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The Business of Harnessing the Power of Social Media

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As business owners and entrepreneurs look to harness the power of social media in a shifting digital landscape, they will need to have an excellent grasp of social media fundamentals and keep up with evolving social media trends.

Social media platforms and channels continue to evolve, challenging businesses to adjust social strategies to capture the attention of target audiences, build brand visibility and generate leads. As business owners and entrepreneurs look to harness the power of social media in a shifting digital landscape, they will need to have an excellent grasp of social media fundamentals and keep up with evolving social media trends.

The sheer number of social media users makes a compelling case for businesses to increase their social media acumen. As of April 2021, social media platform users reached a global total of 4.33 billion – that equates to more than half the world’s population which stood at 7.85 billion at the start of April 2021.

On average, users spend nearly 2.5 hours on social media. Much of this time is spent on the larger social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok. This captive audience provides business owners and entrepreneurs a powerful opportunity to reach and connect with key stakeholders. The most effective way for business owners and entrepreneurs to do this is by adhering to best practices when it comes to social media fundamentals and making it a priority to keep up with evolving social media trends. The following are a few of the social media fundamentals and trends every business owner should either master or be aware of.

Know your audience

Today, competition for capturing the attention of target audiences on social media platforms is fierce. And, considering that according to one oft cited study, the average human attention span is eight seconds which is less than the reported 9-second attention span of a goldfish, brands don’t have much time to attract notice.

Competition for mind share and dwindling attention spans make it critically important for brands to understand who their audience is to most effectively connect and engage with them.

The process of knowing the audience includes determining what social media platforms they most use and researching what their ‘pain points’ are, what their needs and wants are and what content will most appeal to them. Surveys, customer data and social media analytics can help companies refine social media strategies to ensure the right audience is targeted with content that is relevant and personalized to them.

Find brand voice

Brand voice is defined as the distinct personality a brand takes on in its communications. A strong social media strategy starts with companies knowing who they are and what they represent. According to a Sprout Social Index survey, brands that stood out more to consumers on social media had more memorable content (40%), had a distinct personality (33%) and told compelling stories (32%). Sprout Social noted that “in all three of these aspects, brand voice plays a significant role. You can’t have a distinct personality without a distinct brand voice.”

Developing an authentic voice aligned with company branding develops trust and recognition with audiences, allows key stakeholders to get a clear sense of company values and connects audiences more deeply to brand messaging.

Consistently post content

An intentional social media strategy that focuses on posting content consistently keeps audiences engaged, develops loyal followers and boosts brand awareness. In the social media realm, lack of consistency is a sure way to lose audience interest.

Research from Hootsuite revealed the ideal number of times a day (or week) to post for each platform:

  • On Instagram, post between 3-7 times per week.
  • On Facebook, post between 1 and 2 times a day.
  • On Twitter, post between 1 and 5 Tweets a day.
  • On LinkedIn, post between 1 and 5 times a day.

To stay on top of posting regularly, business owners can develop a social media content calendar as a tool for scheduling out social posts each month. This strategy can help businesses plan for and tie social posts to holidays, recognitions and upcoming events. Using a content calendar to develop a consistent cadence of posting also allows companies to analyse what content is working and what is not so that the content strategy can be fine-tuned across platforms to ensure that posts most effectively resonate with and engage target audiences.

Engage in social listening

Social listening allows companies to monitor and analyse digital interactions and conversations related to company, product, competitor and industry mentions across social media channels. Talkwalker notes that social media listening gives companies the view from 30,000 feet by “pulling conversations from social media and analysing the conversations in aggregate for insights.”

Social listening can help companies understand whether mentions are increasing or decreasing in a given month, whether people are engaging with content, what is trending related to a specific industry or topic and whether sentiment/feedback is positive or negative.

Now let’s take a look at some evolving social media trends.

Video

The popularity of video content on social media will continue to grow. Consider that on average, more than 100 million video hours are watched per day on Facebook and according to data from Limelight Networks, user generated content such as videos on social media significantly increased in popularity, doubling over the past year to four hours per week.

Video content is also going short form. The fact is, most social media users don’t have time to watch videos that are longer than a few minutes, making the optimum length for these shorter videos about 90 seconds or less. Audience preference for short form video content is a major reason for the surge in popularity of video-sharing app TikTok which reached 1 billion active global users in September 2021.

Stories

Immersive and interactive, stories remain one of the most popular features on social media. The personal and ephemeral nature of these 10-15 second photo or video posts make them more compelling to audiences than newsfeeds. They are typically a vehicle for brands to more casually share the inside scoop on company updates and showcase products and services.

Instagram is one of the most popular platforms for this feature, reporting 500 million daily active Stories users worldwide in 2019. Currently, 9 other social media platforms have their own version of stories available including business networking platform LinkedIn.

Live stream

Live streaming is trending on social media now. Companies are using this approach to stream behind-the-scenes content, announce new products, demonstrate products, give facility tours and host live Q&A sessions. Live streams also allow businesses to inject more personality into their social media with challenges and giveaways as well as surveys and polls.

As a tool for real-time engagement, live streaming is a great way to increase brand awareness, improve and enhance communication with target audiences and gain a deeper understanding of audience interests.

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Entrepreneur Leadership Network Contributor

Juda Honickman loves growth, strategy and being creative with disruptive brands. Currently serving as CMO for Slinger Bag Inc., an innovative sports brand focused on game improvement, Honickman previously held senior marketing positions in global consumer and tech companies.

Sourced from Entrepreneur Europe

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Avoid These 4 Social Listening Pitfalls at All Costs

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By Scott Clark

Social listening enables brands to understand what their customers truly think about the brand’s products and services. By “listening” for mentions of the brand’s name, products, and services on social media, brands can remove pain points in the customer journey, resolve customer complaints, learn what customers like and what they don’t, and even learn what customers think about the brand’s competitors. That said, there are several things that brands should avoid doing when using social listening. This article will discuss the pitfalls of social listening and how to avoid them.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is a marketing practice in which brands “listen” for keywords, typically the brand name, the brand’s products and services, and its competitor’s brand names, products and services, on social media outlets. By actively listening for those terms, brands are able to rapidly respond to customer complaints, determine where the pain points are in the customer journey, understand what they are doing right, and where they are going wrong. Additionally, brands can learn the things that customers like or dislike about the brand’s competitor’s products and services.

Research by SmartInsights revealed that as of October 2021, 57.6% of the world’s population (4.55 billion people) use social media. The leading social media outlets are, in order, Facebook (2.8 billion users), YouTube (2.2 billion users), WhatsApp (2 billion users), Instagram (1.3 billion users), and farther down the list, TikTok (732 million users), Pinterest (478 million users), and Twitter (397 million users).

A report from GlobalWebIndex showed that up to 50% of social media users use social networks to do research on products and services. Additionally, a report from Statista indicated that 33% of those polled from the United States said that they have used social media to complain about a brand or its customer service. Given these statistics, brands have a huge opportunity to learn more about their customers through social listening.

Don’t Fail to Listen to How People Feel

Dean Browell, PhD, Professor of Digital Ethnography and Social Listening at the VCU School of Business, shared his thoughts on the true benefit of social listening: gaining a much clearer picture of the personalities, behaviours, and feelings of customers. “Social listening provides deep behavioural insights into the decision making of the online public while also providing the landscape through which peers find when they are information gathering,” explained professor Browell. “It helps to illustrate the personalities and behaviours of audiences and can be used to follow trends and patterns in both the audiences and their feelings toward brands, services, products, facilities, and more. Social listening seeks to provide the voice of the consumer and understand the volume and timber of that voice and how it influences others.”

Brands often get caught up on metrics, rather than paying attention to the feelings that their customers are expressing on social media. These customers are representative of all the other customers that feel the same way but haven’t taken the time to post on social media. “Listen to them — they’re telling you what products they want, how they want to be treated, and who they trust. And if you think those are just the loudest voices, then understand the power of those loud voices for all the lurkers looking for answers. Social listening can help you understand the customer experience and their perception of it — and how it influences others. That’s very different than simply how they navigate your website or find products in store (although they might talk about that too),” said professor Browell.

Don’t Focus on the Brand’s Official Social Channels

When brands focus on social media, they often turn to their own official channels, focusing on what customers post there, or how they respond to what the brand has posted. Often, however, the most revealing aspects of social listening will show up on customer’s own profile pages, or within other groups or communities.

“It’s understandable that brands would be focused on the channels they own first, but there’s a real issue with thinking that by mostly paying attention to who shows up at your official channels represents how people actually feel about you,” said professor Browell. “Yes, there’s things to be revealed in those interactions, but the context of those interactions is incredibly important — and showing how people speak to peers when you’re not around is crucial to understanding why some segment shows up at all on your digital doorstep. It’s too small of a focus group.”

According to Davitha Ghiassi, executive vice president of Social and Integration at Red Havas, a merged media public relations and communication agency, going beyond the comments that come to brands is vital to gain a fuller understanding of their customers. “Whilst much of your customer feedback may come to you directly via branded channels — research shows that 96% of the people that discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles,” said Ghiassi. “Therefore, looking beyond the comments that come to you is crucial in order to see the complete picture; and social listening enables you to do just that by tracking conversations including relevant keywords, brand mentions and even visual mentions of your brand (i.e. logo, product through visual intelligence tools like Talkwalker).”

Don’t Just Listen, Participate

The 2020 Sprout Social Index report revealed that 79% of customers expect a response within the first 24 hours after they have reached out to a brand through social media, and 40% expect brands to respond within an hour. Although social listening is about just that — listening — it also provides opportunities for brands to interact and respond to customers.

When customers create a post extolling the virtues of a brand’s products, that brand should step in and reply, thanking them for their feedback. When customers leave negative comments about a product or service, it’s the perfect time for the brand to resolve a problem and gain a loyal customer. Social listening is not just about listening to what customers are saying — it’s about participating, and having conversations with customers, showing them that the brand cares about them, and is grateful to be able to learn how they feel about the brand.

Brands must avoid being confrontational or defensive when they reply to what may appear to be negative comments left by customers on social media. They should leave a well thought out reply explaining that they are sorry that the customer had an issue, along with a way for the customer to contact them directly to resolve the issue. If the issue cannot be resolved, they should offer to immediately reimburse the customer for the entirety of what they paid. Once the offer has been resolved, there is always the opportunity to provide the customer with a special discount, buy one get one free, or something extra that shows that the brand cares about the customer’s feelings.

“Social listening not only offers a powerful means of identifying and directly addressing comments, questions or concerns surrounding your brand or product — it also allows you to look to them for insights that can help improve the overall customer service strategy,” explained Ghiassi. “For example, by creating pro-active content that can live across channels and addresses frequently asked questions sourced via social.”

Don’t Fail to Set Goals for Social Listening Initiatives

Many brands begin social listening initiatives without setting any specific goals or KPIs. Not only do specific goals require different practices, but without goals or KPIs it becomes impossible to gauge the effectiveness of social listening initiatives.

Depending on the goals that have been set for social listening initiatives, brands can gain a much deeper understanding of their customers’ needs and desires, how they feel about the brand in general, or how they feel about specific products and services, than they can through other channels. “Goals of social listening can be incredibly varied,” said professor Browell. “Social listening could help inform a brand of their actual brand health, it could provide insight into how their target audiences (B2C or B2B) make decisions and therefore inform decision paths, it can help validate and enhance personas, it can help with recruitment and retention, it can illuminate crucial geographic differences, it can enrich other research including making big data more valuable with rich insights, it can help in product development and adoption…honestly, the applications are as endless as a market research tool, the only difference is social listening also informs you on what the public will find when they look for peer input — something that a survey or focus group can’t fundamentally confirm.”

Final Thoughts

Social listening can be a very effective tool that enables brands to get to know their customers on a more personal, emotional level — when it is done correctly. Brands must set goals for their social listening initiatives in order to reap the most benefits, listen to how their customers feel, and learn to empathize with what they are hearing. They must not make the mistake of only listening to what is posted on the brand’s own official social media channels, and they must participate, rather than just listen, responding to customers when appropriate. Finally, brands must take action based on the insights that social listening has revealed, and ultimately, improve the customer journey.

Feature Image Credit: Adobe

By Scott Clark

Sourced from CMS Wire

 

 

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7 ways to use data to create better social media content

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Lauren Cover

The social media content calendar is the crux of every social media marketer’s strategy. When done well, content brings your audience closer to your brand, demonstrates your brand’s personality and most importantly, supports your goals.

But what really drives your KPIs?

What is it that your audience feels when they come across your content that then converts to a like, a share or a link click? Why do they feel that?

And how can you continue developing fresh content that replicates success?

You can find the answers to those questions in your social media data. However, according to the Sprout Social Index™, only 49% of marketers are using data to create social media content.

Reporting on social data is not just about understanding whether you reached your goals and learning what worked or didn’t. On a deeper level, data analysis and reporting are about spinning insights into creative social media content that resonates with your audience more deeply and gives you a competitive advantage.

Keep reading to learn how to create content for social media marketing and supercharge your strategy using data as your inspiration.

1. Determining what worked and what didn’t is all relative

Content should always be aligned to a specific goal. If you’re creating content just because an idea seems fun, that could work out, but what’s your objective? At what stage of the marketing funnel does that content fall?

Ground your content strategy with intention and measurable objectives. Without those, it’s going to be awfully hard to know what data to look for that will show you if that content “worked.”

Create more effective social media content by first making sure you know which KPIs are the right ones. That way when you report back on content performance, you can hone in on the essential data, understand what happened and investigate why.

If you need a little help with content ideas or deciding on your KPIs for each stage of the funnel, check out our social media metrics map!

2. Identify top-performing posts by goal

The starting point for your content inspiration should be your top-performing content and as we’ve already pointed out, success is all relative to your goals. With analytics tools like Sprout Social, you can view performance data post-by-post, sort by KPIs and efficiently determine which content to create more of.

Let’s say you’re launching a new and improved product or service. Look back at your last product launch and past product content performance on social. Here’s how you might break down your evaluation of that content:

Goal: Drive conversion

Social KPIs: Link clicks and click-through rate

Analysis of top-performing content:

  • Evaluate the factors that contributed to your audience engaging and driving those KPIs.
  • Did you use snappy CTAs or were they more direct?
  • What accompanying creative assets did you use and how might they have influenced your audience’s actions?
  • Did you try something new with your content format or stick with a tried-and-true method?

If you can at least hypothesize the answers and establish patterns, you can apply your insights, build a flexible content framework and replicate your success.

3. Analyze your low-performing posts

It’s easy to focus on success, but it’s equally important to know which kinds of content might repel your audience. Continuing to spin your wheels on content that has little-to-no value for your audience is a lose-lose situation. In fact, 45% of consumers will unfollow a brand due to irrelevant content.

Sprout social index data: why consumers unfollow brands on social

If you want to be best in class, examine what is not working and diagnose why. Was a CTA missing? Is the content feel off-brand or irrelevant? Has your audience seen the content before? Was the platform the right place for this content type?

If you have a single post in a month that doesn’t perform to your standard, that doesn’t mean you should immediately throw that content out altogether. Instead, look for patterns over time, just as you would for successful posts.

Concerned about content performance plateaus? Use this checklist to jumpstart your content strategy and bounce back.

In a social media management tool like Sprout, you can retroactively add tags to your posts. This can help you keep track of the posts and content types that continue to underperform. Then, you can analyze that tag data to find commonalities that point to low performance and determine which content to discontinue.

4. Always look at engagement and sentiment

Engagement metrics aren’t always an indication that you met a goal, but they do indicate quite a bit about your audience and how to create social media content for them. Consumers revere brands that know how to engage their audience as best in class on social, according to the Sprout Social Index™. But going a layer deeper,  sentiment, feelings and emotions are what drive a person’s reaction to your content.

Social is a really important tool for our organization and Sprout has helped us gain a much better understanding of who our audience is and what they are looking for from us. Being able to publish content in a way that is responsive to when and why our audience is engaging with the content has improved our engagement metrics.
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Darcy Young
Director of Social Media, Teach for America

On some platforms, like Facebook and LinkedIn, people can choose different reactions beyond the traditional “like,” which can give you a better idea of how and why the post resonated. Sometimes, people will even tell you what they like, so always check the comment section.

 

Engagement rates speak to the relevance of your content and track how actively involved with your content your audience is. If you have a smaller audience, relevance is especially important in building brand awareness and affinity.

 

5. Get inspiration from Google Analytics data

For 52% of social marketers, increasing web traffic is their top goal. Link clicks are a good indication that your content is driving traffic, but Google Analytics can help you dig deeper and inspire new social content.

With GA, you can see a breakdown of each web page’s pageviews, traffic referrals, conversions, page value and more. If there are high-value pages that you haven’t shared on social, use what you know about your audience and the kind of content they engage with to develop social posts around that page.

Collaborate with your other marketing colleagues outside of social to determine which web pages, blog content, webinars and other published marketing content to promote. Then, when you’re ready to publish your content, add UTM tracking to every URL you share. That way, you can track results in GA, report back to other stakeholders and refine your content as necessary.

6. Tap into brand-relevant conversations

Instead of solely using best practices or performance to formulate your ideas, use social listening data as well. Social listening can help you find relevant trends, themes and topics that are resonating with your target audience right now and ripe for content inspiration.

Sprout’s Listening and Reporting features have enabled us to dig into our content and topics in much greater detail than before, which helps us identify key hashtags, influencers, trends, and metrics in a comprehensive way.
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Aida Ruilova
Director of Brand Research, Analytics & Insights, Teach for America

In Sprout’s Listening tool, users can use Topic Templates to create and continually monitor conversations and perceptions about your brand, products, industry and more even. Once you’ve set up your Topics, filters and keywords can help you get into more granular details that will help you create engaging social media content.

Sprout Social Brand Health Query Builder

Let’s say you’ve set up a Topic around brand health and you notice that positive sentiment on Twitter has increased over the past few months. You can add a positive sentiment filter to hone in on the messages driving that up-tick and investigate what exactly it is that’s tickling people’s fancy. Then, use the insights you gather from those conversations to build content that continues to dial up the positivity.

sentiment analysis through social media is a great example of improving ux for marketers

Or, maybe you notice that there are recurring questions and misconceptions about the kinds of products or services you offer. That might indicate that you need to develop more educational content to fill your audience’s knowledge gaps.

The ability to explore individual topics like brand health, coronavirus, school fall plans and have Sprout provide key data in an easily digestible format (that’s also easy to share internally) has helped us present data more regularly and efficiently.
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Aida Ruilova
Director of Brand Research, Analytics & Insights, Teach for America

7. Look at competitor data

To stand out from your competition, first you have to understand them and know how you stack up. Listening can help here as well.

Set up a competitive analysis topic in your listening tool to find major keywords, content themes and hashtags in conversations about your competitors. With the option to filter by competitor, content type and sentiment in Sprout, you can determine what content resonates among your shared audiences, find customer pain points that future content can solve and discover new opportunities to differentiate your content and brand.

Stay connected and stay agile

Your audience’s tastes are not fixed, and neither is your audience. You can always count on them to change. But if you stay connected to your audience and continue to follow social data, you can continually find ways to create more inspired and successful content.

There’s more you can do with your data. Download this guide to learn about 40 different ways to use social media data that you might have overlooked.

Lauren Cover

Lauren Cover is a Content Specialist at Sprout Social where she writes to empower brands and equip social media professionals with tools for success. Her specialties outside of work include serenading her dogs, devouring buffalo wings and dad jokes. Read all articles

Sourced from sproutsocial

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Why it Pays to Look at Your Online Reviews

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By Mediastreet staff

People who run companies need to check out what their customers are saying about them online. In the long run this could stop a problem from becoming a total and utter crisis. Here is a perfect example: U.S. bank Wells Fargo.

Last year, the bank was fined a whopping $185 million in fines for bad business practices. However if they had started looking at what customers were saying about them long before the excrement hit the fan, they would have avoided the fines and kept their rather okay reputation.

Here’s how the New York Times reported what was happening at the bank over a number of years:

“For years, Wells Fargo employees secretly issued credit cards without a customer’s consent. They created fake email accounts to sign up customers for online banking services. They set up sham accounts that customers learned about only after they started accumulating fees.  These illegal banking practices cost Wells Fargo $185 million in fines, including a $1oo million penalty from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the largest such penalty the agency has issued. Federal banking regulators said the practices, which date back to 2011, reflected serious flaws in the internal culture and oversight at Wells Fargo, one of the nation’s largest banks. The bank has fired at least 5,300 employees who were involved.

In all, Wells Fargo employees opened roughly 1.5 million bank accounts and applied for 565,000 credit cards that may not have been authorized by customers, the regulators said in a news conference. The bank has 4o million retail customers.”

According to an analysis completed by customer feedback company ReviewTrackers, customers of Wells Fargo were writing negative reviews about the opening of fake accounts prior to the breaking news in September 2016.

Reviews hinting at these illegal practices were posted as far back as August of 2015 – more than a year before the news broke in the media. This analysis only extends back until August of 2015, however; with further research, it is possible that the reviews might reveal that the fraud was happening for even longer.

The research shows reviews containing negative sentiment from separate dates in August 2015 to December 2016. The following were negative phrases found in the reviews:

– 08/17/15: “wrong fees”

– 08/31/15: “unethical sales tactics”

– 04/09/16: “illogical fees”

– 08/17/16: “hidden fees”

– 09/08/16: “phony customer accounts”

– 09/30/16: “bogus fees”

 

Reviews from Citibank, Bank of America and Chase were included as well. However; these same negative phrases listed above were not found in any of the competitor reviews.

In addition to negative sentiment, the average star rating of Wells Fargo decreased month after month, with a 19.9 percent decrease from August to September 2016.

By looking at their online reviews they could have seen the negative feedback about the fees and used that as an opportunity to immediately correct the situation and save $185 million in fines.

We live during a time dubbed “The Age of the Customer.” Customers are more informed, connected and empowered than ever. For the first time, they are taking the power seat and utilising their voice through online reviews to talk about their experiences. It is a time when brands must acknowledge this shift and use online reviews as an opportunity to connect with their customers. And, in the case of Wells Fargo, to mitigate a large-scale business disaster.

You can hire a company to “listen” for you, like ReviewTrackers. They sell customer feedback software that collects review data from 85+ review sites to surface customer insights that enable brands to listen, comprehend and make data-driven decisions about what their customers truly need or want.

But you don’t necessarily have to hire a company to “listen” for you. But you need to do some listening yourself. Stay on top of feedback and you may stop a small problem from becoming all-out bedlam.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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