A Comprehensive Guide to Understanding Social Media Analytics

Do you believe in the power of data to help you make smart business decisions? If yes, where would you find such data? Having found the data, how will you analyze it right to glean actionable insights?

Social media analytics is, without a doubt, the right tool for this. A term used most often but also misunderstood most of the time, social media analytics is defined as the method of collecting data from social media sites and analyzing them for business decision making.

This describes the concept pretty well. But people tend to forget that social media isn’t just about brands and their products. People talk about their lives and get to know others on these platforms. This is where brands can step in to learn about the interests of their audience members. Social media enables brands and consumers to connect. Brands have to be on their best behavior at all times, lest they should turn people away with a negative action or interaction. It helps to keep in mind that the Internet has an elephant’s memory.

How does Social Media Analytics Work?

Like Google, social media analytics tools use crawlers. They collect public information from across the web. So when a user enters a keyword or query, the crawler searches the web for every conversation/incident with that keyword or query. This includes searching through social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and blogs, review sites, news channels et cetera.

Once the information is gathered, it is then organized. The platform allows the data to be categorized using various filters such as media type, location of origin, language, sentiment, etc. These platforms then help you visualize the data by processing the data into charts, numbers and virality maps et cetera.

Why Should You use Social Media Analytics Tools?

The primary benefits of using social media analytics tools include:

Measuring your ROI
Creating effective social media marketing campaigns
Finding the right influencers for your brand with ease
Competitive benchmarking
Identifying trending news and topics

This tool provides you with a wholesome social media marketing management experience. It includes every micro tool’s benefit starting from social listening to online reputation management to finding influencers.

Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience and their needs helps you improve your product, plan your strategy and advertising accordingly. Social media analytics help you track basic attributes like

When were they online? When were they most active? These insights help because it is useless to post at a time when your audience is not active.
What are their interests? How do they react to the content you put out? This helps you target your audience better.
Customer segmentation helps you develop more targeted campaigns.

Competitive Benchmarking

Competitive benchmarking is important if you really wish to measure how your company is doing within the industry. It can also be beneficial when you want to know more about your rival’s winning strategies. The competitive analysis feature in most social media analytics tools allows you to monitor each mention, each post of your competitors. You will gain a complete idea of what they are doing online. If they lack in something, you could start pitching your product/services to the customers who are unhappy with them.

Managing Online Brand Reputation

As a marketer, you should be able to see how your brand is being perceived across social networks, blogs, and review forums. This is vital because, in this day and age, a single bad review could go viral and ruin your brand’s image. Any social media analytics tool lets you integrate media monitoring services with social media analytics data. This helps you stay informed of any upcoming PR crisis moments.

Track Social Events and Trends

Say you strategize a lot and launch a campaign. Is the campaign working the way you planned? Is it drawing the expected results? What’s a way to know? You can monitor the details of your marketing campaigns using social media analytics tools. Use sentiment analysis to see how your audience feels about your campaign.

Besides, social media monitoring, analytics, and reporting help you study the current trends within your industry and design your online content around it. Use the insights to create viral content to draw leads in.

Some social media analytics tools go the extra mile here. For instance, Auris sends you a real-time report where you’ll find your performance data all visually laid out. Use this abundant and insightful information to structure your marketing efforts and plan a winning strategy.

Your Ultimate Guide to Emojis on Social Media

Emojis are fun, creative and engaging. Which is why you should include emoticons in your content. Do you agree? Think about it!

They are a creative way to communicate visually. They are about loving fun, which is what younger generations want. Most brands would react incredulously to the thought of using emoticons on their social media. Here’s why we think agencies should try out emojis while marketing on social media.

Emojis were developed in the late 1990s by NTT DoCoMo.
Around 5 billion emojis are sent daily on Facebook.
The world even celebrates an emoji day every year, on the 17th of July.
92% of Internet users use emojis.
25-29-year-olds use emoticons the most.

Here we try to break down some reasons why emojis are important for your brand’s marketing plan.

The Most Popular Emojis you could Use

There have been lists of top social media influencers, social media platforms et cetera. Why not a list of the top emojis used on social media? We did some social listening on the matter, to bring you the top 10 emoticons in use currently.

Face with Tears of Joy ?

Good to know that the world puts a laughter emoji at the top. Laughter is the best medicine after all.

Loudly Crying Face ?

Life is full of ups and downs. If laughter topped the list, crying out loudly came in next. Also, here’s a fun fact, men and women both had this emoticon in the second position. Who says boys don’t cry?

Smiling with Heart Eyes ?

Here’s your first love-themed emoji in the top 10. “Beautiful” and “cute” are the words most often used with this emoji.

Red Heart ❤️

Talking about love-theme emojis, the red heart – the symbol of love, is next.

Backhand Index Pointing Right ?

Unlike the other emoticons, this one is a surprising entry among the top 10. This one is popular because most tweets use it to point at links.

Purple Heart ?

6th on the list is the purple heart. BTS fans are particularly fond of this emoji. Even BTS’s official Twitter handle posts the purple heart often.

Two Hearts ?

So much love! The next emoji on the list is the one with two hearts. The word “happy” is most often used in combination with this emoji.

Smiling Face with Smiling Eyes ?

The blushing smiley face is a great way to accept a compliment gracefully. It can also say that you are feeling loved or even happy & warm. This emoticon is most used when wishing happy birthdays or good times.

Thinking Face ?

After love, happiness, and sadness, the top 10 emojis have one which depicts a question or expresses confusion. This emoji is most useful when discussing politics.

Folded Hands ?

Then we have an emoticon that passes for thanks, gratitude or even prayers, who knows! What’s sure is that it has made its way to the top ten emojis.

Why Should you use Emojis for Social Media Marketing?

Here are 4 reasons why and how you should use emojis in your social media marketing plan.

Emojis Present a Pleasant Visual Aspect

Emojis are like ideograms – a tiny visual depicting an idea. Marketing experts insist on the importance of engaging your audience with strong visuals. The fact is that it is extremely difficult to catch the attention of your audience for long. Make your brand stand out so you can hold on to their attention. Creating content with distinct visuals is one great way to do it.

Most of you would feel that an emoji is not the first thing that comes to mind when talking about strong visuals. But check this:

More and more brands are advertising using emojis. Google search for “best emoji advertising” turns up over 50 million results.
More than 50% of brands saw an increase in the number of email-opens when they used emoticons in the subject line.
Push notifications that had emojis in them saw an 85% increase in open rates and a 9% increase in conversion rates.

Not only do emoticons make your content more pleasant to look at. They also make your content seem less monotonous with fewer words and more colorful little signs.

Emojis are International in Reach

Emojis are most convenient when you are trying to reach people from around the world with differing cultures. Who doesn’t understand a smiley? An emoji for a pizza slice is the same across the world. So it’s easier to convey that your restaurant is serving pizzas now with an emoticon rather than trying to write a sentence in every language.

Millennials Relate to Your Brand

Unless you are trying to sell walking sticks, almost every product and service today tries to target the millennials. The use of emoticons is one of the primary ways to communicate with millennials and gen-Z. These new members of the consumer market do not care much for traditional ads. They respond when your brand begins to engage with them. You need to start speaking their language to get them interested in you.

How to Use Emojis on Social Media?

I hope I was able to convince you and that’s why you kept on reading till this point. Now if you are wondering how to make use of these little faces within your content, read on.

Using them doesn’t necessarily have to follow a rulebook. It is an unconventional form of marketing communication hence use it freely. But be sure not to overdo it. Use it creatively. Here’s a popular example of how Hillary Clinton used it:

Emojis are meant to be used as a complement to your message. So make sure that when you use them it makes sense in conjunction with the whole message. Once that is achieved you are good to go ?.

How to Find Trending Hashtags on Instagram?

The use of hashtags has become the norm for quite some time now. In fact, It’s been there for over a decade. A hashtag was first used on August 24th, 2007 by @chrismessina. Almost every social media platform implements the use of hashtags. Instagram ranks on the top when it comes to the usage of hashtags. Hashtags on Instagram are a powerful tool for influencers and marketers alike. A brand can use this powerful tool in multiple ways. Before you start looking at trending Instagram hashtags, let’s look at how and why it’s so important.

Instagram Hashtags – Power Tools for Marketers?

A hashtag on Instagram works almost like a search engine. You would have noticed that hashtags on Facebook don’t mean as much as they do on Instagram. This is because Instagram uses them for sorting the data. The hashtags on Instagram determine the reach for your posts, and how visible your content is. Say you want to launch a software product for phone photography and editing. You want to know what content covering the topic already exists. Simply look for #Phonephotography on Instagram’s search engine. You’ll have all the posts with the hashtag #phonephotography marking them. On the flip side, it also becomes a tool for tagging your content to make it more visible.

Find the Right Audience

Finding the right audience on Instagram also becomes easier. All thanks to Instagram hashtags and the platform’s intelligent algorithm. Trending hashtags related to your industry can help you find the people and influencers talking about it. You now have the opportunity to know more about the kind of audience you want to target. These accounts can also lead to additional information. For example, let’s say you are looking for the trending hashtag #ootd for your clothing brand. You might find popular accounts also tagging their content for #OutfitInspiration. In this way, you know your audience and also what hashtags they follow. Tag your content to these and increase your reach.

Find Influencers and Promotional Content

While you are discovering popular accounts via browsing trending hashtags, you may also find top and micro-influencers within your industry. You can visit their profiles to understand their engagement rates, follower base and take inspiration. Or even plan your event/product launch collab with them. Some companies get even more creative. They discover influencers, do a collab and come up with a special brand hashtag. The influencer then promotes the brand and the hashtag and they succeed in creating a unique space for themselves. Fiji Water did one such campaign.

So How to Find Trending Hashtags on Instagram?

Instagram marketing has proven to be a successful tool for businesses. This can be attributed to the way brands have used and gained an idea of trending hashtags. Here we discuss some very easy ways you can find and track hashtags to your benefit.

Organic Search

Like we mentioned earlier, hashtags are a way to aggregate content. So organic search is the cheapest and easiest way to find trending Instagram hashtags. So if you just type in a hashtag into Instagram’s search engine, it will display all the content available. Also, it begins to show other related trending hashtags. You could just tap on those and explore more. Initially, you may feel a little lost but give it some time. Even if you have no idea of any hashtag and are wondering what to type in, just type in your genre. Say you have a restaurant that serves Italian cuisine. Type in “#ItalianCuisine” or “#ItalianFood” and boom, you are there.

Social Listening Tools

An organic search is a great option but for someone who can invest a lot of time on it. As a marketing manager, usually, you’ll have many other things to take care of. In such cases, you can opt for social listening tools and so. These tools do the job for you and track the top trending keywords and hashtags for you. Let’s talk about some of the tools:

All Hashtag

In case you are searching for just the keywords to look for, allhashtag.com is the answer for you. It is a unique tool that can help you find the most trending hashtags and random hashtags too. The platform can also help you to create your own hashtag.

Auris

Looking for an in-depth analysis of the hashtags? Auris can help you track the trending hashtags and analyze the sentiment around them. It helps you gauge the kind of social following the hashtag or the keyword has. You’ll know what kind of audience follows it, posts related content et cetera. And finding influencers via this tool becomes easier thanks to the filters. The tool tracks the influencer scores of whoever posts regarding the topic helping you find your pick.

Instagram has been booming as a space for marketers, be it for Instagram hashtags or influencer marketing over Instagram. We have tried to study the platform and build our Auris platform around its nuances. You can check out our Instagram-related posts too, if interested.

Create an Appealing Social Listening Strategy for 2020

Social media sites have matured influencing the way businesses are carried out online. And this information may not be new to you. Social listening has become a tool to drive online sales. Savvy brands today listen in to their customers and stay informed of the sentiment around their brand.

As brands strive to survive amidst rising and falling trends, they are required to constantly keep an eye out for their rivals. Brands adopt creative marketing techniques like influencer marketing to be in sync with current trends. In 2020, one of your marketing goals should be to build a social listening strategy.

How does Social Listening Work? What exactly is Social Listening Strategy?

Social listening is made possible by a software tool, an application that monitors online conversations. Say your brand is called “A2B3 technologies” and the name gets mentioned online, on a social media site, a review platform or elsewhere. The social listening tool tracks the comment and send you an alert. It also tells you who commented, their age, gender, geographical location and even the tone of the comment.

Now with billions of Internet users, there could be hundreds of people talking about your brand. The tool aggregates all of this data. It then analyses the overall percentage of comments, whether negative or positive and presents them to you. It will also analyze the other demographic details to offer you insights into your popularity or lack thereof, by geographic location.

Social listening tools also help you zero in on a potential pain point or strength. Say 68% of your users commented repeatedly that your product is great but they would like “A2B3 technologies” to provide free installation services for their product. As a result, your potential customers might hesitate to buy your product and start looking for alternatives who do provide installation.

With the right social listening tool, you can learn about reviews that are likely to snowball, in real-time. You can respond to the unhappy customers almost immediately, get them to change their minds about you and avert a PR crisis for your brand. You can also gain insight into how to provide better customer service and improve your customers’ experience.

A social listening strategy is nothing but you planning your goals and selecting a social listening tool to get optimum results.

Let’s get started with creating a Social Listening Strategy

You now know what social listening is all about, which is great. In addition to this, you need to understand the steps to getting the process started. What you want from your social listening tool is usually dictated by your business goals. So here we break down the steps to offer some simple pointers for your social listening strategy.

Fix your goals

The basis for building a robust social listening campaign lies in knowing what you need from the tool. As we mentioned before, a social listening tool can be your ultimate stop for all your marketing needs. It can offer you information and insights into all the following:

Leads
Business insights
Real-time feedback
Sentiment analysis
Influencers and advocates
Pointers for customer service and many more

You might just be looking for a way to know your customers better, and gain leads. Or you might be looking for the current marketing trends and influencers. Once you define your goals, you can fine-tune the platform to deliver the results.

Engage in Market Research

With social listening tools, you have access to digital data. Use this for thorough market research. The information you receive from social listening comes directly from the users and usually isn’t biased. You can use it to know about your target audience. When you enter your brand’s name and the names of your competitors, the tools pull up the handles of people who mentioned you. Analyze their kind, the demographics, location, preferences et cetera. You will know who your target audience is. Similarly, use the data to monitor current trends or industry news. Trends are heavily discussed online, so it’s impossible to miss it if you wish to monitor trends related to your brand.

Customer Service and Reputation Management

The most common use of the real-time alerts you get via social listening tools is customer service. Marketers study the data to know the queries and perception their audience has. When you analyze the feedback from your customers, you understand the overall sentiment towards your brand. This helps you gauge ways to improve customer service and to monitor your brand’s online reputation. And when you engage with your customers in real-time, the focus and commitment demonstrated will only help your brand. According to research reports, 71% of customers who receive a quick response from a brand are more likely to recommend them.

Influencer Outreach

The purchasing behavior of youngsters today is driven by online and word-of-mouth reviews. If an influencer talks about a favorite product on his or her blog, chances are that his/her followers will try out the same product. It’s human nature to trust fellow human beings. In this scenario, social listening tools help you search for your perfect influencer. If you are into a tech business, find an influencer whose forte lies in tech reviews. If you wish to work with micro-influencers, social listening tools can help you find them too. Just set the filters to highlight the influencer scores.

An effective social listening strategy will require multiple iterations. But once you invest the time and energy, the results will prove worthy of the efforts you put in.

5 steps to Evaluate your PR Campaign Effectiveness

There is no, one definite, way to measure the impact or success of a PR campaign. But, companies generally invest money in PR campaigns hoping to create some impact. When we measure the impact, we can find loopholes in the campaign. Unfortunately, there isn’t one specific method by which we can measure the effectiveness of a PR campaign. Here we shall discuss some possible methods using which you could find your ideal approach.

How do you start measuring your PR Campaign Effectiveness?

Don’t be disheartened. While there is no specific measure for your PR campaign’s effectiveness, the evolution of social media management tools makes our task easy. They offer ways to measure your PR campaign’s effectiveness.

Traffic on your Website

The most obvious indicator of a successful campaign would be an increased inflow of visitors to your website. Straight metrics like ‘visitors per day’ can only tell you half the story though. A deeper look will analyze your web traffic to reveal the demographics. This would throw light on who you need to target more often.

Surveys

One way you can get definite answers is by asking the people themselves. Most PR professionals conduct market research surveys to track the impact of their PR campaigns and to measure their success. Yet it’s also worthwhile for you to seek the first-hand opinion of your audience. Are they aware of your campaign? Did they receive your message? Did they like the campaign? Most importantly, would they opt for your product based on the campaign?

Survey

Monitoring Brand Mentions

Evaluating your brand’s performance across different platforms is also crucial. Set up a social media monitoring tool to get notified every time there’s a mention of your brand. Additionally, social listening tools also help you decipher the overall sentiment around your brand. If they are satisfied with your services, connect with them and raise awareness further. Propose to collab with them and turn them into your brand influencers.

Engagement on Social Media

Social media metrics tell you how large the audience pool is for your campaign. The greater the engagement rate, the better the awareness. Anyone sharing, commenting or asking about your campaign or the promoted service/product (or, a similar product) is a potential customer. These actions of your audience members tell you how successful your campaign really is. Monitoring the engagement metrics for your PR campaign helps you gauge the effectiveness of your message. If it hasn’t worked, you may want to tweak the content or your approach and try again.

Sales Numbers

Last but not least, any product-based company knows that a spike in sales is proof that their campaign has worked. PR campaigns may not bring hundreds of customers to your door in a single night. However, with time, a successful campaign does generate significant sales. If you have a multi-location presence and sales haven’t picked up yet at a particular location, you may have to revise your PR strategy for that location. Also, it is key that you focus your marketing and sales activities on lucrative locations or during peak season.

In a world bustling with social media trends and influencers, the importance of PR campaigns cannot be overlooked. Having invested time efforts and money into a PR campaign, it is logical for you to try and track its effectiveness. We hope the ideas provided above can help you do so.

Are Micro-Influencers a Part of your Social Media Strategy?

Influencer marketing has been gaining popularity as a tool for social media promotions. Over a few years, brands have collaborated with influencers. As a result, the industry is now worth at least $5-10 billion. Currently, the emerging concept of micro-influencers is all the rage.

Who are these Micro-Influencers?

Influencer marketing with micro-influencers is the same concept on a smaller scale. Brands interact and collaborate with individuals who have a follower base of 1000 to 10000 people. These individuals are well informed and reputed in their areas of interest. They will also have a high rate of engagement on their posts. When brands are looking to reach niche audiences, they typically seek micro-influencers.

A fashion influencer may boast millions of followers and many boutiques et cetera. A micro-influencer, on the other hand, has a smaller audience but a dedicated one. A micro-influencer might only post daily boho outfit designs or videos about DIY outfits.

Are Micro-Influencers Important?

Markerly, in one of their studies, found that with the increase in the number of followers, the engagement rate of influencers went down. But, micro-influencers with less than 1000 followers received likes 8% of the time. In comparison, influencers only received 1.6% likes. ExpertVoice also found in a study that micro-influencers have 22.2 times more conversations than regular users. It is, therefore, logical to assume that businesses would achieve a higher engagement rate with micro-influencers.

Micro-influencers have a defined Target Market

Most celebrity influencers have millions of followers. If a fashion clothing brand collabs with them, the content will reach a lot of people. However, most of these followers aren’t interested in clothing. The brand could, instead, collaborate with 100 micro-fashion-bloggers each with about 1000 followers. The chances of gaining leads from these 100,000 followers, who actively seek fashion advice from these micro-influencers are higher.

Affordability

As a business owner, you would want to invest smartly. Micro-influencers help you achieve a better ROI. Let me explain this further to see how. Captiv8 reports that an influencer with 3 to 7 million followers can charge $75000 on an average for a post on Instagram. In contrast, a micro-influencer charges less than $500 for a post. So even if you employ 10 or even 100 micro-influencers, you spend less and actually reach more people.

Micro-influencers are usually honest with their audience. They have a small following and they don’t want to lose their trust by giving fake reviews. So most of the time, companies may simply send them free goodies for a review instead of paying hard cash. For instance, La Croix Sparkling Water sent free product vouchers to micro-influencers.

Authenticity

Millennials look for authenticity. It is the current trend almost because they know it is easier to fake something on social media. Micro-influencers with their smaller audience do engage with any comment on their posts. They are more likely to behave authentically in the fear of losing their following in case of a fake review. It is also true that Instagram’s algorithm now has adjusted to weed out fake influencers, comments, and followers. So brands now are looking for someone who would be genuine. And micro-influencers are the best bet.

La Croix for example targets micro-influencers by searching branded hashtags like “LiveLaCroix”. They then reach out to people posting these with a lower follower base. The company even reaches out to individuals who have tagged the brand in their posts. They specifically target these individuals with lesser followers to maintain the feel of authenticity or “realness”.

There are a number of other brands that have collaborated with micro-influencers. You can check out our blog post to know more about their success stories. Before you make up your mind to invest in this, make sure you consider your strategy well. Instagram influencer marketing might work well for visual products like sparkling water or a fashionable sweatshirt collection. If you want to promote software, you might have to get creative, move out of Instagram and look for influencers on YouTube perhaps.