 – the 71st edition of the event, was chaired by Lady Gaga, Harry Styles, Serena Williams, and Allesandro Michele.

Geographically, people from Manhattan, New York City, Las Vegas, Washington Court House, Chicago, Italy, Mumbai, and Baghdad discussed the event the most.

The graph below shows the overall sentiment analyzed from the chatter around the event. People seem to have positively received this year’s theme and outfits. The overall sentiment appears to be positive.

Met gala sentiment analysis

Comments with positive sentiment show how well the theme and the fashion parade were received by the many followers on social media.

Positive Response to Met Outfits

Met gala positive commentLady Gaga Met GalaBesides the positive responses, people also expressed their opinions about the outfits and the celebrities who they felt did not present themselves quite well. Ashley Graham was judged to be among the worst dressed at the event, according to the Twitterati.

Outfit Critique

Besides directly critiquing the celebrities, some took to posting memes related to the costumes and the celebrities wearing them. Celebrities were compared to characters from the kids’ cartoon Pokemon (short for Pocket Monsters) to inanimate objects.

Memes regarding met outfits
Image Courtesy: Twitter
Katy Perry Meme
Image Courtesy: Twitter

Celebrities and influencers from around the world were very invested in the whole affair. The top 5 influencer profiles to have mentioned Met Gala in their posts were:

Kim Kardashian West with an influencer score of 92.

Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra Jonas both with an influencer score of 88.

Forbes with an influencer score of 86.

Idris Elba with an influencer score of 78

Top influencers
Image Courtesy: Instagram

Take a look at the word cloud below for the buzz words discussed the most. During our analysis and our day-to-day monitoring of the event, we saw shifts in the word cloud. Lady Gaga was extensively discussed on some days while it was Harry Styles on other days. Overall, the most talked about are these:

Word CloudMet Gala Trending

Met Gala 2019 has been quite successful when it comes to grabbing attention on social media. Social listening into the conversation threads around Met Gala 2019 gave us a look-see into the closets of many celebrities. Hopefully, the fashion brands would get design cues by listening to the chatter about what defined the best and worst dresses.

 

 

 

 

Social Listening for Fashion Retail Industry

The industry which witnesses changing trends almost every week is fashion retail. We can safely say that the only thing constant in the fashion world is that fashion never goes out of style. With changing times, the fashion industry is also embracing technology. Here let’s talk about how social listening for fashion retail can help you monitor fashion trends, handle controversial fashion choices or disasters, and to find fashion influencers.

The scope is never ending with social listening for fashion retail. Most of us like to glam up once in a while. Social media is full of influencers, amateurs seeking advice, fashionistas looking for new collections et cetera. If you keep listening, there is no end to the kind of insights you could gain.

Social Listening keeps You Fashion Fresh

“Great design comes from interaction, conflict, argument, competition, and debate” – Onur Mustak Cobanli

Fashion and style are personal and unique, of course. It is a designer who makes the world aware of new clothing possibilities. In fashion, the buyer persona is often defined by the stylist, social listening might not be of help here. However, social listening helps you gauge public opinion and other marketing insights like your share of voice, response to campaigns by you or your competitor.

Create an index to keep track of your competitors or the leaders in your industry. Luxury fashion brands like Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Armani, and the others have effective strategies to make their social presence known. Studying their social visibility, sentiment scores, and other competitive metrics can help you gather ideas for designing your own social media marketing strategies.

Vogue and Gucci engage their clients via fashion podcasts. Chanel has been setting quite an example when it comes to social engagement. They don’t just stream podcasts, they even have movies about the history of their company – a fine example being “Coco Before Chanel”. Monitoring the chatter surrounding such brands will help you judge the weaknesses and strengths of rival brands and strategize your own marketing mantra.

Chanel Podcasts - Social Engagement tools Chanel Podcasts review

Understanding Your Stakeholders

The world of fashion deals with a lot of people – your customers, brand endorsers, investors, influencers, celebrities, and media to name some. Whether you aim to build a high fashion clientele or make yourself known more like a street style brand, you will need to know the influencers and the key people talking about such things.

A fashionista interested in your product is more likely to become your shareholder/investor than others. Planning for a big launch? Hiring a celebrity, who is known for her chic dressing, to launch a boho collection might confuse your target audience.

Listening to social chatter and tracking impressions can help you identify the important people in your industry. And, social media listening tools make it simpler. While tracking the comments, a social listening tool will give you the influence scores and impressions of every commenter.

More than just finding the influencers, social listening allows you to know more about the customer base, the demographics and the interests of your target audience.

Fashion Weeks/Events – Get the News before Anyone else

Every brand grows by learning from others. There are times when monitoring fashion weeks, a campaign or a fashion event may help you gather key insights about your industry.

A moment to moment real-time social monitoring tool helps you track what is influencing or impacting the conversations around the event. Whose spring-summer collection is topping the charts and why so?

Social Listening for Fashion Events

Doing What it does Best

Lastly, social listening is the ultimate tool for feedback. While fashion is artsy, it might not impress all your customers all the time. Listening for feedback is essential, especially so in the fashion world. It can be your new handbag line or some celebrity line of clothes you launched. Gauging the chatter around your product helps you analyze the sentiments and work on the pain points. Simply put, social media listening provides you feedback which can help you deal with negative feedback well in time.

Social listening for fashion line launch

In conclusion, every learning and marketing opportunity is up for grabs with social listening. Social media and the fashion world are closely knit. Every trend, new sensation, and fashion story is religiously covered on social media. All you need to do is to listen!

10 Points to Consider before Planning your Social Media Listening Project

Information is critical for discovering opportunities. Data seekers are getting smarter, and so is technology. Insights essential for your business is quite commonplace today – available from sources like the internet, social media and review boards. Social media listening is the process of gathering all such data at one place and analyzing it to give you the business intelligence required to discover future opportunities and scopes.

Social media listening

Why Should You invest in Social Media Listening?

The foundation of your marketing strategy begins with analyzing customer satisfaction data. Social listening is a tool which helps you in the process. Gathering all the data related to your purpose, mining the relevant ones, structuring the data, analyzing it for insights and presenting you with the report. All the hard work is done by social media listening while you take the back seat for a while.

There are examples galore, of companies employing social media listening to address critical issues and projects. In brief, social media listening keeps track of your performance for you and provides a benchmark for your brand as well by keeping a constant eye on your competitors.

4 Tips from the Social Media Listening User Manual

All said and heard, social media listening is not a genie from the magic lamp. It will help you reap benefits when you follow some useful tips, like the following:

Why do you want to monitor Social Media?

Social listening has multiple uses. Be it to gain customer feedback, or to track your campaign #hashtags. You can use it for all these purposes or concentrate on one. Whatever it is, make sure you are clear about your needs before initiating your social media listening project.

Target and planning Social monitoring vs social listeningGoal Setting

Similar to the previous tip, this is about planning what your project is aiming to do? This helps you chalk out a real plan of action. Say you want to improve your overall online reputation and currently 75% of your customer comments are positive, you should work to have actionable goals on how to increase the figure to 85% positive comments and so on.

Choosing the Right Social Listening Platform

Being aware of your social listening needs can be really helpful when you have to choose from about a hundred options. Your needs help you define what particular features you require out of a tool. There are many social media listening tools out there with varied functionalities. Making an informed decision is the key to a successful campaign.

Spend Time on the Results

Building a demanding brand presence online is a tough task especially in the world of web 2.0. Starting a keyword search and abandoning it midway only to recheck it after a month will do your company no good. Spending some quality time with the results each day is what will go a long way in helping you formulate more powerful brand campaigns.

6 Major Things to Look for in a Social Media Listening Platform

Social Listening adds value to your business but only if you invest in the right kind of tool. Any marketer will tell you that the thumb rule for selecting a social listening tool is, to have your own goals and needs defined to choose the most suitable tool. The best one wins. If you are in need of some guidance with the selection, here are some of the key features you should look for:

Data Coverage

There are simple tools to track your likes and retweets, and there are tools with really fancy high-end features ranging from reports to video analysis et cetera. A full league of other tools fall in between these extremes. If your company needs an extensively detailed analysis, go for the tools which crawl the most data.

Customized Reports

Most of the tools in the market are now offering a report. Opt for a report which is fairly comprehensive, easily understandable, and even customizable to your needs. A clean report would be lucid with most of the analysis presented well via graphs and pictorial representation. Pages of text analysis in a report is a big negative since no busy marketer has enough time for that.

Social Listening Platforms covered

Some social media listening tools may not have the option of listening on all social media platforms. For instance, TweetDeck works only with Twitter data. However, if your company’s presence is limited to Twitter alone, this may work just fine for you. If you are a fashion brand with the majority of your client-base active on Instagram, investing your time on TweetDeck will reap you no benefits.

Industry-specific Listening

Every industry has a specific set of problems, goals, and needs. A one-size-fits-all approach will not help when you expect your business to grow. Social media listening tools with the facility to extract industry-specific data and create benchmarks and reports for you are definitely a better choice than others.

Sentiment Analysis

Marketers focus on sentiment analysis when they initially adopt social media listening. One of the most prominent features of social listening tools is sentiment analysis. Every comment and conversation that a customer posts online has an undertone. Manually judging each one of them can become tedious, sentiment analysis helps you understand what percentage of your customer base is happy with you and what is going wrong.

Customer Service

Like every service provider, the tool which has the best customer support and can extend quick help for troubleshooting is the one you should choose. Proper guidance in case of doubts is essential and a mark of the right service provider.

Armed with such information about the features of an ideal social media listening tool, you should be able to make a sound decision. Yet, if you want to test the waters first, you can always opt for the trial versions of a promising tool to judge it better before making a final choice.

What is Social Media Monitoring and Why is it Important?

Social media monitoring is the act of identifying and gathering information regarding your brand mentions and customer sentiments online. The sample size for such data collection is massive. It encompasses all the social media platforms, review boards, and messenger forums.

Manually tracking all the user-generated content about a brand is quite impossible. It’s impossible without software tools which can crawl sites and index them which make the content easily trackable and enable searches based on queries or using conversation strings.

Track Precise Content with Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring tools are designed to work with what users type in a query, using a brand name, a location, a general phrase or an event mention.

The tool uses Boolean operators to filter out irrelevant content and home in upon specific terms to precisely identify the relevant bits out of complex strings in a query. Some tools allow searches which get results from across sites, anywhere in the world and in different languages too.

Importance of Social Media Monitoring

The modern age is defined by the use of social media and the internet as a whole. In today’s wired world, every conversation is digital! In a survey conducted by The Advertising Research Foundation, FOX and DB5 (with a sample of over 12000 twitter users, both male and female), it was found that about 80% users had mentioned a brand in their tweets in the measured period.

Social Media

This goes to show how much you would be missing when you fail to monitor social media sites for your brand mentions. However, if you aren’t yet convinced of the power of social media monitoring, here’s a list of some benefits of social monitoring:

Real-time Feedback

Feedback can be positive or negative. Both help to set your strategic direction and guide you on your path to success. Seeking feedback is a great way to invest in improving your product, service or overall strategies. Feedback does not necessarily have to be about your existing product. You can also take insights from a closed focus group on social media about a campaign. Tracking everyday brand mentions gets you useful feedback without your having to actively search for it. This real-time feedback is great as you can surprise your customers by covertly listening to their wishes and demands. Modifying your product accordingly and releasing it in as a new improved version would pleasantly surprise them.

Dominoes Case Study - social media monitoring

One of the greatest examples of how a company listened to customer opinion to successfully turnaround its product comes from the world famous pizza restaurant chain – Domino’s.

Domino’s tapped into social media, gathered evidence of how a number of customers complained that their pizza crust tasted like cardboard and re-invented their pizza.

Identify Your Advocates and Critics

Brand advocatesSocial media monitoring gets you in touch with your greatest fans as well as your harshest critics. Embracing both can help you develop your business strategy. The critics help you improve, and the fans help you to advertise your brand. Interacting and engaging with both these groups makes them feel valued and who knows, maybe you can turn a critic into a fan. When you engage with your fans, you encourage and excite them about your brand all the more. They may turn into active ambassadors for your product and that can positively affect your sales.

At Par with Trends

Say you are in the food business serving Italian cuisine. Your town is hosting the year’s biggest food festival, and all the restaurants are vying to put up their stalls. This upcoming food festival in your town is one of the trending stories on social media. But you failed to catch the buzz because you did not monitor social media platforms and as a result, missed all the action. Popular trends related to your industry help you to stay informed and to plan your marketing efforts.

Social media monitoring is not a shallow activity for passing time. It falls under the umbrella of social intelligence. Once you’ve started with social media monitoring, gaining crucial business insights using social listening and social intelligence, isn’t so hard.

What is Social Engagement?

Human beings love interactions; we are social beings after all. No wonder social media is trying to capitalize on our socializing nature. Social engagement could be both offline or online, with people meeting each other and sharing thoughts feelings and emotions over a spoken or written conversation.

Social Engagement is a new advertising tool being adopted by businesses, as they move away from the unilateral style of traditional advertising and learning to interact with customers and forge long term relationships with them.

Social Engagement

What makes Social Engagement so Popular?

Every consumer loves to feel special.  Actively engaging with your customers on social media is an easy and viable way to make each and every one of your customers feel special all the time. Responding quickly to social media reviews and chatter is not a very difficult task, especially when you consider how it makes a consumer feel valued. Even as they protest loudly, customers place their trust in you to offer them a solution.

Engaging with customers has traditionally been an offline task, but social media engagement has made it simpler yet more efficient. Stop trying to delight your customer from Harvard Business Review reports that customers resent having to contact the company relentlessly to have their problems solved and having to describe their issues repeatedly. Understandably, offering a solution to a problem was a little more complicated in the olden times than it is now.

Social Media Engagement Benefits

If social media itself is a boon for marketers; social media engagement adds to it. What can be better than garnering attention for your brand from a hundred thousand people, across the globe? Social media engagement lets you interact with them and to take them into confidence, staying agnostic to time zones, geographies, gender or race.

Social media engagement has more than a few benefits to offer:

Cost Effectiveness

Social media reaches a vast majority of people. Engaging people from around the world via traditional means can get logistically tricky and expensive. But, interacting with an audience base on social media practically costs nothing.

Boosts Brand Awareness

Brand responsiveness makes customers feel valued and happy. Keeping customers happy would earn your company, brand advocates and more sales in the long run. Positive word-of-mouth is the best sales pitch one could wish for. Social media engagement helps bring in more sales and spread your company’s fame and that too organically.

Social Customer Care

In the world of social media-savvy people today, most customers turn to social media to denounce or praise a company’s services. Social media engagement is a quick and hassle-free mode to get your customer’s attention. A quick response to a negative comment could save the day, while positive feedback can be broadcasted as a badge of honor.

Customer Service Positive Review Social Engagement

Customer Service Negative Review Social Engagement

Customer Retention

One of the primary reasons for marketers to opt for social media marketing is to gain brand awareness and trust from the audience, building a potentially loyal customer base. When a customer sees daily activity on the company profile, with proactive answers to customer issues and questions posted there, with follow-up feedback, they naturally feel drawn to reckon with you. That could be the beginning of building a large customer base.

Improve Your Social Media Engagement Strategy

Imagine how you would engage with people at a party or a get-together. You chat with people, exchange information and so on. Social media engagement for a company is on similar lines with different objectives. You build your presence online, chat with people, exchange information – crucial information that can help you get a sense of customer perception. Also, you share information with customers facing issues when using your product or service.

Easier said than done. Building an engaging presence online might sound easy but can be a tough job. However, even the toughest of jobs have a starting point. Here are some steps you can take to slowly build and improve upon your social media engagement efforts:

Social Listening

Listening to social media chatter to understand how people perceive you or talk about you is extremely important before you initiate a conversation with them. Social media marketing runs smoothly if you listen first, plan your strategy and then engage with your promoters as well as detractors. Without a plan, you might end up disrupting the social reputation that already exists for your brand and create more problems for yourself by taking a defensive or belligerent tone, as many businesses have found to their cost.

Start the Conversation

Once you know the facts and figures about what your customer sentiment is like, you can initiate real conversations, using a respectful tone and adopting a positive attitude, aimed at problem resolution. Social media engagement does not necessarily mean a customer has to pose a question/problem and you would then continue the conversation. You could yourself start a casual social media feedback session or a Facebook live Q&A session or a similar forum.

Start the conversation

Identify Brand Advocates

In the initial stages of social listening, you may have found some supporters who like your brand’s products or services. Identify these people and engage with them more often to turn them into your brand’s advocates. They are like your brand ambassadors, the happier they are the more they influence people to join you.

Events, Giveaways, Social Posts and Activities

The best thing about social media is that it’s like an ongoing fest, like a Tomorrowland festival, around the year. Someone or the other is hosting a giveaway or an online event, or a webinar and so on. This attracts attention and traffic to your cause. It also helps to improve your overall brand image.

Response Time and Receptivity

Last but not least, there’s a golden rule of social media engagement. Be receptive to your customers and respond in time’. A quick reply shows your interest in the customer and might stave off a disaster. The longer you take to reply, the longer the negative comment stays online. Others might see and change their minds about your brand and think of you as an uncaring and unresponsive brand.

Management Response

Once you have started on your social media marketing journey, it is essential that you take care of all its aspects like social listening and social engagement. Attention to such details could add up to make you successful on your social media marketing efforts.

Listening Platforms: An Important Part of your Social Media Management Arsenal

Companies are increasingly digitalizing their marketing efforts, which need to be managed well if they are to achieve their goals and succeed in their efforts. There are multiple platforms and tools that you can use to market your brand, especially with reference to your social media management.

With the current exponential growth in social media users, marketers today often wonder how to manage their social media profiles for optimum benefits. In today’s post, we try to answer that question.

What is Social Media Management?

Simply put, social media management refers to the process of managing your brand’s/content’s interaction with your audience, across various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and so on.

Social Media Management

Social media management may typically include creating, scheduling, analyzing and engaging with content and conversations posted online. This could become tiresome and a lengthy process when you do not adopt any social media management tools.

As per DOMO’s Data Never Sleeps 6.0 report, more than 2.5 x 1018 bytes of data got created each day in 2018. Tracking such an extensive database to gather relevant brand mentions and analyze them daily is a daunting task. This makes social media listening tools an essential part of your social media management arsenal.

Why is Social Listening Important for Efficient Social Media Management?

The primary focus for most brand marketers is the management of their brand’s reputation. Keeping track of one’s brand mentions, and engaging with them over social media is easy and achievable with the support of social media management tools like social listening.

Before investing a lot of time and effort in social media marketing and management, you would want to know how a social listening platform benefits you:

  • The easiest way to manage your accounts: Social listening platforms help you monitor and analyze all the chatter around your brand.
  • Engage with your audience in real-time: Social monitoring tools have in-built features that enable you to engage with your audience and to schedule timely responses.
  • Customer insights: By providing an in-depth analysis of the chatter, these tools provide the most accurate customer insights, helping a brand to improve their services and thereby, their relevance to customers.
  • Increases credibility: A brand which listens to its customers, responds to their sentiments and reacts in a timely fashion is bound to make a mark in the hearts and minds of people.

Now that we have extensively discussed how the tools benefit your business, here is a handpicked list for your reference.

The Best Social Media Management Tools 2019

In case you want to test the waters, here is a list of the best social media management tools for 2019:

Hootsuite

A popular social media management platform, with over 10 million professionals as active subscribers. Hootsuite allows you to analyze, engage and manage your brand reputation and social media campaigns over various social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, YouTube.

It has a user-friendly interface which hasn’t changed much since its inception. Hootsuite offers a free plan; hence it could be a wise selection for you to start with.

Hootsuite - social media management

TweetDeck

Tweetdeck is yet another social listening tool designed specifically for Twitter. However, it has a lot of useful features which allows keeping a check on your brand and your competitors’. Be it a keyword you are looking for, or a hashtag, TweetDeck can help you listen to the chatter around it.

Like Hootsuite, TweetDeck is a free service too. An excellent platform to try out.

TweetDeck - social listening tools

Agorapulse

Agorapulse is the full package for social media management – it lets you engage with your audience, track brand mentions, schedule and create posts across all social media platforms. Besides, it gives you dynamic reports which are open to customization options.

This platform:

  • Gives you a visual preview of every post you create before you publish it.
  • Helps you categorize the content you have created and schedule it at specific time slots.
  • Provides bright and attractive-looking reports.

They do offer a free trial version if you want to check the Agorapulse social media management experience.

Agora Pulse

Mention

Mention is a social monitoring tool. that allows you to track your brand, find influencers, study your competition and the market data across social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. The real-time push notifications feature helps you manage your brand round the clock. However, the most striking feature is that Mention caters to its customers across 42 different languages.

Mention - social listening tools

No digital marketing campaign is fully complete without social media marketing, of which social media management is one key aspect. Once you master that, you are truly prepared to help your business succeed in the digital domain.