Online Reputation Management for Hotels

The importance of online reputation management for hotels can not be overstated. This industry thrives by providing better customer service every day. What would it convey about a hotel’s service if its online reputation were to take a dip? And this concept of online reputation management isn’t new, so technically every hotel brand should have a strategy in place. If you don’t, you can start now using some of the upcoming tips.

Why is Online Reputation Management Important for Hotels?

People would argue that hospitality has more to do with the physical form of customer service than others. Think again! When was the last time you received a major number of bookings where the customer was physically present? How many customers visit you physically to inquire about services and charges? Most of these activities have shifted to the online realm. Online presence has also become increasingly important in the current situation with some parts of the world under physical lockdown with no major tourist activity.

Digitization has been a big change for the hospitality industry and it is not new. People have used the internet to search for good places to stay at, they have used the internet to make inquiries et cetera. The only difference is now online reviews are readily available for almost any place. A search for your hotel will bring up all previous reviews written by other customers. Also, your potential customers follow your social media pages or the news around your brand. They keep a check on all the activities you are doing, especially the ones which draw negative remarks online. Hence, it is important to maintain a pristine image online if you are keen on getting the chance to host your future customers.

If you don’t believe us, trust these statistics from the world of travelers who share their opinions online:

38% of people who booked hotels are of the opinion that positive hotel reviews are an incentive to stay at a particular independent hotel.
If a hotel manages to increase its rating by 1 point (on a 5 point scale), it can increase its prices by 11.2% and still maintain the same market share.

Can Technology Help Hotels Manage their Online Reputation?

Technology has been helping hotel owners to promote their brand while helping their customers to search for the best place to stay at. Websites and apps like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Expedia et cetera have been helping hotels advertise to the audience. These aggregator apps also support guest reviews based on factors like service, ambiance, customer experience et cetera. So when a customer goes online to book a hotel, they do read through the reviews people have posted for a hotel.

And this is only one of the sources that help customers make a purchase decision. They also look for recommendations online on social media platforms. Facebook has an “asking for recommendations” feature as well. This is where the online community is discussing their worst and best hotel experiences.

This information is fluid, and this is where technology again steps in to help the hospitality industry. It is impossible for a person to manually go through each conversation happening online. Social listening and ORM tools assemble reviews and relevant data points for you.

What to Look for in an ORM Tool?

The smart way to get the most out of your online reputation management tool is to use one which provides multiple services. Data points can provide a multitude of different insights for your business. Make sure you find a tool that serves all these needs. Here are some pointers about things you should consider in an ORM tool:

Your ORM tool helps you assemble reviews and mentions from all leading social media and review platforms. You cannot afford to miss any of these mentions/reviews because even one negative review could be detrimental to your brand image.
The tool should be able to analyze your online performance (in terms of visibility, band image, SOV, etc) over a period of time. Using historical data improves the accuracy of the insights drawn and thus helps you make better decisions.
Provides a simple and effective gateway to raise a ticket and respond to guests. The system should have a suggested response template that helps you with this task.
The overall ease of tracking is the most important. You should be able to understand the data quickly. Most dashboards make use of graphs, emoji faces, word clouds et cetera to make the data easier to comprehend.

ORM tools like social listening help you further understand the demographics and dive deeper into the data to find the pain points. If you own a chain of hotels, it might show you that a particular branch is trending but not for a good reason. If you delve deeper into the word cloud and subsequent reviews you might find that people are complaining about the concierge service. You can now pinpoint the problem for resolution and for the information of your management. Big hotel chains need such a cluster view for proper administration when they have operations running at multiple locations and this is where artificial intelligence can help. For example, if Taj has 50 hotels in the country, tools like Auris can monitor their Google My Business reviews/Tripadvisor reviews all at once and respond to these as well.

How Does Social Listening help an Ad Agency?

If you run an ad agency, you would already have a fair idea of how opinionated customers can be. And being a temple of creativity, you may sometimes not agree with the ideas of your clients. Social listening can help your ad agency in more ways than one. Let’s explore the different scenarios.

The Value of Social Listening for an Ad Agency

Let’s run through all the major activities happening in an ad agency. There ‘s advertising, PR, dedicated content curation, social media programs et cetera. Every activity listed here helps build the ultimate marketing campaign for your client. In order for them to build their SOV and scale the business, your client needs to respond to the needs of their target audience. As an ad agency supporting them, it is your duty to guide them with what’s best.

Social listening helps ad agencies conquer these problems using a multi-pronged approach. Firstly, each of the activities mentioned above needs you to know your audience (client’s target audience in this case) in and out. Social listening also helps you win your brainstorming battles with the client team. Present them with your findings and analysis and see how you can rationally explain why you chose a particular topic for their campaign. And finally, it makes the entire process easier and faster for you.

Analyze your Clients’ Target Audience

This starts with a very basic step. When you take a brief from your client, you already have a seed list of keywords from their industry. Start by monitoring these keywords using a social listening tool. Some of the things you should be looking for are:

How many people are talking about it?
Which social media platforms see the most engagement related to these topics?
Is the sentiment towards the brand negative or positive?
What words are being used to describe the brand/product/service?
Which influencers are talking about this the most?
What age demography is the most active with regard to this topic?

Questions such as these will give you a fair idea about the kind of audience you want to target for your client. It also gives you in-depth knowledge about the overall sentiment surrounding the brand. What is working for the brand currently and what is not? This information helps you build the very base of your marketing strategy. Your future campaigns, the messaging you send out, the influencers you team up with all will be based on insights derived from this data.

Strategic Planning and Recommendations

As a consulting firm, it is important that you make intelligent recommendations to your clients. Winning over a client comes before you can win over their audience members. Sometimes, it is essential to understand the brief they are presenting, to understand the values they are trying to portray. But you also have to make this saleable by binding these concepts to what is trending online. Your client’s brand can also do well by displaying a willingness to take market feedback and act upon it. You have the data ready and can convince your client based on this. For instance, your client’s brand sells energy bars and drinks. They want you to promote these to pregnant women. On the other hand, from your analysis, you see women athletes, in general, prefer energy drinks and bars as meal replacement options. Present this data to convince your client about how you can base their messaging towards the female community as a whole.

You can show your clients all the data about the demographics of the people who speak the most about energy bars. Share the information with them about the top influencers in the industry. The trending topics on the word cloud help your case. Social listening helps an ad agency with the relevant data at all points for every client.

Simplify the Process for Yourself

This is the main reason why every ad agency should accept help from social listening tools. Social media is not an easy place to maneuver. Marketing gets difficult owing to the fast-paced life on social media. You can not grab and hold a person’s attention for more than a few seconds. Trying to manually analyze audience behavior for ad targeting and other campaigns is an impossible task. Automation helps to prepare for the actual creative work. You are getting real-time feedback. You also know about the audience’s perception of the brand. Further, you can use the tool to gauge the buyer persona and general consumer behavior.

The core market research has been done for you, you have won the pitch. Furthermore, you even get an automated analysis of the performance. It is almost instantaneous with the real-time feedback feature in motion. Social listening goes beyond measuring numbers. It quantifies the subjective data and tells you exactly what your audience thinks about the campaign and how to improvise or maintain such success.

Social listening can help ad agencies the most, given the rise of digital advertising. It is a tool made to draw insights from digital platforms. Technically it is a self-feeding cycle. You draw insights from what people perceive and want, you build a campaign around it, you again listen to what people think about it and adapt to it.

Why does Social Listening matter?

We find every other report on digital marketing trends today talking about the growth of social listening. This emphasis has seen a sharp rise in the past few months. Brands have come to realize the importance of listening to the online chatter. They wish to build stronger customer relationships in these uncertain times. If you are still wondering why does social listening matter, here are 3 major reasons.

What is Social Listening?

In all probability you already know this, but here’s a quick definition of social listening. It is simply the act of tracking mentions across social media platforms. You could choose to track mentions for your brand, or a specific keyword, your campaign hashtags et cetera. The tools further analyze these mentions to present insights that might help you discover opportunities for improving your business prospects.

Many times, social listening is used interchangeably with the term social media monitoring. And even though the two are similar, they are not the same. Social media monitoring is simply tracking mentions and relevant hashtags. Listening, however, is a more detailed process. It looks beyond the mere number of mentions. Social listening assesses and analyzes the mood of the people talking about you. It presents the analysis using what people have actually said about you.

Put simply, social media monitoring will tell you that 120 people are talking about your brand. This seems great, right? So many people are talking about your brand, you must have done something right. Social listening will get you a better perspective here. It will read into all these mentions. And tell you that out of the 120 people, 90 are unhappy with your service, 20 have a neutral opinion and only 10 are happy. Now, do you see the difference it could make?

Why Does Social Listening Matter?

The one reason why social listening matters is that social media activity is growing each day. Especially since the Coronavirus pandemic has hit, the US saw a massive increase in the number of daily social media and internet users. What makes social listening an important activity during this period is the spread of fake information. The pandemic has caused people to spread false claims and if you aren’t vigilant enough, your brand could take a hit. Social listening during this global pandemic situation is a topic we have covered extensively on our blog here, here and here.

Moving on, the other two reasons which make social listening matter the most are as below:

Provides Quantifiable Data and Metrics

To be honest, there are so many marketing metrics that most marketers have little or no idea of or the ways in which they can help. We would say, the best way to judge the success of your business is to gauge your audience’s reactions. Getting first-hand information from them about their experience helps. But collecting review forms and analyzing them manually isn’t the smartest way to do it. Social media definitely helps in this regard because people use this platform to vent their feelings. Listening tools can catch these subjective details and have the ability to derive quantifiable insights from them.

A social listening tool does not separate individual metrics. It combines all of the KPIs like SOV, SOE, sentiment analysis, demographic analysis to tell you exactly where your brand stands in terms of visibility and performance. Isn’t one platform which takes care of everything better than using many different tools performing different jobs?

Helps with a Wider Range of Marketing Strategies

When we say, it is an all-in-one tool, we don’t just mean it in terms of measuring KPIs. Social media listening lets you maneuver through various marketing activities at the same go. Use it to get started with your influencer marketing campaign. It also aids in keeping you engaged with your audience members and helps build a lasting relationship. You can get content ideas, manage reputation crises, and improve overall customer service all from this one platform. Most of these activities make up the chunk of regular marketing activities for most brands.

The multitude of benefits it provides is exactly why social listening matters. When you have relevant data and the analysis available, you can start focusing on taking action. Take Auris on a ride to help you with the process.

Automated Influencer Marketing

Most of us are aware of the phenomenal growth of influencer marketing in the industry. With the massive growth in its count of daily users, Instagram has also seen a massive increase in the number of Instagram influencers. The start of the decade saw the rise of celebrity influencers peaking higher. However, micro-influencers have cornered much of the limelight. These influencers help brands to directly reach targeted sets of audience members. They have a better ROI compared to celebrities like Kim Kardashian and others who can charge up to half a million dollars for a single post. But influencer marketing comes with its own set of challenges too. Designing a whole influencer marketing campaign and implementing it is a hefty task when attempted manually. This is why most marketers are looking for automated influencer marketing systems.

Can Influencer Marketing be Automated?

It is essential to know about influencer marketing before we answer this question. Any marketing campaign takes planning and effort. The same is the case for influencer marketing. To begin with, a marketer would have to incorporate a variety of influencer-marketing related activities in his/her daily schedule. They would also need to be educated on topics like who the industry leaders are, monitor similar campaigns online, attempt content analysis, reaching out et cetera. That is not all. Once the research is done, a list of activities ensue. They will have to get the influencer on board, communicate their goals, curate content, and evaluate the campaign’s performance in an ongoing manner. It would be foolish to try and attempt this manually. Which brings us back to the question of automated influencer marketing.

Can tools help automate certain processes in the marketing campaign? Yes!
Can they help to automate the whole process? No!
Would it be possible to reduce the overall load? Definitely!

How do Automated Tools help?

If you think about it, all these little steps and processes require time and manpower. It could take weeks or months (depending on the size of your team) to implement a successful influencer marketing campaign. Automaton tools like social media listening turn the entire campaign into a seamless flow, from sourcing the right influence for you to tracking relevant content. The tool brings you competitor analysis data, measures the success of your campaign, and more. And that is a major chunk of the work taken care of. This saves you a lot of time and you can focus and give your 100 percent to the challenge of formulating the strategy.

Finding the Right Influencer

Automated tools track the conversation around any keyword you put in. To start your influencer marketing campaign, put in the keywords for your industry. Tools like Auris pull up every mention and show you all the people who are talking about it. Every commentator is assigned an influencer score based on a multitude of factors like their follower count, engagement rate et cetera. You can easily filter out macro or micro-influencers from the list. This saves you time on having to go and manually hunt for influencers online. Once you have filtered out the list, the dashboard brings up all the details of these people. The frequency at which they post, their activities, number of followers et cetera. You can study and compare these and reach out to the right influencers for your brand.

Brainstorming Content

This is the creative part. And you would be surprised at how social listening tools can help you to a significant extent, with this too. When the tool is listening to the chatter online, it analyzes the data collected. The tool then presents a word cloud of the most trending topics online. This will give you and the influencer a fair idea of the kind of content you can work on. Additionally, the dashboard also presents an analysis of the overall sentiment around these topics. You can steer clear of the topics with a negative sentiment attached to it.

Measuring and Improvising

When you have launched your campaign, you can relax a little. And thanks to automated influencer marketing, you might get a chance to do a little more of that. Because had you gone for a full-manual process, you would be on your toes trying to measure the performance. Automated tools help you measure the results with visual data representation. This makes the process easy and you have ready data so you can implement changes on the go.

In conclusion, an automated influencer marketing tool like social listening is a wise investment. Social listening helps you find advocates and influencers for your product/service at ease. Additionally, it also does a lot of heavy lifting for your other marketing processes like market research, content marketing, competitor analysis et cetera. When you have social media intelligence tools taking care of the peripheral activities, you can really take control of the creative part which takes a lot of thought and planning.

Southwest Airlines – The Best Social Listening Example

The world knows well how successful Southwest Airlines is. Terminals like Chicago Midway International airport witness long queues of people in front of their Southwest Airlines ticket counter. One of the many reasons why this brand is so successful is its sound customer service. They also keep an eye on social media at all times. This is what makes Southwest Airlines a great pick as the best social listening example.

Southwest Airlines – Setting the Standards for Social Listening

Like any other successful brand, Southwest Airlines too gets mentions from over 2000 people per day on social media. These mentions range from praise to travel queries to all kinds of complaints. Southwest Airlines believes in the power of social media and has taken steps to leverage it to their benefit. A social customer care representative from the airlines – Daniel Nix said “Social media customer service is the future and so people expect through social media wherever they are.”

An incident proves how well Southwest Airlines is prepared to handle crisis moments, thanks to its active social listening routine. Recently a traveler from Chicago Midway International airport tweeted about his poor travel experience with Southwest Airlines. This single Tweet started a chain reaction 923 miles away in Dallas. This is where Adam Scott,a representative of the airlines’ social care team took note of the complaint and initiated action.

The team got to resolve the matter the moment the problem was spotted. Adam showed the Tweet to a ground operations representative at Dallas. This rep got in touch with the station manager at Midway. The manager identified the glitches and miscommunication about break schedules. More agents were sent to the ticket counter to handle the situation. Meanwhile, Scott tweeted back to the customer “Hey, thanks for the catch, we’re going to get some people out there right away.” The customer replied back with an appreciation saying “I just saw a couple of people come up to the desk. The line is starting to move, appreciate you doing that.”

The manager found the tweeter in the line, shook his hands, and thanked him for letting the airline know about the glitches. All of this happened and was taken care of within 7 minutes!

How does the Airline do it?

This is what excellent customer service looks like. The airline did not have to push out review forms nor did they go for focus group discussions. All it took was monitoring social media platforms and responding to real-time feedback. Social media listening is the new power tool for every marketer and manager out there.

But Social media isn’t a small thing. Data keeps flowing in. How is this brand filtering through all the mentions and taking such swift action? They are ‘equipped’ with the right tool – social listening. Southwest Airlines’ social business manager, Ashley Mainz says “The great thing about our social team is that we are equipped to really help customers with every step of the travel process.”

The company has a glass-enclosed room called The Listening Center. This is the heart of their operation. The walls of the room are flooded with monitors. These bring in real-time alerts from social media conversations. The tool displays a green smiley for every positive comment displayed and a sad red face for a negative comment. And every time a negative comment shows up, the social media team jumps into action.

Social media listening is a key part of Southwest Airlines’ marketing efforts. They have expanded the social media team since January of 2016. The team now works round the clock to keep an eye on the brand’s online reputation.

And if this isn’t the perfect social listening example, we don’t know what is!

Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends of 2020

What a year! And we are halfway through. Owing to the unique conditions mankind has had to adapt to, there have been some shifts in the online space too. The most obvious change is the sharp increase in social and digital media consumption. Here are the digital marketing trends from this year that have topped the charts so far.

Digital Marketing Trends of 2020

Some of the trends mentioned here were ongoing which gained more traction during 2020. An example of one such trend is the use of Chatbots. Moving on to the more distinct trends:

5. Social Commerce

A chance to conduct eCommerce via social media platforms and on social media platforms. Yes, that’s a reality now and a trend that is gaining momentum. Instagram launched these “shoppable social media posts” back in 2019. But they are gaining more and more attention now. Data can testify for the growing popularity. 54% of social media users use these posts to research before making product purchases.

4. Micro-Influencers

We have spoken about the growing popularity of influencer marketing (especially micro-influencer marketing). Many of these medium-sized influencers, in specific niches, are being loaded with sponsorship offers. Of late, micro-influencers are also being pulled into ‘cause’ marketing. And it makes sense, as these influencers have real “influence”. Their followers actively engage with their posts and do follow up on all the updates posted. Adweek says micro-influencers have 60% higher engagement and are 6.7X more cost-effective.

3. Social Listening and Sentiment Analysis

Marketing tactics and strategies have always been based on trying to decipher what people want! Every marketer is trying to know what their target audience is thinking. And with increased online connectivity, bulk data is also available. The problem lies in finding relevant pieces of information. Machine-learning technology has made advancements in this scenario. Social listening and sentiment analysis help to analyze the reactions of your users, by scanning through millions of reviews and pulling out relevant data for you. These tools also evaluate your brand’s performance and provide a detailed report with suggestions on how to fine-tune your product/departments/strategies et cetera.

2. Speaking to Gen-Z in their language

Marketers have welcomed the newest group of buyers – Gen Z. Sources claim Gen Z makes up to 40% of the total consumers worldwide in 2020. Gen Z population grew up with technology, so marketing to them has to take a different approach when trying to speak to them. These young buyers are considered quirky, so marketers are choosing to market their products using a similar tone. If your brand is among the ones trying to target Gen-Z consumers, keep a few tips in mind. In the era of misinformation, these youngsters look for authenticity. They are concerned about their online privacy. And lastly, they appreciate content with some sense of humor. Gen Z’s preferred sense of humor has been described as “absurdist”. Take note of these while designing your campaigns.

1. Video Marketing is a Hit

If your company hasn’t been using video marketing as a tool up until now, it’s time to make the move. Video Marketing is no longer just an option. Don’t believe us? Look at these video marketing statistics:

70% of consumers have shared one or the other brand’s video.
52%of consumers say watching product videos make them more confident about their purchase decisions.
72% of businesses believe that video marketing has increased their conversion rate.

Videos are highly engaging, especially live videos. Live videos are gaining popularity as one of the most powerful digital marketing trends in 2020. It allows your audience to connect one to one live and interact. And that helps build the trust factor for many.

What you can see is that AI, technology, videos, chatbots are among the most prominent digital marketing trends of 2020. And we can safely guess, there’s more of this coming for the tech-savvy younger generation.

4 Ways to Improve your Share of Voice on Social Media

Social media is the world’s busiest place right now and makes the task of capturing customer attention increasingly competitive. There is a fight between brands to gain a small share of visibility and attention. Especially when there are over 52 million photos being shared on Instagram alone each day. Millions of Tweets are going out each second. And your posts are getting lost within seconds, hence the decreased reach. The challenge of increasing the Share of Voice on social media is real and increasing by the day.

What is Share of Voice?

The definition of Share of Voice is quite simple. You may actually know what it is, without knowing the exact term. Traditionally Share of Voice, as a term was used in reference to paid advertisements. But over time, it has evolved and now refers to your brand’s Share of Voice when compared to that of your competitors in the online world. Meaning, the amount of mentions your brand receives online versus the number of mentions your competitor receives. If your share is larger than your competitors’, it shows that consumers are more aware of your brand than any other. This is the dream of every digital marketer, for his/her company. So how do you get there?

How to Increase Your Share of Voice on Social Media?

A large Share of Voice is desirable but many have a hard time getting there. Here are some methods which, if followed consistently, can help you improve your Share of Voice on social media.

1. High-Quality Content

Nothing beats high-quality content which has the potential to go viral. Even if you’re not expecting it to go viral, quality content can grab attention and get people talking. Share content across all social media platforms that you’re on. Share visuals, videos, or even a small text but include a call-to-action.

If you are running a campaign, plan your content calendar ahead of the launch date. Get all your material pre-approved and make the process smooth. This aids a smooth transition for further steps like measuring results and planning future campaigns.

2. Be Active and Consistent

Being active and consistent is key to improving your Share of Voice. As we all know, when you are out of sight, you are out of mind. On social media, with millions of posts coming in every second, it’s your posts that can easily get out of sight. To cut through the noise, being active across your social media platforms is imperative. If you find it difficult to brainstorm about daily posts, plan a content calendar in advance and schedule your posts.

3. Engage with the Audience Members

Another foolproof way to grab and retain audience attention is to engage with the audience. Being active doesn’t mean only posting content daily. Social media isn’t just a content distribution channel. Your content may get lost despite all your efforts, however, if you interact one on one and focus on building lasting relationships, consumers will remember that. In fact, 72% of consumers expect a brand to respond within one hour of posting a complaint on Twitter.

4. Listen to Your Consumers and Lead the Conversation

You would notice that social listening is an essential part of all the steps mentioned above. You need to know your audience well to be able to produce quality content. Try to know their interests if you wish to engage with them. You have to know the leading and trending topics to create your content calendar and be active. Listening to and responding to the needs and wants of your audience is a sure way to increase your Share of Voice on social media.

Once you know the interests and expectations of your audience, do not hesitate to participate in existing conversations or even start new ones. Encourage your consumers to post reviews for your products and services. Share the stories on your social media platform. If your consumer posts a negative review, reach out to them and try to understand the pain point. Re-evaluate the situation after you have extended help. Share the story of how you reached out and helped a consumer. Build a community around your brand and keep it thriving.

If you are starting to build a strong Share of Voice for your brand, start with these simple steps. Before you start, measure your current Share of Voice. It will be easier to track your progress. Remember, increasing your Share of Voice on social media takes some time and consistency.

Tools to Track Top Instagram Hashtags

The hashtag is an Internet and social media phenomenon that could help your brand grow. Don’t be surprised. Think about any Instagram or Twitter post that you have seen without a hashtag. I’m pretty sure you will have a hard time recalling such a post. The reason behind this is pretty simple. This tool makes social media searches simplified and effective. And Instagram hashtags have gained legendary status over the past years.

Why are Instagram Hashtags so Important?

The story of Chris Messina and how the hashtag came to life is pretty famous. What is more interesting is how this “#” sign came to categorize and group vast volumes of internet chatter and information. Hashtags have grown very popular. And now it has become a powerful marketing tool for businesses, and even individuals. Matthew Ogle who brought the hashtag to Instagram says, “My job was to find ways to take the friction (out of searching the Explore tab).”

This overuse of hashtags has often been ridiculed and made fun of. Yet, when used correctly, specific Instagram hashtags help brands cut through the clutter and promote themselves better. Finding these hashtags can be a little tough though and not everyone succeeds in their search for appropriate hashtags.

Tools To Find Top Instagram Hashtags

We decided to extend a helping hand and recommend a few tools which could help marketers find top Instagram hashtags with no fuss.

Auris

Social listening platforms are a great choice for all your marketing needs which require insights. Hashtag hunting is one of them. Auris provides a thorough Instagram report which includes hashtag and keyword analysis. See which keywords are trending, being talked about the most, and the overall sentiment. When you set up a search for a keyword, the dashboard gives you a detailed report on the most influential people talking about it, and the demographics of the people talking about it. It’s an all-in-one solution for your influencer marketing campaigns too. Finding trending topics also brings to your notice the top posts and what the people talking about them. Filter out your preferred influencer based on influencer scores.

When you are tracking multiple hashtags, do a comparative analysis. Which hashtag is being used most frequently? Which one has more engagement? This helps you reach a larger population by placing your content among the categories which are being viewed the most. The best thing about social listening tools is that you can do much more than tracking hashtags. It provides you real-time feedback, market opportunity analysis, more leads, and much more.

YouScan.io

Though not much of a typical hashtag tracker, YouScan lets you analyze images. YouScan does not explicitly mention hashtag tracking but it does include some features of social media monitoring. Their auto-categories feature streams and picks the most relevant information from a large stream of mentions.

Iconosquare

Iconosqaure is a popular Instagram management tool. This platform allows you to schedule posts, in-depth post-analysis, track comments, and respond to them via the platform. Iconosquare paid packs also include hashtag analysis. The app can measure engagement rates for the hashtags you use for your posts.

Successful marketing on Instagram needs a wholesome approach. A proper strategy needs to be in place. Quality content, tracking mentions, replying to comments, and constant monitoring go a long way to build a strong brand image. To strengthen this effort further, Instagram hashtags come in handy, they make your brand more visible and easily accessible.

Influencer Marketing During the Pandemic

The Coronavirus Pandemic has had its effect on everything, even influencer marketing. Some of these changes are short-lived while others are here to stay. Creators and influencers have also felt the wind of change during the pandemic. Most marketers are hesitant to collaborate with influence marketers during the pandemic. Indeed, in the current situation, marketing messages can get risky. Especially if you start marketing luxury goods to a person who maybe struggling for or even lacking basic necessities.

Capture Audience Attention with Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing, if done properly can really reap benefits during the lockdown. People are practically addicted to their social media accounts. Hence they will be consuming the content posted by influencers the most right now. People are also mostly staying at home. Marketers can employ the power of influencer marketing to connect with their home-bound fan base using genuine and authentic campaigns.

Remember the shifts in influencer marketing trends we were talking about, the winds of change? Influencer marketing still works provided the brands adjust and adapt according to the shifts. The pandemic has led people to change their purchase behavior. Brands and influencers need to figure out a way to show how the product fits into the new daily routine. Here we explored some ways influencers marketing could benefit your brand during the pandemic.

How can Influencers Help?

Let’s look at two positive influences on influencer marketing which could make it boom during this period. First, the way the audience now receives communication has altered. So all the traditional outdoor marketing is out. Social media and online advertising are in. Second, the pandemic has brought people together and garnered a sense of togetherness. Influencers can take advantage of this emotional bonding and make the most of it. An influencer marketing campaign can work wonders to help your brand gain the right footage if done correctly.

1.Social Listening and Opinion Mining

When you have plans to collaborate with an influencer, using tools like social listening and sentiment analysis will come in handy at various stages. Social listening can help you find the right influencer. It will also help you read the mood of your audience. This analysis is key to a successful campaign. If you go wrong with the analysis, the campaign could backfire. It’s important to study your target audience. And since your influencer and you are in the same industry, chances are your target audience members already follow them. Hence educate your influencer about your strategy and expectations and your estimates of the current mood of the public. If the influencer goes off-script and makes unsubstantiated claims it will cause more harm than good.

2. Goodwill

Conventional influencer marketing campaigns are designed to promote products/brands/services. But consumers may actually get turned off by marketing messages and advertising spoofs. They will not expect businesses to stop advertising, but they want them to be more sensitive to the situation. Consumers also want to know about the positive steps brands are taking during these times.

This is a good time to build a positive brand image by involving influencers and promoting charitable events. You could also build a campaign around the recent social causes and show your brand’s support for something like #MeToo or the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This would help you to build brand awareness and consumer goodwill among your target audiences.

3. Extend Support

As we mentioned earlier, it is imperative that you listen to your customer base in real-time and keep tracking the conversations which mention you. You would find many of your audience members asking questions about the industry and your brand. Collaborating with influencers and connecting on these virtual platforms also brings in traffic and visibility to your brand. Let’s say you are a coffee manufacturing company. You know your audience members are stuck home probably getting bored. Collaborate with a food blogger for a live recipe session, like a coffee cake recipe! You are extending help, building a positive image, and subtly promoting your coffee.

4. Structure Campaigns Appropriately

It must be apparent by now that influencer marketing can work wonders if you know how to structure the campaigns. One way to structure your campaign is to take inspiration from your competitors. Set up your social listening tool for competitive analysis and take a look at what the industry leaders are doing for their campaigns. You can also track industry news and plan your campaign content around the trending topics.

5. Use Humour the Right Way

Last but not the least, this is a sensitive time. While planning an influencer marketing campaign, you have to strike a balance between the right amount of humor and empathy. While humor is a great marketing tool, inappropriate jokes could backfire now. So be very sure to track the public sentiment before planning and rolling out your campaign.

Going by the trend, influencer marketing is here to stay. The coronavirus pandemic has caused a setback for every industry. But even in that, the influencer marketing industry is now getting more eyeballs daily. Make this campaign work for you by working with the right creator and the right insights.

Ways to Create Meaningful Social Media Connections

It’s 2020 and you already know the importance of social media. The last few months have seen a boom in social media usage like never before. The importance of building meaningful social media connections right now cannot be overstated. You might think it gets a little impersonal trying to connect via a platform that caters to the masses. However, there’s a correct way to build social media connections which will bring in desired results. On average, we are spending 2 hours 22 minutes on social networking sites. Inspiring ideas/stories, communities, and common causes seem to connect us with each other.

Why are Social Media Connections so Important?

Owing to the situation the world is in, both financially and socially, brands will have to reconsider a few strategies. This begins with how they respond to the shift in consumer behavior patterns. A recent report from KPMG shows how consumers yield power in the current scenarios. One of the retail trends shows how they want to buy from brands that represent and stand for something bigger rather than being driven by profits. Brands with a positive impact on people’s lives have grown 2.5 times than brands with lesser perceived impact.

All the data available simply shows us that today, brands who lead by strengthening their customer relationships have a competitive advantage. The online social space comes in handy and is effective to build emotional connections with your audience members.

At the outset, building strong social media connections might not seem easy and it is not. Adapting your online stance and adjusting according to the mood online mood calls for a deep understanding of your target audience. And this is not just for now. Even when there’s financial recovery and everything is back to normal, companies will need to understand their customers. People want to see how brands respond to their pain points, expectations, and reactions.

Social Listening helps to Create Meaningful Connections

The basis for building strong customer relationships lies in how well you know your audience. Your entire organization benefits from the abundance of data lying online. Social listening and sentiment analysis could inform you of what exactly your customers think about your brand. If they are complaining about a lack of customer support, you know which department needs focus.

This seems easy, right? Tracking customer comments and then drilling down to the pain points and solving them. Not always! 96% of the conversations occurring online are unbranded, i.e. the customers do not tag the official handles of the brands. Tracking these comments poses a challenge but not with social listening. This tool tracks all mentions, captures the sentiments, and presents a report in detail.

When you begin to understand the general sentiment, you will know what needs to be included in your brand messaging. Follow your industry news and empathize with your stakeholders, employees, and customers. Read into the sentiment and send out an emotional message at the right time via the right channel. This is bound to resonate with your audience. This move comes after you have carefully studied the sentiments and interests of your target market. In the long run, this move helps your brand gain the trust of its customers, employees, and stakeholders.

Whether you are launching a short-term or a long-term campaign, be sure to read into the social conversations first. If you review the past few months, top brands have all focused on building customer relationships. You can begin doing the same and your social listening tool will even help you formulate your next campaign.