Busting the Common Myths About Social Media Intelligence

Being a netizen in the 21st century, you’d be surprised to know about the myths marketers believe in, about social media and its related tools. Some of these myths have the potential to cause damage to your company. Thereby, we chose to listen to some general comments to figure out the most common myths and to address the ones about social media intelligence and its allied services.

Social Intelligence and its Metrics are Not Important

It is surprising to see that companies really do believe that investing in social media marketing is a waste of resources. And even the ones that reluctantly engage with social media marketing or at least make an attempt, are not really sincere in doing so.

If you believe that social media marketing and the metrics related to it do not matter, you are gravely mistaken. Take a look at these facts for a moment:

71% of customers say they would recommend a brand further if they have a positive social media service interaction.
90% of social media users use it to interact with brands and companies.
Link clicks account for 92% of Twitter interactions.

Impressions, engagement rate, click-through rate might not seem of much importance at a glance, but not paying heed to what your audience expects puts your business in grave danger. In fact, surveys show customers being unhappy with the kind of content companies provide them, which does not even match their interests.

Monitoring social media metrics is an essential strategy to make sure your customer satisfaction rate is high, your business is growing and gaining attention – and not losing any!

Social Media Intelligence doesn’t Increase Sales

This is one of the greatest living myths related to social intelligence out there. Read on to see why you need to change your thinking if you are also prone to believing this, read along.

The fact is that Customers are found to be more attracted to products viewed on social media, be it an ad or even a featured review from a blogger.

To think that social intelligence is not important is highly erroneous. Social media is the number one platform to spread awareness and receive business insights. 90% of millennials interact with or mention a brand online. Social listening helps you gain business intelligence based on the data gathered. If customers are unhappy with the fabric of the upholstery your brand is selling they would tweet or comment about it. Social media intelligence gathers this data and analyses it to give you real-time feedback. Bad reviews make you lose customers and social intelligence helps you know the cause for bad reviews before you have to shut down your brand.

Besides, every marketing strategy needs to be backed by well-researched facts. Consumer-centric decisions cannot be made unless you know their opinion. Social intelligence is the opinion miner.

Not All Social Media Platforms are Important

Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and Twitter are the most common names when marketers are asked about social media platforms. And understandably so, these are the platforms which top the lists when it comes to the most number of active users. However, if your brand focuses on building your brand on only one or two platforms, you are not diversifying enough.

Also, the choice of the social media platform for your online marketing campaign should complement your business. Fashion and merchandise businesses can look forward to Instagram marketing. Pinterest is another interesting choice for businesses. Pinterest might not have a mammoth number of active users, yet it has people from the right demographics. In the U.S., half of their millennials use Pinterest. Over 65% of American women within the age group of 25 and 54 use Pinterest extensively. This makes it necessary for any brand looking to target women to have a strong online presence on Pinterest.

Though the concept of social media marketing and monitoring social media intelligence has been spreading like a wildfire across the globe, these commons myths set companies back from realizing the full potential of this tool.

Did this International Hotel Chain fail in Real-time Reputation Management?

Most of us, saddled with the burden of grocery shopping, roam the aisles of the supermarket looking for discounts and offers. We mourn the rising prices of onions and bananas and blame the government and global warming. Yet, we don’t often question any hospitality business for charging us exorbitantly for squeezing a lemon into cooled soda water.

On a dull, normal day at JW Marriott in Chandigarh, their celebrity guest actor Rahul Bose threw a videoed fit on Twitter, over the price of Marriott’s bananas. And like all good fits and tantrums, it went viral on Twitter, attracting a lot of interest and many comments and reactions.

You have to see this to believe it. Who said fruit wasn’t harmful to your existence? Ask the wonderful folks at @JWMarriottChd #goingbananas #howtogetfitandgobroke #potassiumforkings

4:46 PM – Jul 22, 2019

As with every issue, the responses from Twitterati were mixed, throwing in an abnormal amount of advice, sympathy, ridicule and even complaining about their unhappiness. Some turned against the actor and lamented over what they paid for a movie of Rahul Bose in a multiplex (implying that they didn’t like and would have liked to get a refund on it) as well as the price of popcorn in theatres! Some even told him to grin and bear it because that’s what 5-star hotels do.

For the 5-star hotel, serving two bananas priced at Rs.442.50 plus GST must have been a routine affair. After all, 5-Star hotels are text-book standard examples of conspicuous consumption at its best (or, worst) depending upon which side of the fence you are on!

Some blamed both parties, in a way.

Yet others found the whole issue funny and worthy of a good laugh.

It must be noted that many were completely and specifically upset with the JW Marriott in Chandigarh and mentioned their own personal experiences, sharing pictures of their own and supporting the actor’s stand. Some wanted other, better hospitality chains to be patronized instead of JW Marriott. Some promoted the idea of staying with national hospitality chains and shunning International hotels like Marriott, bringing in the low wages they paid to their staff into the equation.

In case the allusion escaped you, Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code is about punishing cheating and dishonesty!

Special mention went to the ‘5-Star attitude’ which makes you feel unwanted or cheap, the minute you bring up the price of anything!

Some questioned the charging of GST on the bill, rather vehemently.

Some worried about how the farmer who actually grew the banana didn’t get a fair share of the price.

The storm also tried to swamp Starbucks in its wake.

Some others saw a business opportunity!

Even as the storm raged, JW Marriott Chandigarh was conspicuously silent. The hotel in question has an exclusive page on Twitter but does not seem to have anything to offer or say on this whole issue. For all we know, they may not even be aware that Rahul Bose has sparked interest not only in the Twitterati but also from some TV channels which have picked up the story and are running with it, as we speak. Only time can tell what its effects on their business would be. But there’s no doubt that being oblivious to social media comments is definitely not going to help any business, anywhere in the world.

As we have said time and again, organizations big and small need to have systems which make them aware of the mentions on social media, in real-time. Nothing can ensure reputation management better than employing a social listening tool!

What can Companies learn from their Net Promoter Score?

In our blog posts, we have often talked about online brand reputation management and the importance of it. Here, we discuss something closely linked to ORM. Net Promoter Score – a measure to gauge your brand’s customer relationships. NPS detects how well the customer feels connected to you, how they rate you. It’s simply a mark of how often they actually recommend you to others and so on.

Net Promoter Score or Your Customers’ Definition of Your Brand’s Health?

Net promoter score is essentially a customer loyalty metric. NPS is a metric easily measured on the basis of social data, customer feedback and opinions voiced online and calculated to decide your actual NPS. When you ask your customers a simple question “How likely are you to recommend our brand to family and friends?”, your customers would respond with a score in between 0 to 10. People who rate 9-10 are the promoters, who support your brand, are your loyal customers and would probably spread positive referrals. Respondents who score you from within 0-6 are detractors and these are the customers unhappy with you, they do not create any value for your company. However, the goal of tracking your NPS score and boosting the process with social listening for feedback may help you salvage the situation.

Customer Experience

Multinational companies use net promoter score most commonly, to know more about the experience of their customers. An example; a customer rates brand XYZ at 4 on the NPS scale. The form would prompt the customer to explain why they rated XYZ poorly. The customer states that due to the way XYZ’s customer support team is structured, the guidance they needed came late and only confused them and clarified nothing. XYZ now knows the fault lines and what needs to be fixed with their processes, based on the interaction. They can engage further with the customer to offer any possible redressal, gain more insights and change their processes to appease the valued consumer.

If you are thinking NPS is only useful in cases of negative reviews, you are wrong. If a customer rates you high, you can receive further insights as to what they did like about your service/product. Conversing with an already happy customer makes them content and willing to spread a good word about you. Additionally, you now know your strengths to advertise.

Lowering the Cost of Customer Acquisition with NPS

In an extension of what we said earlier, NPS helps you save on the cost of customer acquisition. Tracking NPS keeps a check on your customer success rate and helps you gain a sense of how well your customers like you. The better they like you, the better the NPS ranking, and the more they are likely to spread a positive word of mouth for your brand. NPS has been termed the leading indicator of future growth because it indicates the number of customers who would potentially refer your product onward. The larger this number is, the lower the cost of customer acquisition gets for you.

NPS and Other Online Reputation Management Tools

NPS essentially helps you keep a check on your customer satisfaction levels. It not only gives you a score but a qualitative analysis too. However, using NPS with other tools can help complement the entire customer engagement and satisfaction process. NPS can tell you whether customers are happy with you or not. Social listening for reviews and online chatter related to their specific cause of dissatisfaction helps you zero in upon the real issues. Social engagement tools help you stay connected with your promoters and detractors. This, in turn, is absolutely essential for branding, especially during the formative period of a company.

Simple tools can be used to bring about a phenomenal change in your company’s customer care efforts. NPS, social listening, social intelligence and engagement tools can be used to serve a multitude of purposes simultaneously. Gain customer insights, receive feedback to reduce churn and improve product/service, identify promoters and detractors all from these few easy tools. We’d like to think of these ORM tools more as tools that open new doors to opportunities and not as any alarm devices.

Social Listening is Keeping Your Competitors Ahead

Are you unable to understand how your competitor seems to have a better online presence and worried that you are missing out on something important? Then you may want to read on and find some answers, to help you take some control. Let’s talk about how social listening might be helping your competitors and how you still have time to reverse their winning streak.

Is Social Listening Really helping Your Competitors?

Social listening has plenty to offer. Are you already using it to your advantage or is your competitor racing ahead and leaving you way behind? Here are some definitive signs which tell you that your competitor is ahead of you using social listening:

They respond quickly (response time is far lower than yours) to any negative chatter or social media crisis moment.
They seem to know what the customer wants and present it to them on time. They also seem to know why your customers are dissatisfied and are trying to entice them away.
They engage with their advocates and find influencers at the same time.
They engage with their audience actively.

If any of this sounds familiar, it is time for you to step in.

Respond Quicker and Stay Ahead

If you’ve noticed that your competitors are quite active on social media it might be because they are vigilant to the social mentions of them. Many companies employ social listening tools to help them with digital marketing. The world wide web is a massive space with billions of active users, and it is a daunting task to track your social mentions manually. Social listening helps you track social mentions, gauge public sentiment and respond well in time.

Replying to your customer’s grievances or queries after a long wait time never leaves a good impression. Besides, if you are unable to respond in time while your competitors engage actively with them, it is easy to guess why your competitor would gain business, while you lose custom.

Sentiment Analysis and Other Strategic Insights

Even if you are not keeping an eye on your competitors, they might be keeping a constant eye on your brand’s health. The negative chatter around your brand helps them to lure your audience away. A key strategy to stop such poaching is to plan your digital marketing in such a way as to make your brand visible, trustworthy and relatable. A brand which cares enough would zero in on the pain points of their customers are facing and extend help both offline and online.

With social media being a free source of all the data you need, social listening gives you precise insights into its message. Which outlet is gathering the most negative chatter? Why is that particular outlet doing something different/weird? You do not have to dig too deep for the insights, you have to be vigilant enough to respond to the criticism and resolve the problem.

Sentiment analysis helps you gauge the overall perception of your brand. And provide you with deeper insights. Responsive actions can gain you serious fans who could actually promote your brand and endorse it for all the world to see. To identify these influencers/heroes, you have to keep listening to social media buzz to know who loves you. Marketing which happens through positive word-of-mouth is a foolproof way to rank high on a list of trusted brands.

Social Listening provides you with many key metrics that could help you avoid not just losing business to your competitors but also to stay one step ahead of the game. If you are looking for the perfect social listening tool, we can guide you.

4 Reasons to Dig Deeper into Social Listening

.There’s no gainsaying the fact that social listening is highly beneficial for conducting sentiment analysis and deriving business insights from it. Using social media listening, we can derive actionable insights and answer to questions like:

What do consumers think about my brand?
Which feature of my product/service is being discussed the most and why?
Which department is performing poorly and what is the exact issue?

However, this is not all. Social listening can help you meet many other unique business necessities too.

Uncover Buyer Personas with Social Listening

When trying to impress your audience or potential client, you can’t go making assumptions in the air. You will need to put in an effort to know your audience before you start planning your content and marketing strategy. The consumer will have to be made aware and educated about your offering and its USPs before a purchase can be expected. It is obvious that content should include topics that interest the readers and stay relevant to them. Social listening can help you gain some idea about the topics which interest your readers. By analyzing the chatter, social listening identifies the topics that the target audience relates to and shares on a regular basis. This can provide pointers to the kind of content you need to develop.

Identify an Established Market

It can be tough to identify prospective places to advertise your product on social media. Talking about your product and sharing content on your business page is not enough. Imagine how much simpler it could get if you could find a group of people who really have a need for your product. It’s like an established market, and you get to capitalize on the opportunity. Social listening helps you identify and connect with such leads to people or even some groups, this could enable you to maximize the return on your efforts.

Social Listening to identify Brand Advocates

When you are monitoring your brand and listening to the chatter that develops around it, it would be easier for you to connect with your supporters and critics. While criticism helps you gain insights, as we discussed earlier, social listening tools can help you identify your brand advocates. Using the tool, you could reach out to the people who commented positively about your brand or product. Establish a positive interaction with them based on their score as influencers, making it painlessly easy for you to engage with them and to enroll them as members of your extended family.

Shields You against Competitors

Using what’s possibly the most wondrous of social listening’s features, you can listen to the chatter about your competitors as well. How does that benefit you? Being aware of your competitor’s strategies can help you stay one step ahead. Knowing about their success or failure affects your own plans and strategy for growth. You get to learn from their mistakes and take a leaf from their book when their business does something right.

Social media is vast which makes it impossible for you to look at all the brand mentions you received. And analyzing each comment manually to check the sentiment without a social listening tool is simply unthinkable. Look for the right tool which meets your needs by looking at its various features. Do manage your brand reputation right, using the social listening tool’s ability to update you on every social mention in real-time and stay responsive to your consumers.

Social Selling – A Social Listening Use Case

Social selling has become quite the buzz word of late. Think of direct selling (and all the processes related to it) but just online on social platforms. Social selling has been allowing salespeople to zero in on their prospects, build a rapport and relationship with customers, offer advice and close deals without the dread of cold calling.

What is Social Selling?

Gone are the days when a customer would solely depend on the salesperson for product information. The modern-day has brought with it social media platforms, online review communities and even discussion boards across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Quora, Google Reviews et cetera. Consumers have learned to look up information and be more informed than ever. This is where marketers step in with social selling. As consumers seek information online, sellers pitch to educate the masses using these very social platforms.

If your company has a business page on social media platforms or a business account on review sites then you are already engaged in and aware of the basics of brand awareness and social selling. Social selling isn’t the same as spamming your potential customers. Social selling is more about gaining information about your audience and educating them about your product in turn. It encompasses attributes of gaining access to the contact information of your audience, building a relationship with them, educating, promoting and advising the right buy after understanding and appropriately judging their interests.

Social Buying and Social Selling

If you are still wondering why your brand should care about social selling and how best to go about it, you may want to consider the fact that most of your competitors are already there. Also, any sales member would tell you that no one likes cold calling nor do consumers like being pestered with calls about a product they’re not interested in.

Social media management tools like social listening help your salesmen to track topics of interests and hence discover new leads. Understanding the interests and activities of a potential customer makes it easier for the salesperson to converse with them, build a relationship and convert a lead.

Secondly, in the 21st century, almost every other person is active online. Everyone is aware of e-commerce and they look up and discuss the products they want to buy. Besides the regular pre-purchase information-gathering, people also share their post-purchase experiences. In a world where social buying is already flourishing, why would one hesitate to sell? Social media platforms are practically an entire package. They provide you with the platform to advertise on, promote, sell or educate people before they purchase, helping them to gather insights from post-purchase reviews and so on. Social selling is essentially the entire business process under a single umbrella.

Best Ways to do Social Selling

Social selling is no different than your traditional selling. It is only a smarter way to do it.

A Strong Social Selling Team

Like we pointed out earlier, no salesperson really likes cold calling and hounding customers. In fact, a recent report by CSO insights and Seismic stated that access to social selling tools like social listening, social engagement et cetera lowered the sell-cycle time and increased the conversion rates for B2B professionals. Powering your sales team with social media tools helps them gain insights into the persona of your target audience and personalize the pitch.

Engage Personally

Imagine being really interested in a product and wanting to know more about it. Your sales guide is a robot who only responds with very basic information. It has no personal recommendations, no casual relationship building capabilities and no sense of offering a human touch at all. Honestly, you wouldn’t feel the company is making a great effort to sell to you. You won’t feel like a particularly valued customer.

This is exactly the case when you employ social bots to engage and chat with your customers. Have a team to respond to your customers and ensure that the team is vigilant. 40% of millennials expect a response within 1 hour after they have posted a query.

Social Listening and Monitoring

Social monitoring and social listening are the two crucial tools to successful lead conversion. The first thing before you try your hand at social selling is to try and know more and more about your target audience. Customer insights are key to successful campaigns, advertisement, promotion, and the resultant personalized sales pitch. Social listening is essential even after sales. Tune in to listen to what the customers are talking about you, their recommendations, their pain points and try to reach out to them where necessary.

In the world of web 2.0, online marketplaces are abundant. Building a strong relationship with your audience has never been easier. It is the best time to capitalize on this and start your journey with social selling.