Empower my brand
Empower my brand

The Road to Measuring Brand Awareness

In the modern world, establishing one’s digital presence is one of the most followed marketing strategies. Setting a success meter and gauging marketing ROI by trying to measure brand awareness might seem a waste of time to some. But measuring brand awareness is not about counting one’s total number of likes and shares. It’s the measure of a consumer’s ability to recall your brand and their awareness of your core products or services, which empowers your brand image.

Spreading brand awareness is key. A consumer who isn’t aware of your product will not know where to find you even when they are willing to buy a product like yours. Companies spend fortunes to push their brand into the public arena. Sponsorships, personal events, logos, and slogans are all an effort to make their brand’s image stand sharp. Companies like Coca Cola which spends over $3.3 billion globally on advertising, to Starbucks with their regular online events like “Tweet a coffee”, every company adopts a well-planned strategy to promote their brand’s name.

Coca cola brand awareness

Brand Awareness to Business Revenue – The ROI Story

Managers often try to relate their marketing budgets to the ROI. The catch here is that there is no direct way to measure how brand awareness increases the number of sales. However, a simple common sense approach is enough to see the connection. The more people know about your brand, the more people try it out, which would translate to an increase in sales. Also, good service makes your customers trust you, increase their loyalty to your brand, and spread positive reviews leading to more sales.

Companies which invest in sponsorship do so, with the aim to make their viewers and audience aware of their product and its utility. This is very useful when these people actually decide that they need it or want it, as they will recall the brand and its product without any effort.

Ways to measure Brand Awareness

Brand Mentions

Everyone today is using social media and can be found online for the major part of a day. As an inevitable outcome of this, online reviews are more frequent. Social listening for your brand mentions is a brilliant place to start tracking your brand’s online reputation. Any chatter related to your brand gives you an insight into customer perceptions. While positive reviews build your name and reputation, the negative chatter around your brand alerts you to things that are not going well or may actually be going wrong. Social media listening offers a complete package of tools for you to measure brand awareness.

You may listen for your brand mentions or your brand phrase/slogan or even a hashtag you advertised during an event or promotion. Keyword-based listening too can give you insights into your business, your customers and their perceptions.

Brand Reach using Content

There are marketing tools which help you track how well your online content is performing. They track the URL to give you a real count of your social media reach. Metrics like shares, retweets, engagement, clicks, likes, and comments are meticulously recorded. Some social listening tools have an in-built feature to record this along with overall sentiment analysis.

Success in today’s business world is predicated on your ability to adopt technology to support your business operations and strategic plans. It’s high time you added a social listening tool to your list of must-have technologies.

Connecting with customers via social media

Website Traffic and Direct Feedback

Knowing which sources drive in the maximum traffic to your site is yet another way to measure how well your brand is doing. Listening tools or even Google Analytics helps you see where your traffic is coming in from. Increased organic traffic or clicks from social media is a positive sign. If you are lacking in these, you can dig in and strategize to improve your social engagement.

Finally, you may also invest in social media reports to give you a better idea about your branding. Reports generally present segment wise data – the demography that most relates with your content or the geographical location responding positively to your service. First-hand reviews via social media listening is a great and inexpensive way to measure brand awareness.

 

 

Social Listening into the Cricket World Cup Buzz

The social media is abuzz with chatter about many of the recent happenings, like the anti-abortion laws, Indian elections, Brexit and so on. We at GenY Labs decided to pick up something for the sports enthusiasts. We listened to the social chatter around the keywords ‘CWC19’and ‘ICC Cricket World Cup’, and our found feed overflowing within just 10 days.

ICC cricket world Cup Official logo
Image courtesy: Wikipedia

The ICC Cricket World Cup

In just 10 days, the event has mustered over 17874 mentions. The cricket world cup of 2019 is the twelfth edition of this international tournament. This year’s tournament started on 30th May and ends on 14th July. CWC 2019’s number of participating teams has seen a decrease from the previous world cup where 14 teams took part. The 10 teams taking part this year are New Zealand, England, India, Australia, West Indies, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South Africa, Afghanistan.

Public Sentiments around Cricket World Cup ‘19

The public seems divided in its opinion, some positive, some negative yet a majority have tweeted with neutral sentiments.

Sentiment analysis CWC 2019

The masses seem to be put off mainly by the unprofessional umpiring and pouring rain at match venues.

Cricket World Cup Umpiring

CWC umpiring complaint 2

Poor umpiring - Chris Gayle

Cricket World Cup - Rain

Rain at CWC

Amidst all the irritation caused by poor weather and poor umpiring standards, Indian Cricketer and the captain of the Indian Cricket team – Virat Kohli could receive heaps of appreciation for his act of true sportsmanship. Everyone was impressed at how he urged all the Indian spectators at The Oval to quit booing Australian cricketer Steve Smith and clap for him instead.

Virat Kohli praise for INDvAUS

Virat Kohli True Sportsmanship at the Cricket world cup

 

The Nitty Gritty of this year’s Cricket World Cup

Besides tracking the comments online and the attached sentiments, we also looked into the details. Geographically, London is where the event is being most discussed.

ICC Location wise chatter

When we zoomed in, we found that these were the locations where the chatter was being generated.

Map wise no of comments

UK's chatter for Cricket World Cup

Detailed Location wise chatter

Who Spoke about CWC Online?

German football player-Thomas Muller, ex Australian cricketer-Adam Gilchrist, Indian movie star-Preity Zinta and many more have tweeted with much zeal (and nostalgia too at times).

Thomas Muller CWC comment

CWC Adam gilchrist tweet

CWC Preity Zinta Tweet

Bloggers took this opportunity to advertise the country’s food for the visitors.

Social listening icc

The topics that are trending are shown in this word cloud:

Word Cloud Cricket world cup

The ICC World Cup Final

The ICC world cup final match between New Zealand and England was quite an event. The World seemed glued to the screens, betting over and praying for their preferred teams. We tried to get this blog updated from last time with the details from last night’s match.

The World’s three most discussed sports events went on alongside – ICC World Cup, Wimbledon, and F1. With over 18000 comments coming in just a couple of hours (and this was only for the keyword “ICC World Cup 2019”), the Internet broke last night. News channels and even the official pages of Wimbledon and ICC found a comic way to talk about this online.

ICC and Wimbledon Chatter

ICC Wimbledon F1

The sentiments around the final match for the cricket world cup though were quite interesting. There was quite some support for New Zealand and many viewers felt it was not right to have the count of boundaries as the winning criterion. However, with England winning their maiden cup, the people seemed to be excited and happy about having a new champion.

CWC finals Sentiment analysis

ICC world Cup location based mentions

One of the most influential profiles to post about the event was ESPN. Besides the regular updates, ESPN cracked some lighthearted jokes about the win too. At one point, they congratulated the Aussie coach (of England’s team) on having won the world cup because the Australian team could not make it to the finals.

ESPN cric info

To conclude, the entire period and all the 48 matches have been quite thrilling,  especially for us. We had missed a lot of details while watching the action on the screen, which social media chatter kept informed us about. As informative and exciting as this event has been, we congratulate Eoin Morgan’s men for their epic win and look forward to more such events to cover.

Inspiring Examples of Social Media Listening Campaigns

The growing buzz around social media listening and monitoring would make some of you wonder if companies really implement these tools. Truth be told, in this day and age, social media has a stronghold in the lives of people. For any brand to make a mark, social media marketing becomes a must. 90% of marketers say social media is important to their business.

Social media listening can be an invaluable asset for social media marketers. In most of the previous blogs, we’ve emphasized the importance of social media listening.

Inspiring Examples of Social Media Listening Campaigns

If you still doubt the power of this tool, here are some examples from the corporate world. These companies tapped into social media to listen to the chatter and learn from the insights.

Social Media Listening informs Arby’s Ad Campaigns

For  50 years or more, Arby’s was known for its epic sandwiches. After engaging in a regular social listening session to learn what their customers think about the brand, Arby’s realized that their sauce is equally popular too. Almost about one-third of all the social media comments were about Arby’s sauce and how much people feared running out of it.

Arby’s decided to tap into this very sentiment and start selling their sauces by the bottle with an ad campaign designed around it. They termed this “nightmare scenario” ad campaign – “The Saucepocalypse”. And, the posters were designed drawing inspiration from the famous old apocalypse movies.

The benefits of social listening did not stop here for Arby’s. Next, in an attempt to engage with their audience, Arby’s asked their customers to share their worst sauce-less meal stories. The marketing team saw an opportunity for advertising in this. They picked these stories up and “The Saucepocalypse” posters were based on them. They posted these posters all over social media and on billboards in the towns from where the stories had come in. Soon, the ad campaign was a social media rage. Nearly 50000 bottles of sauces were sold.

Arby's Saucepocalypse

Social Media Listening for Customer Insights and Engagement by Hilton

Almost every hour, there’s a tweet mentioning Hilton Hotels. For a brand of Hilton’s stature, it is to be expected that most of their client base would be tech savvy. And most of them turn to social media to list their experiences and sentiments. To maintain quality service, it is essential for the brand to listen to its customers.

Hilton Hotels Social ListeningOn an average, Hilton hotels receive over 1.5 thousand tweets every day and needless to say, Hilton does monitor these mentions assiduously. Hilton tweets/responds to an average of 3.3 posts in an hour. There is a response team (guest service center) collaborating with the call center team. Hilton monitors all the social media handles for its brand as well as hotels. The effort is visible in the constant engagement threads over twitter and other sites.

There have been many instances of happy customers sharing a picture of their cozy room, or how Hilton hotels made their birthday special. Thanks to the use of social listening, Hilton has been doing that efficiently.

However, there are times when customers do put up negative comments too. Many Hilton hotels host important celebrity figures, negative reviews could take a toll on their firm. A constant eye on their social accounts has aided Hilton’s team to avoid major crisis moments and engage with the customers quickly to assist them.

Listening for Market Research by MoneyGram

Leading money transfer company – MoneyGram used social listening to test and deep dive into the study of their industry, product, and competitors. The analysts at MoneyGram were continually monitoring the chatter online to gather a sense of their share of voice on a daily basis. The insights helped them see any shifts in the market and then plan their future strategies accordingly.

Moneygram Max's World AdventuresThe analysis of the existent competition and their own share of voice helped them to critically judge the success of their “Max’s World Adventure” campaign. Their playful and fun campaign targeted at children gathered quite some attention, and the company noticed a jump in their share of voice that very week. MoneyGram has been diligent with their social listening efforts post the campaign too, gathering deeper insights in real-time.

By now, you must have realized that a vigilant eye on social media really boosted the success of the above-mentioned companies. If you feel inspired, try testing the waters using the free plans many social media listening tools provide. Maybe next time, it would be your brand’s story featured here.

 

 

PR Crisis Management using Social Listening

Every brand manager’s worst nightmare would be a PR crisis and understandably so. While it might take years to earn goodwill or to build a strong brand reputation, a single negative review could literally seal your brand’s fate. PR crisis management is one of the many use cases of social listening and comes in very handy to foresee, prevent and even completely avoid such disasters.

Brand PR crisis management

What is a PR Crisis?

“Publicity is absolutely critical. A good PR story is infinitely more effective than a front page ad”

–Richard Branson

PR crisis moments are not rare. Big brands like KFC, Starbucks, Pepsico, and Taco Bell have all had such crisis moments. Responding well and in time becomes the actual challenge.

PR crises can be disturbing. With the global reach of social media and the Internet, it takes seconds for a story to spread like a wildfire, even if it is just a rumor. Social media can be both your enemy and your friend when it comes to PR crisis management.

Every time a product or a service fails, the brand/company faces a backlash on social media. In 2014, General Motors faced such a crisis when fatalities occurred in car crashes where a design fault in the ignition prevented the airbags from deploying. Samsung too had its share, when the battery on the Galaxy Note 7 was found to overheat and even explode. Both GM and Samsung recalled their faulty products. General Motors created a special website just to educate people about the incident. Samsung used the internet, emails and text messages to recall its products on a global scale, even though the incident was limited to less than 0.1% of the volume of the phones it sold.

Prevent a Potential PR Crisis Before it Spreads

You will not be able to avoid crisis moments at all times. However, you could stay vigilant for the crises which could happen on social media. It is really crucial for any business to be able to extinguish the fire of a social media PR crisis before it blows out of all proportion. How can you possibly do it? The answer is very simple. Pay attention to the growing chatter online and respond to sentiments around your brand on social media using the most inexpensive and easy ways of PR crisis management: through social listening.

Planning Plan Before You Post

It is wise to brainstorm and plan your content before you post anything online. Also, be sensitive to the content you decide to post. Social media posts can go viral within seconds, so if you realize the fault in your post late, chances are that it is already doing rounds on the Internet, being shared onwards and going viral. It would matter little that you deleted your original post. If you have a problem planning for content or a topic to associate your brand with, social listening could be your hero. Listening to the comments around your brand or industry could help you understand the key interest areas of your target audience. Social listening also provides you with the opportunity to learn from any mistakes/successes of your competitors. Keep an eye on their social activities. Take note of their social media policies and how they deal with crisis situations.

Listen to Pay Heed

The most straight forward way to use social listening for PR crisis management is to listen to the chatter and analyze the sentiments of people. What do they think? Are they happy with your brand? Do you have a large following, if yes, how can you grow it further? If not, why not and what can you do to make amends and start afresh? The answers to all these questions come from social listening and are indicative of any future positive/negative reviews you might receive.

If you see negative sentiment building around your brand, the simplest solution lies in taking corrective action. Paying heed to the opinions of your customers and taking steps to resolve their problems will gain you a loyal customer-base while averting a possible PR crisis.

Is Your Brand Listening to the Millennials?

This is undoubtedly the age of technological advancement. Millennials are the first generation to have experienced technological development from the moment they are born and through their years of development. This generation is naturally tech-savvy. It is wrong to assume that millennials use social media for leisurely purposes. Many of them have actually built their careers around social media. The Gen Y is hard to please using the old traditional ways. Influencers, bloggers, vloggers – this generation is full of trends. Keeping up with them can be a challenge yet having them as your customers will help your organic marketing.

Millennials

Why Should You listen to Millennials?

The answer to this is very simple. Millennials dominate the social media space. According to IBM’s executive report “To buy or not to buy?”, 69% millennials said they would post a positive comment on social media if they are happy clients. In the same survey, 93% responded saying they consult online reviews and comments before they purchase.

These numbers clearly indicate that you get the best of both worlds from these millennials. As happy millennial-customer posts positive comments for your brand and another millennial consults these comments and becomes a prospective customer for you. The cycle goes on.

There’s a caveat though! These same millennials are also active social media users who can rip you reputation to shred when they experience bad customer service. As a cohesive group, with high levels of trust among its members, you can expect one bad review to bring about a great loss of business.

What are You doing Wrong?

Millennials are the new darlings of savvy marketers. If you are trying to get their attention and have not succeeded yet, maybe your strategy is not working out. This generation is a little tough to crack, as they are into multiple things – technology, travel, food, fashion, self-care et cetera. Social listening is a great way to get a sense of their interests.

A combination of traditional and social media marketing can attract millennials to your brand. Most of the time, companies keep hunting for tips to engage these young customers. Here, we try to bring you  some insights into what you might be doing wrong:

Building a Modern Perception

If you run through the social media account of any millennial, you will find dozens of trends, conversations, and pop culture jargon. This is a generation with high expectations. For someone who was born with a laptop on their lap, nothing is exciting enough if it doesn’t meet their high standards. If you stick to old concepts when trying to work with millennials, you can’t complain that they walked away.

Using social listening to track their conversations and understand their interests thus becomes crucial for businesses.

unique perception

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing can get tricky with millennials. There are many influencers and micro-influencers. Choosing the right person can make a difference. From among an army of influencers, micro influencers, and bloggers, you can choose the best and the most influential ones. Someone whom a major part of Gen Y considers an idol. Social listening tools help you monitor the most influential people talking about your brand or industry. Such people can be roped in as advocates for your brand.

Segmentation

Though we are speaking about millennials exclusively, this point applies to people of all ages. No two people are equally alike. They may have similar tastes, but they are not the same. As marketers, we often tend to create groups or segments on the basis of age or gender, etc. Every millennial has a different need or a different priority. They all have clarity on they want, but that doesn’t mean they can be treated the same as their needs might differ and they may seek customizable options.

If you are ready to deliver, how would you know about their choices? What customizations do they need? Social monitoring and listening offer the answer yet again.

In conclusion, with changing times, marketing tools and techniques change too. Make sure you keep up before you become obsolete. While marketing to millennials, start preparing for generation Z as well.

The Overall Sentiment around Your Brand can Tell You a Lot

Sentiment analysis holds up a mirror which helps to reflect the sentiments evoked by your brand’s products and services. Just as a person seeks feedback from their significant others on what they need to keep or change about their personality, brands also need to be open to feedback and to initiate change, if required.

Social listening can help you collect the social sentiment around your brand, followed by the application of sentiment analysis to reveal a surprising lot on what people truly think or feel about your brand.

Sentiments

Sentiment Analysis and Social Media Intelligence

Typically, sentiment analysis helps you get a sense of how people feel about your brand or your product. With the advancement of technology, it’s possible to derive. In fact, Facebook recently faced quite a backlash when it was found to be using sentiment analysis to manipulate people’s emotions, by altering algorithms to track messages which inject positive or negative posts in the feed.

Social listening helps you track all the buzz around your brand as well as that of your competitors too. Sentiment analysis steps in at this point to help you to:

Identify the strong points and the weak points in your performance and your products/services as perceived by your customers, like any strong negative sentiments about your product quality or customer service standards.

Exactly identifying the problem with sentiment analysis

Negative comments report that your customer service department isn’t your strong point because every time a customer calls, they are made to repeat their issue, and even after complaining several times their issue stays unresolved. You now know what is explicitly wrong within the customer service department and can institute a process for complaint resolution.

Judge the public mood before you get into action

Sometimes a novel idea can backfire. Established businesses with loyal customers can also come up with dud campaigns which never take off. Testing the waters to know about people’s perception could help avert a disastrous venture without hampering one’s reputation.

Current Trends and Choices

The best feature of sentiment analysis is how it keeps you informed on current trends and choices, throwing light on the positive buzz around them.

Manage and track issues before they turn into disasters

Sentiment analysis works in real-time to show you the early symptoms of what might be going wrong with your business endeavors. It can help you revise your strategy before a problem magnifies and becomes uncontrollable.

Sentiment analysis for Brand reputation-min

Sentiment Analysis for Competitor Insights

With social listening and sentiment analysis, a marketer does not have to hunt for information about a competitor. This is the best feature of sentiment analysis. You can get an idea of how your audience perceives your brand against your competitors’.

Learning about and from your competition lets you stay ahead and adopt smarter ways. You can judge your competitors’ strategies, products and share of voice in the industry and the amount of hype surrounding them and whether it is all positive.

In case, your industry is brimming with competitors, make sure you look into the details of every one of them to fetch strategic inputs which can help you create your own robust marketing plan.

In conclusion, it must be accepted that AI needs a lot of training before it becomes 100% precise when judging sentiments from comments made by humans. The technology is ever developing and in its present state offers quite an array of benefits already. Marketers today love the fact that the software is tenacious and can filter out hundreds of opinions, which a human might not be able to process in 24 hours, within seconds. This is what makes a social listening tool an essential component of a marketer’s arsenal.

How can Social Listening help Schools?

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

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

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

Social Listening - Schools

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

How does Social Listening for Schools Benefit You?

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

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

Millennials on social media

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

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

Key Insights using Social Listening for Schools

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

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

Build a Stronger Alumni Base with Social Listening

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

social listening for schools

Feedback and Crisis Management

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

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

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

How to Create a Social Media Report?

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

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

What is a Social Media Report?

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

Social media reports

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

Why do you Need to Create a Social Media Report?

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

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

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

How to Create a Social Media Report?

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

Stakeholders

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

Set Goals

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

Setting goals

Metrics to Measure

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

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

Time Frame

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

Presentation

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

Report Presentation

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

Conducting Market Research using Twitter

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

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

Market Research using Twitter Comments

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

Market Research using Twitter

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

3 Key Uses of Twitter in doing Market Research

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

Social Listening

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

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

Tracking Trends and Feedbacks

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

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

Know Your Competition

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

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

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

Social Listening Helps Track Event-Related Social Mentions

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

Social Gathering

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

Social Listening – Your Complete Event Partner

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

Event Idea/Topic Ideation with Social Listening

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

Buzz Creation

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

Social Media Monitoring

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

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

Feedback and Business Decisions

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

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