What does the Likes Ban on Instagram mean for Marketers?

The decision to hide likes on Instagram isn’t a rumor. It is real and will be happening soon. Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram, recently mentioned that the feature which hides the number of “likes” from the public eye has already been rolled out in many countries and is currently being rolled out in the US as well.

So what exactly is changing and why? At this year’s Facebook F8 conference a number of new potential Instagram changes were proposed and among them is the ban on showing likes on Instagram and the feature has already been beta-tested in a few countries.

Why ban ‘Likes’ on Instagram?

According to Instagram, this change was inspired by Instagram’s popular story feature where a post can be viewed for 24 hours only and the views are visible to no one but the account holder. Instagram feels this move will also encourage better mental health among users because some of them are developing the dangerous habit of linking the publicly visible number of likes on their post to their sense of self-worth.

Users tracking their Instagram accounts will still be able to see the number of likes on their own posts. However, users will now see reduced information, and will not be able to see the likes on other people’s posts. This trial was initially rolled out in Canada and has now successfully been rolled out in other parts of the world like Australia, Brazil, Japan et cetera.

How does this affect Influencers, Businesses, and Brands?

Instagram has been the playground of influencers for long. Some of them have even learned to monetize the engagement using brand endorsements and so, having Instagram hide their “likes” could impact them. We can assume that in the future instead of waiting for brands to request them to endorse their products, influencers would themselves have to reach out to brands to work with them.

Many influencers have seen overnight success with fake followers and likes. Instagram had previously taken steps regarding this and removed fake likes and followers leaving these profiles depleted. Furthermore, the death of Instagram’s likes will prevent brands from falling for fake influencers.

Social media platforms often change their algorithms, they too want to serve their customers better. It isn’t fair to keep worrying about the ban on Instagram’s likes, you know it is only a vanity metrics. There are better ways for you to check your brand’s performance like sales lift data. What’s more, it hasn’t even been confirmed whether or not this change is going to be a permanent one.

For brands and businesses trying to use Instagram for social media marketing, there isn’t much to worry about. A company’s own analytics wouldn’t be affected because they will still be visible to the admin. Moreover, measuring brand performance on social media goes beyond measuring vanity metrics like the number of likes. One area which could somewhat be affected however is competitor analysis. Although follower count and the comments will be visible to third parties, the number of likes on their posts will not be visible. This is not the end of competitor analysis though, however, a quick glance on the number of likes earned will stop being one of the quickest ways to compare performance.

There’s no need to lose hope, as social listening tools are still around and active social listening can still help you pull out comparisons from the comments. So you can always know the pain points your rivals are facing if you wish to.

Assess your Performance on Social Media

Social media is a great space where you can interact and engage with your audience and get to know them better. So if you are using social media to reach out to your target audience, you should use it to track your performance online as well, to learn what is successful and what needs improvement?

Tracking your brand’s performance on social media goes beyond tracking the number of likes and comments. The right way to get started is by tracking the right social media KPIs. You can measure ongoing activities over time or opt for measuring the success of a campaign or even an event that has a definite start and end date.

Steps to track your Performance on Social Media

Like we mentioned earlier, the proper way to get started is to track the right set of social media KPIs. To determine which metrics to track you’ll need to strategize.

State your Social Goals

There are many social media platforms and the number of active users on each of them is in the millions. Mindlessly tracking every Facebook post or every Twitter comment and trying to decipher the implication will only make you confused. Therefore, It is essential to define and know your goals first. What are you trying to achieve through these social media platforms? There are various platforms that cater to varying needs. If you want a platform that answers your questions, you’ll find that Quora is suitable for you. But, if you want to display vibrant photos of the merchandise available at your store Instagram is the place to go. Knowing what you need will help you choose the right platform suited to your needs like improving your brand’s performance on social media and also tells you which metrics you need to track.

Metrics to Measure

Once you know your goals, match them to see which metrics help you measure your performance. Here are a few suggestions:

If you wish to measure the increase in brand awareness and how far your message’s reaching, you should use track metrics like reach volume and exposure of your posts. Social analytics reports generally help you measure this data.

If you wish to figure out the psychographics of your target audience, gauging the social sentiment or tracking trends online can help. Social listening tools are a great help with this.

To find influencers and advocates, track contributors online. You could also make use of social listening tools to track people with influence scores. This will help you find a wider list of influential people – both hyper-influential and micro-influencers.

Monitoring and Reporting your Findings

You now know your goals and you are also tracking the required metrics. Use the initial findings to set a baseline for you to rate your performance in the future. Keep a regular check on these numbers. Use social analytics tools to run reports, compare the data with the baseline or measure them against what your competitors are achieving.

Social listening tools help you rate your performance as compared to your competitors. Just add your competitors’ profiles to the dashboard and you can run reports to get comparative data.

Once the entire process is set, you are ready to take your social media marketing to a whole new level. With these insights at your disposal, you can monitor the pain points of your brand and address them immediately, without delay. Your brand’s performance on social media will perhaps not show a drastic improvement in one day, but learning from the data, adjusting and improvising over time will definitely ensure that you reach your goals.

Common Social Media Monitoring Mistakes of most Brands

The Internet is a powerful space. You can’t afford to lose focus on the social media marketing front if you wish your brand to be a frontrunner. And while managing a social media presence is not the easiest of tasks, thanks to social listening tools, we can say that social media monitoring is practically the easiest of them all. You aren’t much likely to make many mistakes. All you need to do is set up the tool and engage with the mentions. Having said that, I want to discuss some very common social media monitoring mistakes which still tend to creep in. This could be because this is the first time you are using a social listening tool or because you switched to a new tool and the interface is different. Whatever might be the reason, we are here to alert you to some general issues you might face and help you to avoid them.

Not paying attention to Competitors

Competitor analysis is a vital part of your marketing strategy. Social listening tools are designed to meet this purpose yet many brands fail to take advantage of this feature. We understand if you want to avoid competitive analysis and focus only on your personal brand mentions. However, tracking your competition and your share of the market when compared to them is important to ensure your growth. It helps you find out their influencers, their pain points et cetera. There is a chance you could gain more customers by resolving the competition’s customer pain points with your offer.

Not Setting up Search Filters

The aim of any social listening tool is to gather all the data relevant to you, off the Internet and present it to you. Yet sometimes it is difficult to do so. Imagine if a company has a common name. Let’s say Apple Inc. is trying to listen to the social chatter to evaluate their social presence. If they use “apple” as a keyword, they are likely to receive alerts for thousands of irrelevant mentions.

To reduce the huge number of irrelevant alerts, the company can spell its name in capital letters “APPLE” and also add the website URL. To filter the mentions further, it is possible to add negative keywords. So the company can perhaps add words like “pie”, “cider”, “sauce” and so on as negative keywords helping them avoid common posts mentioning food items using apples, like apple cider or apple pie!

Not including all Brand Names

In the previous example, we saw how troublesome it can get for a company with a generic name to track mentions. Most times managers forget to mention all the relevant keywords. The addition of such keywords helps the tool to understand the premise better and narrow down the data furthermore.

Like in the case of the previous example, it would help to add keywords like “Apple iPhone”, “Apple Inc.”, “iPhone”, “iPad” et cetera.

Another very common mistake that occurs is a typo or two while putting in the brand name. It is essential that you be careful with this and add all possible keywords. First of all, you also need to choose a tool that allows you to add and track an unlimited number of mentions.

Not Tracking Industry News

It goes without saying that the health of your business depends somewhat on the external environment too. What is happening in your industry could easily affect your business prospects. A little preparedness can never hurt. And as we mentioned earlier, sometimes marketers fail to track their competitors, similarly, they fail to track the industry trends.

Keeping an eye on industry keywords, the niche market and the influencers within can be of help in many ways. Finding influencers for your next marketing campaign gets easier, tracking trends helps you advertise judiciously and to boost your brand’s image.

This list might not be comprehensive as we have tried to discuss only the most common social media monitoring mistakes made by a majority of marketers. If you are facing any other issues, you can always reach out to us.

Marketing to a Niche Audience

Gone are the days when social media conversations were open to everyone on the Internet. The trend today is to form closed communities, which are based on common interests and to interact withing such a niche community about specific things. Imagine having a group of DIY enthusiasts or a group of new moms who compare notes and share insights on the latest DIY project or on the ways to soothe and feed the new (wailing) addition to the family. What if you are trying to market a product suited to just such a group’s specific requirements? It could be a massive opportunity especially as such groups keep on adding new members. It could also prove daunting to a marketer to compose and deliver brand messages right to such a small subset of their audience. This challenge is called niche marketing.

Social media is a great place for businesses trying to reach specific social communities because, with the advent of closed groups on these platforms, more people are looking for a sense of belonging where they can collaborate and express. These specific social communities are more valuable than the general public feed if you are trying to reach a smaller group with a specific interest. Social listening to a niche audience fine-tunes your ability to gauge the minutest details of your customer’s preferences and to tailor your messages suitably.

Niche Audience

“Niche Audience” literally translates into “specialized section of the population”. Niche marketing has been helping the growth of many industries to a large extent. For example, we have seen spectacular growth in the gluten-free, vegan brands selling organic food products to specific audiences. Niche marketing also contributes in a big way to better customer relationships as the network is more closely knit than in other models. It caters to customers on a personal level, which in the end increases word-of-mouth references, the most effective yet inexpensive promotion available out there.

It is needless to say, however, that taking care of a niche audience can be tricky as it requires the seller to have honed experience in the area of the business or else one bad review can shatter the entire effort to build the brand and gain brand recognition. Similarly, good reviews, whether online or offline, help increase the brand’s visibility and recognition and grow the business.

How can Social Listening help with Niche Marketing?

From the thousands of posts that go online every day, the opportunities to become sensational or go wrong are a legion. But how do you steer your brand clear of such controversies especially as you serve to a handful of connoisseurs? Even a slight mistake can make them shy away and change their minds. How do you anticipate and respond to the needs and wants of these customers whose collective knowledge about your product/service is very high?

Your brand health challenges and customer insight management issues can be resolved together with social listening skills. The actual volume of conversation in niche markets may be low but every single word will prove highly meaningful, which makes it all the more important to listen to each remark.

When you are marketing to a niche segment, research is key. These members may or may not discuss the issue in public on each other’s Facebook feeds. Listening in to group conversations thus becomes vital in importance. These members offer unfiltered reviews/accolades/complaints online and sometimes anonymously. As you monitor the issues and address them, it is essential that you advertise the fact that you are listening and you are putting in the effort to make the necessary changes. Note how the perception changes. A social listening tool comes handy with its ability to track sentiment over a period of time. One great use of social listening tools within this division is tracking micro-influencers within the subset of your micro-audience.

Social media platforms have millions of users naturally providing massive opportunities for marketing. But brands that can zero in on the needs of a niche segment are more likely to succeed in identifying their target audience and building a loyal customer base faster.

Use Social Listening to go beyond Basic Customer Care

The scope of social media for business research purposes is vast, but most brands usually fail to look beyond its basic utility or leverage its potential. Social listening tools can offer services beyond customer care insights and reputation management. Leading brands have moved beyond just listening in – they are using the data derived in their favor to lead the market. Let’s see how they are doing this.

Social Listening to Drive Innovation

Public sentiments expressed on social media help brands learn about customer needs and pain points. Customers actively express their needs and opinions on social media, mentioning a particular brand or an industry as a whole. These comments help to shape industry/market trends. Social listening to these comments or mentions can help brands come up with and offer innovative solutions to their customers. Any brand which can offer a unique/innovative solution is naturally a winner in any industry, gaining a larger market share and maximizing their profits.

It is always good to know what is affecting your customers’ satisfaction negatively. Knowing about their needs and acting on them helps to increase their trust in your brand. Giving your brand a competitive edge over the competition using innovative means to gain a loyal customer base and build a positive brand image. An inspiring example of a brand that used social listening to cater innovatively to the needs of their customers is Netflix. We are talking about the Netflix socks which were an instant hit, for all the right reasons.

Listening to Interests across Channels

Social media does not work in isolation. People actively posting and sharing content on Facebook are also present on other sites, engaging with TV commercials, billboards and commenting on them. Hence social listening goes beyond tracking the activity around a specific hashtag or keyword. Monitoring overall social sentiment across channels may give you the little pieces needed to put the jigsaw puzzle together to form the big picture, which helps you derive actionable insights into improving your CX.

Become more Customer-Centric

Customers expect brands to be more customer-centric. Forbes reported that companies that offer superior customer experience bring in 5.7 times more revenue than others. Savvy customers of the day know what they want. They would switch over easily to another brand if they don’t feel your brand is integrating their needs into your offerings.

Brands that want to succeed need to adapt to the individual preferences of their customers. Social listening makes it easier for brands to be receptive to the needs of their customers and to react in time. Tracking trends and sentiments online can help a brand gauge the general interest before investing in full-blown research about the psychographics of its customer base.
Social listening is about tracking all the key conversations happening on social media. When a comment or conversation concerns you, your brand, a keyword/trend you are interested in or even an industry; your social listening tool can zero in on it – in the vast sea of what happens every day on the Internet. The tool then organizes and presents the relevant data and insights to you. Act on them to derive an array of benefits from this real-time feedback and gain an enormous advantage by going beyond customer care to ensure true customer satisfaction. Keep following this space for more such insights.

How to Anticipate and Track Trends Online

The growth of social media has been explosive in the last decade and with all this flux of digital networking, it has become a way of life to have these sites set, if not dictate trends. You must have noticed savvy brands keeping up with the trends in their posts and wished you knew a way of anticipating trends that would take off. It is crucial that you understand your customers and their whims before others get the clue and move in. Well, trend monitoring is possible and is easy enough. Paying close attention to the world of social media and the social sentiment online makes trend monitoring possible for everyone.

Social listening for Trend monitoring

Most people are connected to their phones throughout the day. They spend more time with the phone than what they spend seeing billboards and TV commercials. Hence it is only natural that social media platforms have become the new face of sales and marketing. To compete within the social media sphere you have to stay ahead in terms of knowing what people prefer, what is trending and thereby invest time in trend monitoring and in analyzing it further. Trend monitoring opens up a lot many avenues in social media marketing.

Track Trends and Investigate

An easy way would be to log in to Twitter and to simply browse through their trending list. But know that not all trends are important for you. Some trends may seem an amazing fit for your upcoming campaign but before you dive in, think through it. Was it started by a fluke? Who all are talking about it? Will it last long enough for your campaign to completely capitalize on it?

How to separate Useful Trends from the Data Ocean?

With millions of users active on social media round the clock, data is an ocean of uncleaned collection and so it is difficult to browse through everything to pick up the relevant bits. Yet with the help of social listening tools, trend monitoring gets easier.

Sentiment Analysis and Trending Topic Cloud

Extracting the relevant trending topics from within the data ocean can be done using a social listening tool providing the required sentiment analysis and trending topic cloud. The social sentiment is one of the best available metrics for gauging the true popularity of a trending event/topic. This exercise is particularly important because a topic might be trending for all the wrong reasons and you need to steer clear of using such topics in your campaigns or promotional messages et cetera.

Keep watching for Trend Spikes

Not all trends are suitable for your brand all the time but keeping a check on spikes in trends can never hurt. A trend that might not be relevant to your brand message may become so later on. For instance, #tealpumpkinproject has been trending during Halloween for the past couple of years. This was started to offer a solution to families with children having food allergies. The teal pumpkin indicates non-food treats so kids are not offered any candies. In general, not all food brands would likely be tracking #tealpumpkinproject. But candy companies need to explore this trend if they need to keep the sales up in a world where candies with possible allergens aren’t allowed.

Keeping up with trends isn’t a competition but it is good to stay aware when you are managing the social media side of marketing for a brand. We do hope that you possess an arsenal of social analytics tools, which can help you with your quest in trend monitoring.

Grow your Business in the Holiday Season with Social Listening

The holiday season is fast approaching which means people will shop. Are you prepared? Are you worried about all the offline preparation, online promotions and the handling of social media required? This is the time your customers are glued to their monitor screens, ready to spend their dollars on gifts for themselves and others. They are looking online for unique products, reading reviews, browsing online catalogs all the time and making purchase decisions. How are you going to grab their attention amidst all the noise? Social media can be of great help as social listening tools come to your aid in the holiday season. With the right planning and the right tools, you can be more than prepared.

Setting up Holiday Season Marketing with Social Listening Tools

With Hannukah, Christmas and the New Year around the corner, gift shopping becomes the obvious focus of most people. It is necessary to pay close attention to what your audience is looking for because preferences keep changing and so do trends. Social listening tools can easily turn into the mirror on the wall which tells you what the public is most excited about, their deepest wishes and needs.

Planning and scheduling posts

At this time of the year, you’ve got your hands full and you tend to slack a little on your social media marketing efforts. However, that is practically the last thing you should be doing in today’s wired world which has many people baring their souls online. The holiday season, shopping and social media are like the Trinity. The more you post and engage, the more you are visible and more the sales for you.

To make things easier, we suggest you create a social media calendar, work on the posts beforehand and keep them scheduled so you don’t have to manually do it all the time. Also, keep the theme of your posts coherent and uniform. Your stories and posts can display similar products in varying setups and so on.

Online promotions and ads

The marketplace will get busier the more you wait. If you wish to put out promotional posts and advertisements it is advisable that you start working on them and get them submitted for approval. It is advisable to schedule the start and end dates for your ads, there’s no risk of launching early in case you schedule the dates but submit them for approval. Waiting until the last moment may get the post delayed because some sites might take longer to approve.

Don’t miss out on the trends

People never fail to express their excitement over social media and use a lot of hashtags and keywords in doing so. Social listening during the holiday season becomes more important because of this. Monitoring will help you stay updated and understand what new trends are gathering steam and why. A detailed analysis can even help you use the insights for future marketing efforts or campaigns. Some hashtags that run very popular every holiday season include:

#Holidays

#Christmas

#HomeDecor

#Halloween

#Fall

#ShopLocal

Top trending hashtag -holidays, during the holiday season — Picture Courtesy: Instagram

Social Engagement

Like we mentioned earlier, people are shopping online these days and the holiday season is when the marketplace is bustling. Hence, people are bound to browse through and ask questions if they are intrigued by your products. If you are not around to answer their queries they will not wait for long and you could miss out on prospective customers. Social listening tools help you keep tabs on all mentions and can alert you across your mobile devices the moment you receive a mention. This way you don’t have to be always on your toes and yet can engage with your audience immediately.

The holiday season gets really exciting on all fronts, doesn’t it? With all the tips here, we hope you will have a great social media marketing strategy in place this year. We wish you a great holiday season ahead.

Can Social Listening be useful for Financial Services?

Social media platforms today essentially play a variety of roles in today’s world, like a marketplace, a research database or a user’s journal where someone can share their experiences. 74% of consumers use social media to make their purchase decisions. Sadly, many brands within the Financial services industry are quite reluctant to engage with social media and exploit the benefits of doing business using them. But those who adopted it are reaping the benefits. In our post today, we try to break down how financial services companies can leverage social listening tools to serve their social media strategy.

Understanding Market Needs within the Financial Services Industry

Understanding the needs of the audience is a must for any business and the financial services brands are no exception to the need to perform thorough research. Brands have been using traditional methods like focus groups, surveys, and questionnaires to derive valuable insights into customer expectations. Financial services can deviate from this traditional methodology and use social listening to critically analyze what people say or think when they say words like “bank”, “loans”, “credit cards” etc online.

Social listening can be surprisingly helpful in studying economic trends with the social data available online. European Central Bank’s study says Twitter can be an economically significant predictor of the international stock market sentiment.

Competitive Analysis

People often compare rival brands when discussing financial instruments online, where people talk about which plan has better returns, lower interest rates et cetera. Social listening helps you compare one brand to another by monitoring what people think and through sentiment analysis. Newer startups like FinTech are becoming a threat to the traditional financial services companies, social listening keeps a constant eye on any development, FinTech trends and what exactly customers prefer about FinTech.

Improved Customer Service

How do your customers or potential customers remember you? Do they prefer to return to you for more business? We know that customers do remember you when your service was exceptional or extremely poor. In any case, improving customer experience is a constant journey. Most people get confused with banking terms, banking apps, investment plans – their clauses et cetera. By being impersonal, banks can’t help their own case or wow their customers. Social listening can always guide you through the friendly social media platforms to access and engage with your customers without them or you getting frustrated. Many customers post about their confusion on Twitter and other places. By monitoring these posts, and engaging with them to giving tips even if they are not your current customers can help your company gain more visibility, a better online image, and more marketing qualified leads.

Successful Marketing Campaigns

The general perception is that serious brands such as the ones in the financial services industry can’t be fun on social media, they can’t advertise in a fun manner or post memes. Not true, some brands have aced engaging with their audience. Some others have tried and failed. BNP Paribas created a community online for tennis lovers called We Are Tennis, and they do sponsor many sports events. However, their audience started discussing only tennis more often and unfortunately BNP Paribas is not in the business of selling things related to tennis.

In a similar attempt to engage with their audience, JP Morgan had tried to hold a Q&A session back in 2013. The hashtag they went for was #AskJPM. They wanted this Q&A to be related to “What career advice would you ask a leading executive at a global firm?”. However, the campaign went wrong and people started attacking the company about the then-recent court case where JPM was fined $920M.

It is difficult for financial companies to come up with creative campaigns to attract new clients, at least more difficult than it is for other industries. However, carefully listening to your customers and engaging in appropriate research can be of help here. For example, Bank of America employed ample research before releasing boards on Pinterest to attract new clients and promote their “Better Money Habits” site. These boards would have lifestyle moments like someone buying a house or a car, and these were linked to the brand’s site which had educational content.

It is important to be available when someone has a serious need for money and does not understand how to go about seeking a loan. The same goes for people who are looking for investment avenues or saving schemes. Catching them at the cusp of their need is possible only with social listening. Social listening for the financial services industry can be useful at a corporate and local level.

Social Listening for Small Businesses

Recently, a member of my business school alumni group inquired if any of us had used a particular service and sought feedback on their quality. The only answer to this query came within 5 minutes, talking bitterly of a bad experience and advising strongly against using that service. I was reflecting on how there’s a lot of truth in the saying that happy customers may not talk about you much, but unhappy ones will even go out of their way to spread the word far and wide.

Word-of-mouth advice for or against a business can make or break a small business, unlike established brands that develop a certain amount of resilience against such attacks. According to the U.S SBA, there are about 30.2 million small and medium-sized businesses in the U.S, 90% of which fail. It stands to reason for us to say, that not listening to their customers must be count as a major reason for their failure.

Social listening for small businesses is not only important but also particularly effective. If you are running a small business, you could use it as a one-stop solution to most of your marketing needs, saving precious time and money. The market is filled with options from social listening tools ranging from free to premium paid versions, but you can try most for free before you make a final decision. Small businesses need to undertake social listening actively because unlike bigger businesses, they are closer to their consumers.

Why should Small Businesses invest in Social Listening?

Social listening helps a business to be aware of how what their customers think, of their products and services. Any company needs to know its standing in the market before it can dream of gaining an edge over its competitors. Being ignorant, of market trends, competitors and general public opinion, is never a good idea, even for popular brands. Nokia is perhaps the biggest example of a company that stopped listening and was decimated as a result. If it can affect big brands such as Nokia, small businesses need to be more careful because you do not want to lose your existent customer base, however small it may be. Social listening for small businesses can actually help them draw insights from their current customer base and take corrective action to rectify any defects/faults. Once you cater to the needs of your existing customer base, they are sure to share a good word with other people and it bears repetition to ask, what’s better than word-of-mouth marketing?

How to use Social Listening for Small Businesses?

The worst thing a business could do, in today’s wired world, is not to care when customers are angry. Small businesses risk everything in such a scenario. Customers when angry vent it out on social media platforms, which reach a million users. Not paying attention to negative feedback on social media can create a chain reaction on the Internet. One bad review can attract other negative comments and on many occasions, customers have even stormed ahead to call for a boycott for some brands. Even potential customers will be able to see these toxic messages when they use Google and look for the nearest business for that product or service. To avoid a massive crisis in an age when news travels faster than light, one needs to stay vigilant.

Social listening can help small businesses in a great many ways here. The platform allows you to establish an impeccable online reputation by enabling all of the following actions:

Market Research and Real-Time Feedback

Real-time feedback and the insights derived from them render social listening tools the most effective for small businesses. Normally, one would have to invest time and resources to procure consumer data like paying a hefty fee for a survey and then analyzing the data. Social listening tools extract the most relevant pieces of information for your brand from the largest source of free data – online networking sites, review boards et cetera. The tool even helps you to visualize the data with inbuilt analytical features. Real-time notifications help you to act quickly and respond immediately to your customers and this is key to your brand’s success. No angry customer would like to wait a month for your answer, they would just move on to a rival brand. Social listening is also an excellent platform to monitor industry trends, consumer opinions et cetera and thus proving to be a relatively inexpensive market research tool.

Crisis Management and Advertising

Advertisement tries to inspire the wish for a product in a customer through a creative message. In their attempt to be creative, many brands have faced public wrath. Sometimes, it is difficult to understand what would be perceived as creativity and what would not. Interacting with the online audience and obtaining their opinions before you release any controversial content is a smart solution to avoid a PR crisis. Some brands have faced issues with their ad campaigns like the one by Dove, with their shampoo bottles trying to showcase different body types and Antonio Federici putting up a print ad mixing sexual and religious sentiments. Both these ads created serious adverse reactions from many quarters and had to be taken down.

Customer Experience and Engagement

Even the top brands of today would have once been small start-ups. Their ability to provide customers with a unique and satisfactory product or service is the reason why they’re big today. However, this sentence tells us only half the truth. Even a great product coupled with poor back up and customer service can drive customers away. Social listening for small businesses helps you track the needs and problems of your audience and resolve them immediately. Most social listening tools create a trouble “ticket” which will be open until a problem is resolved. Multiple members of a team can access the platform, which enables an escalation matrix so more people can be looped in for effective problem resolution. This makes social listening the best tool for online media management.

Engaging with audiences across various channels from one centralized platform with a multi-user feature saves you a lot of financial resources. Social listening for small businesses is an apt marketing solution and one which is critically important for a brand’s survival too. You can now listen to consumer insights, engage with them, find brand advocates, support your recruitment and indulge in social selling – all of this from one platform! Experience the tool by signing up for a free trial.

A Lesson in Social Listening from Netflix

Netflix is among the top names that come to mind when talking about video-streaming and online media services and rightly so. The company is a powerhouse in all its endeavors – be it in delivering quality content or a strong digital presence. The company has witnessed a phenomenal growth in terms of business. The numbers are intriguing – subscribers of Netflix were a mere 22 million in 2011 but have shot up to nearly 150 million in 2019. An estimated 37% of internet users worldwide are Netflix users. Netflix’s massive success can be attributed majorly to two things – the quality of product offering and its top-notch marketing efforts. This company does not take a backseat on social media when it comes to paying attention to the audience. Here, we discuss how Netflix proves to be a fine example of proper social listening, audience engagement, and expert digital marketing.

Netflix

How has Netflix used Social Listening and Social Media to its Advantage?

Netflix has chosen an unadulterated, strong and bold marketing approach on social media. They know their target audience very well and their Twitter bio attests to it. See how they get their target audience to relate to their brand with the reference to Gerard Way. The brand caters to the millennial mindset engaging with and tracking conversations happening online.

Netflix uses Social Listening to invent in Netflix Socks

If you’ve followed Netflix on their social handles, they have always been an audience-friendly brand trying to post humorous and witty posts et cetera. Their gregarious nature does not stop just there, they have also been social listening into the comments and chatter posted online. Through these measures, Netflix discovered that many users fall asleep while binge-watching shows only to wake up several episodes later. To tackle this issue Netflix devised Netflix Socks, a pair of smart socks that sense it when the user is dozing off and send a signal to the device to pause the show.

No doubt, the project was a massive success and they won the Shorty awards for the creative use of technology. Besides proving to be innovators in the industry they also won the trust of their customers as being attentive to their needs.

Social Media Monitoring and Customer Engagement

Netflix invests a lot in social media and digital marketing. They post highly creative content regularly. Not just that, engaging with their audience is a part of their routine as well and they do it quite vigorously. Encouraging viewers to share their content with friends, tag them, participate in activities and polls posted via stories is all part of these activities. They are also keen listeners and their monitoring of pop culture trends has helped them with their social media campaigns. Netflix does not rely much on the traditional ways of marketing. When targeting millennials they are not afraid to follow the “trending” topics and add their own take to it. They are daring and are willing to get casual with the audience. They have promoted the concept of “meme-marketing” very effectively with their posts. By social listening to millennials, you would know which are the trends they love and like Netflix, you can simply leverage on them.

Netflix’s intriguing ability to think forward and adopt innovative social media gimmicks never fail to impress its audience. Paying close attention using social listening to what is being said online is also a big passion for Netflix’s team, and sure enough, the results show in their massively growing business. Netflix is a great example, but not the only brand to have used social listening so successfully. Keep watching this space to see us discuss others who are also doing great work to reap the benefits of social listening.