Use Social Listening for Influencer Marketing

A brand may claim any number of things. Consumers believe what their friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues have to say about a brand more than all such claims. They would also trust any endorsements by their favorite actors and sportspersons. This is the power of word-of-mouth and how much it is trusted. This concept is the premise on which influencer marketing plans are based. Influencer marketing is on the rise and startups, consumer brands and even B2B businesses are realizing the effectiveness of word-of-mouth. According to Social Media Today, influencer marketing content has eleven times the ROI of traditional marketing.

How does Influencer Marketing work?

The popularity of influencer marketing is primarily derived from the algorithm trusted by social sites that prefer humans over business pages. It’s also due to the innate tendency of human beings who like to socialize with fellow beings, trust them and follow their recommendations. Customers relate more to your product when their favorite celebrity endorses it or an industry expert vouches for it. There are tools aplenty in the market which claim to be good for influencer marketing on social networking sites but it is always wise to hold back and look at the simpler things instead, for a while, before making a hefty investment. Log in and simply browse through, try to find influencers and the people who have influence over you. This is a good place to start. For the next step, investing in tools like social listening platforms can be a smart move. It is a platform that serves the purpose of hunting influencers for you and meets a plethora of other marketing needs.

How to use Social Listening for Influencer Marketing?

Social listening only aids your native search process by organizing the data better. Simply put, you are browsing through relevant social media comments after applying the required filters. So, how do you get started?

Identification

Any social listening tool allows you to set up a search for specific mentions or hashtags. If this hashtag or keyword is related to your area of interest/business/industry, you would find important people from within that community speaking about it. Mapping their influence score and audience reach with the social listening tool tells you about this influencer. Now, based on their influence scores, a social listening tool tracks all the important people talking about the keyword and presents you with the data. Influencer identification becomes easy when using a social listening tool.

Learning more about the Influencers and choosing the Right Fit.

Once you have identified prospective influencers to work with, a social listening tool presents you with a complete analysis of each influencer’s score, community reach, no. of posts, and engagement rate.

Swedish watchmaker, Daniel Wellington, built its social outreach strategy mostly around influencer marketing, since inception. The company approaches micro-influencers to spread brand awareness. The founder believed that several micro-influencers would create more buzz than one mega influencer. Different companies adopt different strategies and social listening tools which are built to serve any purpose. Auris, for example, lets you look for mega or micro-influencers on the same platform. Filters within Auris allows the admin to search for influencers by their influencer scores.

It is always advisable to closely follow an influencer before you choose to go ahead with them. Social listening tools can help you monitor your prospective influencers, they can help you find the right fit, but it is upon you to prove a great collaborator and get the influencer to champion your cause.

How is Social Media Influencing your Customer?

It shouldn’t come as news to anyone that social media is continually growing in the number of its users and in terms of how much it influences people. People continue to shop online, and the e-commerce sales figure last year made up almost 12% of all retail sales as per Statista. With the continued expansion of online sales, marketers are doing everything to ensure the presence of their products and services at the top of the list.

One way to attract an audience is to adopt traditional advertising methods of print ads and billboards. But times have changed and those are no more really effective options to gain you visibility. Social media network is on its way to becoming the biggest marketplace of all.

How Influential is Social Media?

To put things in perspective we found some statistics. Hubspot says that 71% of customers are more likely to buy a product/service based on social media referrals. Another survey report by PwC says 45% of global respondents said that online reviews, comments, and feedback effectively influence their decision-making and shopping behavior.

How the Big Three Social Media Platforms can Influence your Audience

The three best social media platforms that can help you capture your audience’s attention are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These social media platforms are essential for your marketing toolbox based on your requirements.

Facebook

Facebook has the world’s largest active user base. With nearly 2.41 million monthly active users it also has the largest diverse audience. And despite the numerous controversies, Facebook has held its ground in terms of popularity. The company has had to rewrite some of its regulations and policies yet has seen a growth in its advertising revenue. Some experts have pointed out that the growth is slowing but Facebook still drives 50% of total social referrals.

Twitter

Twitter is quite popular with over 330 million active users worldwide. Twitter is one of the USA’s top 10 websites and hence is the go-to place for influencers and decision-makers for the latest news and trends. According to Hubspot, “42% of Twitter users rely on this channel to learn about new products/services, and 41% of them share opinions about products/services via Twitter.” The audience on Twitter also tends to be younger with over 36% of users within the age group of 18-29.

Instagram

Instagram has been growing slowly but steadily. The platform has now come to boast more than 500 million monthly active users. Its audience engagement rate has been measured to be 70% higher than that of Facebook. According to Ad Espresso, 80% of the users follow at least one brand on Instagram.

Social Media as an Influence

You may have known that these platforms are the most productive in helping you to impress your customers and to get them to buy your wares. But it is also essential that you know how successful brands are using these platforms and associated tools to make the most of it.

According to a study, almost 50% of Twitter users have bought a product as a result of a direct Tweet from an influencer. 84% of millennials are swayed by user-generated content and the resultant trends. Besides influencer marketing and trending content, word-of-mouth from friends and family both offline and online can be another way social media influences your audience’s purchase decisions.

Tell your Story

How do you leverage this incredible power that social media offers you as an influence machine? Social media isn’t only an influence machine, it also helps you find the right way. You can opt to monitor the trends or use a social media listening tool to track the influencers within the industry. You can opt to collaborate with them or tell your brand’s story in your own way keeping the trends in mind.

Clearly, social media has a large impact on how people spend their money. However, the online space of influencer marketing is really getting crowded. So, you need to act fast before the trend itself goes stale.

Top 15 influencers who participated in insurance discussions in India

Influencer marketing is being deployed by brands across industry verticals. Insurance is no exception.

The question though is about identifying the right influencers to engage with.

The best way is to find consumers who are influencers and are happy with their brand experience. The next best solution is to identify influencers who regularly discuss topics related to insurance and could lend “voice” to your brand.

We have used Auris to draw out a list of all influencers who engaged on topics related to insurance within India. Here is a list drawn from insurance conversations in August and September in 2019.

Authors & Bloggers

Here are some authors and prolific bloggers who engaged in conversations around insurance. They can be great advocates for your brands & initiatives.

Business Leaders

Business leaders who engage in discussions related to insurance and other financial services are good candidates to be followed. Brands can crystal-ball-gaze by consuming their publishing and tweets.

Others

Here are some other handles who engaged in discussions on insurance.

The Auris platform makes it very easy to identify influencers in each industry. Watch this video to understand how the influencer marketing tool works within Auris.

We will publish more such lists going forward. Your questions and suggestions are welcome!

What is Social Media Monitoring and Why is it Important?

Social media monitoring is the act of identifying and gathering information regarding your brand mentions and customer sentiments online. The sample size for such data collection is massive. It encompasses all the social media platforms, review boards, and messenger forums.

Manually tracking all the user-generated content about a brand is quite impossible. It’s impossible without software tools which can crawl sites and index them which make the content easily trackable and enable searches based on queries or using conversation strings.

Track Precise Content with Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring tools are designed to work with what users type in a query, using a brand name, a location, a general phrase or an event mention.

The tool uses Boolean operators to filter out irrelevant content and home in upon specific terms to precisely identify the relevant bits out of complex strings in a query. Some tools allow searches which get results from across sites, anywhere in the world and in different languages too.

Importance of Social Media Monitoring

The modern age is defined by the use of social media and the internet as a whole. In today’s wired world, every conversation is digital! In a survey conducted by The Advertising Research Foundation, FOX and DB5 (with a sample of over 12000 twitter users, both male and female), it was found that about 80% users had mentioned a brand in their tweets in the measured period.

This goes to show how much you would be missing when you fail to monitor social media sites for your brand mentions. However, if you aren’t yet convinced of the power of social media monitoring, here’s a list of some benefits of social monitoring:

Real-time Feedback

Feedback can be positive or negative. Both help to set your strategic direction and guide you on your path to success. Seeking feedback is a great way to invest in improving your product, service or overall strategies. Feedback does not necessarily have to be about your existing product. You can also take insights from a closed focus group on social media about a campaign. Tracking everyday brand mentions gets you useful feedback without your having to actively search for it. This real-time feedback is great as you can surprise your customers by covertly listening to their wishes and demands. Modifying your product accordingly and releasing it in as a new improved version would pleasantly surprise them.

One of the greatest examples of how a company listened to customer opinion to successfully turnaround its product comes from the world famous pizza restaurant chain – Domino’s.

Domino’s tapped into social media, gathered evidence of how a number of customers complained that their pizza crust tasted like cardboard and re-invented their pizza.

Identify Your Advocates and Critics

Social media monitoring gets you in touch with your greatest fans as well as your harshest critics. Embracing both can help you develop your business strategy. The critics help you improve, and the fans help you to advertise your brand. Interacting and engaging with both these groups makes them feel valued and who knows, maybe you can turn a critic into a fan. When you engage with your fans, you encourage and excite them about your brand all the more. They may turn into active ambassadors for your product and that can positively affect your sales.

At Par with Trends

Say you are in the food business serving Italian cuisine. Your town is hosting the year’s biggest food festival, and all the restaurants are vying to put up their stalls. This upcoming food festival in your town is one of the trending stories on social media. But you failed to catch the buzz because you did not monitor social media platforms and as a result, missed all the action. Popular trends related to your industry help you to stay informed and to plan your marketing efforts.

Social media monitoring is not a shallow activity for passing time. It falls under the umbrella of social intelligence. Once you’ve started with social media monitoring, gaining crucial business insights using social listening and social intelligence, isn’t so hard.