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4 Red Flags for Pinterest’s Future

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By Leo Sun

The social media company still faces an uphill battle.

Key Points

  • Pinterest’s stock has been hit by downgrades and price target reductions over the past two months.
  • It’s struggling to retain its top executives, and its insiders continue to dump the stock as it hits fresh 52-week lows.
  • The stock looks reasonably valued relative to its growth, but the lack of new buyout rumors at these levels raises a bright red flag.

Pinterest‘s (NYSE:PINS) stock hit an all-time high of $89.90 last February during the Reddit-fuelled rally in meme and growth stocks. However, the stock subsequently plummeted about 70% as concerns about its decelerating user growth in a post-lockdown market spooked the bulls.

Investors might be tempted to buy Pinterest after that massive decline, but they should pay close attention to four red flags which recently appeared.

1. A series of downgrades

First and foremost, Pinterest has endured a series of price target reductions and downgrades over the past two months.

Last November, Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak reduced his price target from $77 to $53 but maintained an “overweight” rating on the stock. In December, J.P. Morgan analyst Doug Anmuth cut his price target from $55 to $50 and maintained a “neutral” rating.

That same month, Loop Capital’s Rob Sanderson cut his price target from $66 to $50 but maintained a “buy” rating, while Citi analyst Jason Bazinet cut his price target from $48 to $42 and maintained a “neutral” rating. Earlier this month, Guggenheim’s Michael Morris downgraded Pinterest from buy to neutral and cut his price target from $46 to $39.

All of these analysts expressed similar concerns: that Pinterest’s monthly active user (MAU) growth would remain sluggish in a post-lockdown market, that it could lose its early mover’s advantage in the “social commerce” market to nimbler social media rivals, and that its online advertising business was vulnerable to competition and macroeconomic headwinds.

Those concerns are all valid, but investors should always take Wall Street analysts’ forecasts with a grain of salt — especially since they only lowered their price targets after Pinterest’s tumbling stock dropped through them:

PINS Chart

Source: YCharts

Furthermore, even the lowest price target now represents a significant premium to Pinterest’s current price — although that could quickly change if these Wall Street analysts hastily cut their price targets again.

2. More executive departures

Pinterest needs to test out fresh strategies to curb its post-lockdown decline in MAUs, which dropped from a peak of 478 million in the first quarter of 2021 to 444 million in the third quarter. Unfortunately, Pinterest seems to be struggling to retain its top leaders as its growth decelerates.

On Jan. 25, The Information claimed that Pinterest had lost at least seven senior executives in recent weeks. That list includes:

  • Corporate Development Chief – Gary Johnson
  • Core Product Chief – Omar Seyal
  • Creator Marketing Chief – Colleen Stauffer
  • Global Business Development Chief – Ravi Adusumilli
  • Content and Creators Leader – Silvia Oviedo Lopez
  • Consumer and Brand Marketing Head – Celestine Maddy
  • VP of Sales and Partnerships – Meredith Guerriero

All of those departures come just a few months after Pinterest’s chief accounting officer Lily Yang and Evan Sharp, its co-founder, board member, and chief creative and design officer, both abruptly left the company. That ongoing exodus, which coincides with Pinterest’s loss of momentum in a post-lockdown market, strongly suggests that the company could turn in an ugly fourth-quarter earnings report on Feb 3.

3. More sellers than buyers

If Pinterest’s stock was getting undervalued, its insiders should be buying up more shares. But over the past three months, Pinterest’s insiders still sold slightly more shares than they bought as its stock plunged 44%.

Insider sales don’t always indicate that a company is in trouble. But in Pinterest’s case, that lack of insider enthusiasm coincides with its executive exodus and raises a bright red flag for its future.

4. No more offers from PayPal and Microsoft

Last October, Pinterest’s stock briefly rallied after a Bloomberg report claimed PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) was interested in buying the company for about $70 per share in a $45 billion deal. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) had also previously approached Pinterest with a $51 billion bid in 2020. PayPal subsequently said it wasn’t interested in buying Pinterest “at this time,” while the talks between Microsoft and Pinterest fizzled out.

Pinterest has an enterprise value of just $18 billion today, yet PayPal and Microsoft haven’t made any new offers for the company. If they thought Pinterest’s downturn was temporary, they would likely have stepped up again with much lower offers. But that hasn’t happened yet, which suggests that either Pinterest’s growth has peaked, or its potential suitors are waiting for its stock to drop even further before making a new bid.

Should investors buy Pinterest’s stock today?

Analysts still expect Pinterest’s revenue and earnings to grow 25% and 22%, respectively, next year — and its stock looks reasonably valued at 20 times forward earnings. But with so many unanswered questions about its sluggish MAU growth and plans for the future, I’d rather wait to see Pinterest’s next earnings report before considering it to be a turnaround play.

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Feature Image Credit: Pinterest.

By Leo Sun

Sourced from The Motley Crew

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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.

By

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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Pre-Launch Marketing Strategies

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By Faith Walls

Marketing your business begins even before you illuminate that ‘open’ sign. Setting up a pre-launch marketing strategy is one of the best things you can do for your brand. The worst case scenario is launching your business only to realize you have failed to rally the appropriate audience for your services. Entrepreneurship is an uphill battle and requires someone who is comfortable with rejection and does most of their thinking outside the box. If you eat failure for breakfast (and you might have to, if that budget is small enough), then tackling the hefty job of marketing a new business should be no problem for you.

It is no secret that many businesses fail within the first five years of operation (upwards of 80%). You can set your company up for the highest chance of success by being proactive instead of reactive in the marketing world. Planning your pre-launch marketing strategies is equally as important as filing your DBA or purchasing insurance for your company.

Create a Social Media Editorial SOP

Having a social media plan is crucial to the success of your business. This determines where your energy and efforts should go in terms of digital promotions. Your social media marketing plan is the cornerstone of your organic and paid online advertising. Content marketing consistently generates up to three times more leads than per dollar versus paid search marketing. Establish a clear SOP (standard operating procedure) regarding social media so that there are no gaps in your team’s efforts. It is ideal to have a designated content creator. This of course falls to you if you are currently the sole employee within your business.

Content organization software such as Sprout Social and Later offer cross-platform scheduling and community management options. Here you can simply plug in the pre-established content and queue it up for a later date. Additionally, keeping a spreadsheet of proposed content allows you and your team to plan in advance and make edits within a single working document. Here you can write post copy, link to the approved images, include appropriate links, and manage hashtag lists.

Plan for Email Marketing

Email marketing ROI (return on investment) is one of the highest-grossing digital media tools today. Consumers benefit from consistent company updates and promotions delivered right to their inboxes. In a 2021 business survey, 59% of consumers reported that brand marketing emails impact their purchase decisions. Having a setlist of email recipients allows you to notify existing customers of sales and special discounts. Email marketing also generates increased traffic to your website, as you can easily link your page to copy and image blocks within the newsletter.

Schedule a Launch Event

It’s true that in this day and age, most of your pre-launch marketing efforts are likely geared towards the digital space. However, there is a significant benefit to promoting your services within your local area. As your business opening day draws closer, consider planning a pre-launch event to generate even more local interest.

By Faith Walls

Sourced from HEY Socal

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5 LinkedIn Mistakes to Avoid When Job Hunting

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By Maxwell Timothy

Are you getting a lot of employers visiting your LinkedIn profile, but you don’t hear from them? Avoid these LinkedIn mistakes when looking for a job.

LinkedIn is one of the largest career-focused sites on the internet. It provides a platform for job seekers to showcase their skills and get within arm’s length of recruiters in their industry.

The platform can serve as the first line of scrutiny for employers of labor to assess an individual’s suitability for a role. What recruiters see or fail to see on your LinkedIn profile can tip the odds against you if your profile isn’t in order.

Nobody wants to be in such a situation. Below are five common LinkedIn mistakes to avoid when job hunting.

1. Avoid Boring and Cliché Headlines

LinkedIn profile

Your LinkedIn headline is the first thing that gets noticed once someone visits your profile. It is also what comes up on Google and LinkedIn on-site searches. It’s like an article headline; it decides whether or not someone clicks through to read your profile.

Unfortunately, some people let LinkedIn fill up their headlines with their job titles. This is not the way to go. Your headline is a unique opportunity to sell yourself, and a job title might not do that well enough.

Instead, you have to be as descriptive in as few words as possible. Avoid clichés and boring stuff millions of other accounts are probably using.

When optimizing your LinkedIn profile, your headline should ideally:

  • Describe your primary skills.
  • Entice visitors to want to connect with you.
  • Portray you as a valuable member of society.
  • Serve as a call to action.

There’s a huge difference between a LinkedIn headline that reads “Translator at ABCD company” and another that says “Translator with Marketing expertise for Korean Market.” The first is a job title, while the second is a brilliant pitch.

Image Gallery (3 Images)

Screenshot of LinkedIn headline
Screenshot of LinkedIn headline
Screenshot of headline

To make a headline that sells:

  1. Use clear and compelling language.
  2. Use a combination of keywords that visitors would likely be looking for, e.g., “translator” and “Korean.”
  3. Be precise. No one simply wants a translator; they’ll need a translator for a specific language, e.g., a Korean translator.
  4. Offer unique value. There are probably thousands of Korean translators, but fewer with marketing skills.
  5. Be action-oriented. Use words that show you’ve put your skills to use, e.g., “translated” 30,000 pages for the UN, “created” a translation blueprint for a Fortune 500 company, etc.

2. Avoid Getting Too Personal

Surprised woman starring at her phone

It can be a bit tricky to draw a clear-cut line between your personal and professional life on social media. Even when you try to do so, the lines can be blurry. As a result, it’s hard to say with certainty what qualifies as personal content and what meets the threshold of professional content.

Always remember, before anything else, LinkedIn is a professional network. So try as much as possible to stick to professional and career-centric content. It’s easy to be roped into sharing a bit of our personal journey masqueraded as a relevant career conversation.

Sure, some recruiters might like to read a bit about how your personal journey influenced your career path. However, writing about how you took a break from work to look after your ailing grandparents starts to cross the line. Irrespective of how you want to package it, if your post highlights more about your personal struggles and less about your career, it probably shouldn’t be on LinkedIn.

However, there are a few exceptions. Recruiters might appreciate reading content about your non-work interests if it can provide them with relevant insights into your persona. For example, talking about your participation in local marathons might help your case if you’re being vetted for a job role that requires fitness. Similarly, sharing content about volunteering to lead a local charity might help exaggerate your leadership skills.

Personal content you share should ideally add a professional value that’s immediately clear to a recruiter. If you have any doubts about whether a post item meets the requirements of professional content, don’t post it.

3. Avoid Indiscriminate Connections

Linkedin networking

Having a lot of connections can help grow your LinkedIn profile and professional reputation. However, that will only happen if your connections are relevant and valuable. If you’re sending out invites solely for the numbers, you’re doing it wrong. Indiscriminately connecting with strangers on LinkedIn can hurt you in many ways.

Your LinkedIn timeline mirrors the kind of connections you have. When a recruiter lands on your profile, they’ll likely take a look at the kind of posts you interact with. This is what gives them a sense of your interests and what matters to you. If you’re connected to too many people that aren’t relevant to your industry, you’ll most likely be interacting with content that doesn’t add both face and intrinsic value to your timeline.

Also, limiting your connection to the most valuable, like-minded people within your industry can significantly increase your chances of being seen by recruiters. How?

When potential employers search for talents to hire, people within their network are prioritized on the search result pages. This includes 1st, 2nd, and 3rd-degree connections in that order. This means, if you are within the network of professionals who are connected to recruiters, there’s a good chance that you’ll come up in searches whenever those recruiters search for talents.

If in doubt about the kind of people you should connect with, here’s a checklist to guide you.

  • Professionals you already know. Maybe, people you’ve worked with or are currently working with.
  • Professionals you would love to learn from. These include thought leaders or established talents within your industry.
  • People with a lot of key LinkedIn connections within your industry.
  • Prospects or people with potential within your industry.
  • Close friends or relatives with a professional value.

4. Avoid Showboating

LinkedIn user

LinkedIn is one of the best professional platforms for promoting your skills. It is the perfect place to sell yourself and lay the foundations for important career moves.

Unfortunately, a lot of users tend to tilt more towards showboating rather than showcasing their abilities. Sure, it’s sometimes tricky to differentiate between the two. However, how a potential employer sees your attempt at self-promotion hinges on a few key presentation details.

Stay modest and treat every post like an interview when promoting yourself on LinkedIn. This means:

  • Your choice of words is very important. Avoid words that overly focus on positive labels or qualifiers that overemphasize your status or achievements.
  • Acknowledge team members in team achievements; a link to their profiles in your post is a good idea.
  • Focus on the hard work involved. “I didn’t break a sweat to do that. It was very easy,” might sound arrogant. “My team worked hard to see that through” sounds more appealing.
  • Don’t belittle other people to emphasize your achievements. “Nobody in company XYZ is as good as I am at documentation” won’t elevate you; instead, your post will be seen as mean and dismissive. Avoid comparison in your LinkedIn write-ups.
  • When talking about your achievements, try to keep them within a relevant context. Always subtly present the audience with a reason for bringing up your achievement.
  • Always focus on what your audience can take away from your skills and achievement. It could be industry insights, best practices, or valuable tips. This will demonstrate your subject matter expertise and your willingness to share knowledge rather than just showing off.
  • When showcasing a successful project, try to back it up with evidence. Back up any claim you make with appropriate statistics and proof.

If a recruiter sense that you’re showing off, even with a legitimate achievement, you could be inadvertently demarketing yourself. Nonetheless, don’t let the fear of appearing as a braggart make you undervalue yourself. Instead, own your successes and be as professional as possible.

5. Avoid Highlighting Your Experience Wrongly

How you highlight your experience on LinkedIn can either diminish or emphasize your career progress. Don’t undersell yourself; pay attention to how you highlight your work experience. Here are key points to consider:

  • Your work experience isn’t limited to 9-5 jobs. Your experience at volunteer jobs, freelance gigs, and one-off contracts can add enormous value to your profile.
  • If you’ve held multiple positions at the same company, it’s good practice to list them all, especially if it highlights your career progression.
  • Always give an overview of what your job entails when listing your work experience. However, avoid words like “I was responsible for,” “my job included,” or other variations that seem like a boring list of responsibilities. Instead, use power words like grew, managed, led, piloted, or reduced. These action-oriented words better emphasize the actions you took and the value you created at your previous jobs.

Make LinkedIn Work for You

Making LinkedIn work for you boils down to a few salient details. Get it right, and LinkedIn could be a launching pad for your career success.

Do things the wrong way, and you could be hurting your career progress.

By Maxwell Timothy

Sourced from MUO

 

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Mistakes You’re Making in Social Media Marketing

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By Deanna Ritchie

The world is filled with billions of users on social media across the globe, and that number is growing each day; and we can watch as the issues to increase.

Social media users have resulted in social media platforms becoming among the most popular virtual places.

Traditional marketing methods, such as commercials on TV, are usually only one-way communications, delivering a brand to the consumer. But social media marketing encourages engagement. It facilitates multi-directional communication, which:

  • Businesses can interact with their customers
  • Customers can interact with the brand’s image by providing feedback.
  • Customers can connect with fellow customers via posting posts.

As a brand’s owner and marketer, you can connect with a variety of potential customers in a matter of seconds with the use of pay-per-click.

There’s plenty to benefit from using social media for marketing. However, if your efforts haven’t yielded any results, you may be making some of the typical marketing mistakes that people make. Becoming aware of these marketing mistakes can help make the right choices and avoid the following mistakes.

1. You’re Operating Blindly

One of the most costly mistakes you can make with your advertising on social networks is to shoot blindly and expect to see results. Instead, you must be sure to treat it with the same seriousness that you would for any other campaign in marketing.

Make a strategy — a clearly defined social media marketing strategy. It’s an essential ingredient in an effective social media presence.

  • An effective social media advertising plan will guarantee that you’re posting content that will help you achieve your business goals. This will stop you from investing your time and energy in a campaign that is bound to fail.

You have scheduled and planned your posts in time. Regularly posting helps you build and maintain your online presence that is organic.

How can you develop an effective strategy?

A simple plan is not enough. You require a master plan that covers:

  • What are you hoping to benefit from your social networks? New leads? Increased brand recognition? If you aren’t sure what you’re after, it’s impossible to achieve it.
  • Who do you want to target?
  • Your action plan. What type of posts will you create? What strategies will you use to promote your content to reach your desired viewers? Do you require more videos?
  • The team is responsible for the management of your accounts.
  • The time and the money you’ll invest in social media advertising.

Your most crucial performance indicators.

Find out what you want from social media — and learn how you can achieve it. Then you will be on the right track towards achieving your total capacity on social media.

2. You’re Aiming at the Wrong People

There is a plan in the right place. However, if you’re trying to reach the wrong people or not targeting the right audience, you’ll have an issue of wasting time and funds. There will be a lot of followers with little contribution to your objectives–an audience that isn’t the ideal client.

In general, Facebook is the most popular social network in the world.

But, it doesn’t suggest that you should solely focus your marketing efforts exclusively on Facebook.

Social Media Platforms

First, define your target audience. The target audience is the group of people who are most likely to be interested in your service or product. You can determine who these individuals are based on income, age or education level, location, or even behaviour.

If you’re active across multiple social media platforms, be sure to focus on the popular platforms for your targeted audience.

For example, data shows that Instagram is most popular with those aged between 18 and 29.

Pinterest is the most popular social media platform among women. While Snapchat, as well as Twitter, are popular with those aged between 18 and 29.

LinkedIn might be more suitable for you if you’re working in the B2B sector.

People tend to overlook irrelevant content. Therefore, it is best to be careful not to make assumptions about the audience you intend to reach.

Examine them and modify your content to meet the needs and expectations of your audience. Your content should be valuable to your readers and incentivize them to interact with it.

Your tone must also be appropriate for the social network platform you are using. The type of content that your viewers are looking for varies across platforms.

Facebook users, for example, will expect a casual, fun, playful, and fun tone — it is an excellent place to connect and advertise. However, LinkedIn works best with a moderately formal tone, and Instagram is predominantly focused on aesthetics and is a great place to show your diversity.

  • Increase the reach of your potential audience with features such as captions and subtitles.
  • You can watch your videos even in loud spaces, like office spaces or in noisy areas.
  • Understand dialogues where participants speak rapidly.
  • Be alert, and help you transmit your message.
  • Access your content even if you have hearing difficulties.

3. SEO Best Practices are Neglected in Your Social Media Marketing

The biggest mistake companies make is not recognizing the importance of SEO to make their social media campaigns effective.

Similar to how you’re focused on SEO when writing content for your blog, such as landing pages and other web content. It would help if you did the same thing with social media.

Engaging in SEO will aid in ensuring your profile, product, or service is ranked higher in results from searches. This increases the organic search engine traffic that comes to your website and boosts your following.

The number of shares, likes, and comments your posts receive online determines your posts’ social media rankings and reach. So, especially to begin with — you will want to post regularly and share quality and exciting content. To stay competitive, plan to always show up with info, and put out quality content. Also, set your social media up to make it easy for your readers to share your content with friends and contacts by including attractive CTAs.

Use keywords. Find the most compelling phrases and words when researching keywords for your blog posts. Then, use them in the social posts you make.

Visual content is among the most powerful SEO strategies you can employ. Use relevant and high-quality images, video, additional images of products or services, and GIFs. Use all content that loads fast — and make sure your site loads fast.

The decision to include subtitles on videos and captions on images or GIFs is also to your advantage. Google, as well as other engines, can’t view the video. However, the search engines can read the text to index and search for the content, making your content more visible.

Implement SEO strategies, and you’ll notice an increase in impact.

4. Over-the-top brand promotions with no actual content

For most people, social media is an opportunity to connect and discuss opinions, keep informed on the latest happenings, and be motivated.

So, if you’re using it only to increase brand awareness and create auto-generated backlinks to your website, you’re not doing it right.

Why are you looking to create content that sparks people’s curiosity and conversation? First, have your goal very clear in your mind.

Feature Image Credit: George Becker; Pexels

By Deanna Ritchie

Managing Editor at ReadWrite

Deanna is the Managing Editor at ReadWrite. Previously she worked as the Editor in Chief for Start-up Grind and has over 20+ years of experience in content management and content development.

Sourced from readwrite

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Top Social Media Content Moderation Trends that Will Reign Supreme in 2022

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By Roger Max

The technique of managing desired information from online platforms such as social media networking sites is known as content moderation. It’s also known as social moderation, and it’s used to control various forms of content that aren’t appropriate for a general audience.

The practice of filtering information on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Tumbler, among others, is known as social media content moderation. All forms of unpleasant or unacceptable content, such as pornographic films, explicit photographs, or pictures that are inappropriate for individuals of all ages.

As soon as such content is posted, a social media content moderator removes it before it becomes viral and becomes accessible to a wider audience. Such offensive information is immediately removed from all social media platforms by social media censors.

The Content Moderation Do’s and Don’ts

 

Don’ts

Wait a long time before you start moderating your stuff

Do not wait too long to begin moderating your stuff. As your platform expands, you’ll need a strategy for moderately producing user-generated content.

Do not misinterpret an excellent piece of material

Quality content is critical for building customer trust and ensuring a positive user experience on your site. Avoid misinterpreting the excellent material to the point where you disregard user-generated content only on the basis of its negativity.

The Do’s

All material should be moderated

Guarantee that all material, whether photographs, text, or videos, is controlled properly to ensure that your platform has entertaining interactions.

Have a set of guidelines and regulations

All people who participate in content moderation on your platform should be aware of your content moderation rules and standards.

A suitable moderation form is required

What type of material do you have, and who is your platform’s users? This paints a picture of the moderation and configuration criteria to employ.

Top-3 Trends For 2022

 

As the year comes to an end, the trends that have been present throughout the year are revealing their promise for the coming year. We reviewed the trends we’ve noticed gaining traction in 2020 and came up with the following top three:

Customer Service using Social Media

From small businesses to multibillion-dollar corporations, adding a customer service component into their social media channels is critical. The requirement for outstanding online customer service cuts across both horizontal and vertical businesses. Reliable customer service and proper content moderation policies may protect the business reputation.

Listening to others on social media

Social listening is another trend that isn’t new for 2022, yet it continues to make headlines and impact social media. If the mention was noteworthy enough to show up readily in the Google results, simply searching your company name used to be enough to pull up multiple mentions of your firm.

Searching social media networks, forums, news feeds, and other places on the web for mentions of certain keywords and phrases linked to your business goes well beyond Google search results. These mentions are examined for trends and interests that may have an impact on your business, such as important influencer viewpoints, interest in products and services, and more.

Online Monitoring

The demand for real-time engagement, communication, and reaction is increasing around the clock. Chatbots, for example, allow customers to contact a firm at any time of day or night, with the assumption that someone would respond. Hold periods, prefabricated replies, and templated bot responses are no longer acceptable to customers. They are looking for genuine service, and they want it quickly.

By providing customer support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you show your clients that you care about them no matter what time of day it is. Plus, after you’ve earned your clients’ confidence through your round-the-clock customer care, they’ll gladly suggest you to their friends and colleagues.

EndNote

As the year 2022 begins, businesses throughout the world will face new difficulties.

Content moderation is essential for ensuring entertaining and stimulating interactions amongst your platform’s users. Additionally, employing any of the aforementioned strategies to moderate your material has several benefits. Outsourcing content moderation needs saves you time and money while still providing you with top-notch results. Cogito Tech LLC can assist you with the solution.

 

By Roger Max

Sourced from Data Science Central

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Social Media Shopping Is Expected To Reach $1.2 Trillion USD by 2025, According to Report

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Accounting for 16.7% of all e-commerce spending.

With the ever-growing digitization of retail, social media shopping is expected to reach $1.2 trillion USD by 2025, according to a new report from Irish consulting firm Accenture. The figure will account for 16.7% of all e-commerce spending.

According to the report, the global social commerce industry sits at $492 million USD in value and is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 26%. The increasing figures are due to Gen Z and Millennial shoppers, who will account for 62 percent of global social commerce spending by 2025.

“The pandemic showed how much people use social platforms as the entry point for everything they do online — news, entertainment and communication,” said Robin Murdoch, global Software & Platforms industry lead at Accenture in a release. “The steady rise in time spent on social media reflects how essential these platforms are in our daily life. They’re reshaping how people buy and sell, which provides platforms and brands with new opportunities for user experiences and revenue streams.”

Digital shopping refers to product discovery and the check-out process occurring all within a social media application. Accenture’s report surveyed just over 10,000 individuals, with 64% of respondents indicating that they made a social commerce purchase within the past year. Although this represents a great opportunity for big companies, it represents substantial growth opportunities for small business owners as well. To illustrate, 59% of the respondents indicated they are more likely to support small and medium-sized businesses via social commerce. Additionally, 63% said that they are more likely to purchase from the same business in the future.

Check out the full report from Accenture for a comprehensive breakdown of social media spending growth.

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Sourced from Hypebeast

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Branding’s Perfect 10 – The PR Afterthought

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By Glenn Matchett

When considering the future of branding and brands, it is important to properly understand that Communications is now a fractured, complex, and diverse discipline. The challenge for a PR and brand team – and, indeed, for an entire business – is to get everyone working as one. The overarching task is to impart and nurture genuine empathy and understanding for what a brand stands for, along with the overall business goals. The next step is to plan on how that gets communicated effectively to the outside world.

In Communications, working in silos doesn’t cut it anymore. It requires complex, interwoven, and often co-dependent messaging played across advertising, branding, packaging, PR, digital, customer service, and more. Symbiotic, interlocked, and constantly evolving, there is no solitary lens for PR. Instead, there is a brand kaleidoscope that acts as an ever-changing window into how a brand is perceived through the entirety of its communications.

Social media perfectly illustrates how interlocked communications channels can be for brands. A misplaced tweet or a tone-deaf post can quickly catch fire as a PR disaster that can lose customers or have a negative commercial impact on a business. When Dulux became the sponsor of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club this year, one of the first things the paint brand’s social media manager did was engage in some Twitter banter about the club’s lack of trophies. This quite quickly whipped up into a PR storm about how a new commercial partner was making a major faux pax by denigrating its new partner. There were questions asked about the suitability of the partnership and it has resulted in the commercial relationship getting off to an unsteady start.

With an improved lens on PR, the brand would have anticipated the potential problem here. In a future, more perfect world, PR fails can be mitigated by ensuring those who are in charge of social media are adequately briefed and aware of the power of social as a communications channel.

In a future world, this sort of mistakes would be stopped at the source because companies would understand how interlocked all their messaging is with the perception of their brand. A misjudged post on social media has the potential to be just as damaging as Gerald Ratner’s quip in 1991, that the jewellery he sold was “total crap”. His tongue-in-cheek remark in front of the Institute of Directors promptly wiped £500 million from the jeweller’s valuation and nearly took the company to the wall. Reflecting on the incident in 2021, Ratner tweeted, “It is 30 years today when I made ‘that’ speech. It seems like yesterday. I wish it was tomorrow. I would cancel it.” A PR blunder can have a lasting impact. Lessons for the future are often gleaned from what has happened in the past.

In a perfect future vision, PR would always have a board-level seat at any business – helping inform and shape decisions as they are made. PR is not an afterthought. PR is not the red phone to ring in a panic when the shit is about to hit the fan further down the line. Nor is it a cherry to stick on top of a cake with a positive business announcement or new launch. It is not enough to position PR and marketing at the end of a business process. That does not work anymore and brands who do it will often come unstuck or fail to properly connect with their customers.

Another great example from the world of football this year is the abortive launch of ‘The Super League’. As the breakaway scandal unfolded, it was revealed that the organizers only decided to appoint an agency to look after PR on the day of the announcement. What they fundamentally misunderstood is that PR cannot be an afterthought. It’s not about managing a few negative headlines with the belief that today’s newspapers will be tomorrow’s chip papers. PR is vital to monitor the pulse of a brand or an idea. It is about fully understanding and communicating effectively with your customers.

PR is a pre-emptive tool that is as much about anticipation as it is about activation. Like the tip of an iceberg, with PR there is much more to it beneath the surface than you end up seeing in public. As soon as the tsunami of negative responses hit, The Super League brand was dead in the water. If the clubs had effectively engaged PR earlier in their process they would have realized the whole shebang was a bad idea a lot sooner. This whole episode serves as a lesson on why engaging with PR early is a necessity for any brand.

In recent years, technology has seen brands become more and more efficient in how they target their audience. Data-driven intelligence hoovered up from our online activities means that advertisers often seem to know us better than we know ourselves. In the early days of this tracking technology, this was hailed as new nirvana. We’d be served better because we’d get shown what we want rather than things that weren’t relevant and of interest to us. We were heading to a perfect world of branding and advertising. With minimum wastage for advertisers, you would only see the products you’re interested in.

More recently, however, that dream has turned somewhat sour. The dystopian vision in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, of being relentlessly targeted with ads, looms larger like a tangible reality. Documentaries like Coded Bias, The Great Hack, and The Social Dilemma each portray a dark and damaging heart at the center of this technology, purely focused on milking and manipulating consumers for all that they are worth.

From a PR point of view, consumers are waking up to how their data is being used and brands need to be mindful of this. Customers don’t like it and the resulting bad PR for their brands may be commercially damaging. From a brand perspective, we may end up shifting in a different direction, with more organic, transparent, and authentic connections being a prerequisite of brand communications. Privacy controls will be placed back into the hands of the customer and, as a result, the PR wildfire that is burning about privacy and data may start to recede. We’ve already seen this come to light with Apple’s new privacy feature, intended to put the brakes on the sharing of customer data across multiple sites. By preventing the targeting that is the bread and butter of many brands online, its introduction may be a catalyst for a dramatic change in the entire online advertising industry.

From a brand perspective, we may end up shifting in a different direction, with more organic, transparent, and authentic connections being a prerequisite of brand communications.

Brands need to continue to adapt and change in step with the world in which we live. Many cultural commentators believed that, after COVID-19, the consumer’s relationship with brands might change dramatically. Our values would shift away from a disposable, frivolous culture and brands would need to follow. The jury is still out on whether this will, in fact, come to pass. If the queues at the UK’s high-street stores, when the lockdown was lifted in April, is any barometer of a new consumer consciousness, it may not, in fact, be the case at all. The hunger to spend on a wide range of goods still appeared to be firmly intact.

It is fair to say though that brands continue to become more socially aware. As part of a brand strategy, CSR is often now firmly embedded into many companies. However, CSR is only really effective when it is integrated properly and not just used as a PR badge to appease a target market or drive sales.

In the future, unpicking the relationship between CSR and PR will be a great step forward for brands. If you consider a brand like Dove, which has ‘body positivity’ at the heart of its brand purpose, you can see how powerful this can be – not just part of a marketing strategy but an entire business philosophy. It’s not just a PR badge adopted in order to shift their products.

In summary, I feel that it is worth addressing the elephant in the room.

“What is the perfect future version of branding and brands?”

Well, there isn’t one, of course. We live in an imperfect world and nothing ever stays still. When Brandingmag launched, 10 years ago, the world was a very different place. Fast forward 10 years from today and I expect, fuelled by technology, that change will be even greater. PR, as a profession, continues to evolve and it is now part of a larger, more integrated, communications ecosystem. The days of fluffy ‘Ab Fab’ PR – with boozy lunches and ‘it’s not what you know, it’s who you know’ dynamics of doing your job – are long gone. The future vision for perfect PR and brands is to refine and adapt to the broader, interlinked way in which communications operates. It’s also imperative for PR to be positioned at the heart of every business operation. Perfect? No, it will never be perfect, but that’s what keeps the craft of communications such an engaging challenge.

By Glenn Matchett

Sourced from Brandingmag

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Live commerce is here and brands are upgrading. Is this retail’s next big leap?

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By Jhinuk Sen

We’ve seen retail undergo a series of changes and upgrades over the past two years. Before COVID-19 got us to stay in and shut down malls and markets, 85 per cent of all shopping used to happen offline. Forced into quarantine, retailers and brands did the best they could to adapt to a new world order where they had to transition to online for sales or perish.

Digitalisation became the new mantra. Consumers too, quite naturally, weren’t immune to this renewed digital push.

Many took to online shopping naturally. The younger generation had been buying things online for a while now, the elders followed suit gradually, but definitely. But many things were missing when it came to online shopping.

First and foremost, the experience. Pre-pandemic, going out to buy an outfit meant an evening out with friends or family – it was a social outing in most cases. It was all about consulting each other, speaking to the salespeople, trying to find the best deal, and visiting multiple shops until you found just what you were looking for.

Online shopping took all of it away by bombarding customers with a million discounts and offers, and consulting another person for the best suggestion got replaced with sending each other links. And while that’s exactly how things still stand, social commerce and live commerce has brought some action into a space that is cluttered and on the verge of becoming very boring.

Ask Paloumi Das. The 25-year-old, who works as head of content at the fabric retail outlet Cottons and Satins, is no stranger to online shopping and social commerce. Das has been shopping online for years now and the brand she works for has been juggling between ramping up their portfolio on Instagram – where they have about 65k followers – and directing interested users to their website or their brick-and-mortar stores in Delhi and Mumbai if and when feasible.

“I’ve been shopping online long enough to not be hassled when malls were shut down due to the pandemic. One barely needs to go out to buy anything nowadays and while that is very convenient, it is also quite boring,” Das said. She argues that social media has made it easy for consumers to buy something with a click of a button.

While it certainly is easy, but it has killed off the excitement of shopping. And at this point, consumers like Das feel frustrated being confined to this linear mode of shopping, where all it entails is sharing product links to friends so that they can decide what one can buy, and if not that, then after a bout of endless scrolling, chance upon something to buy it using a click of a button.

And this increasing frustration is slowly percolating into the brands as well. They too seem to be asking the same ubiquitous question: how do we liven things up?

The solution lies in the question itself. When social commerce has become mainstream, the next best bet is to go live.

What does ‘going live’ in shopping mean?

Live commerce, simply explained, is a real-time event where customers get a chance to bag some great deals and they also get to engage with other customers, and influencers, ask questions, etc., before they buy the product.

Live commerce is already a huge trend in China and globally people are starting to pay attention, as are the brands. Cartier hosted its first jewellery show on Taobao Live where they unveiled more than 400 timepieces and jewellery items. Kim Kardashian sold more than 15,000 bottles of her perfume in minutes, live.

Closer home, Myntra has taken its first step into the world of live commerce with M-Live. The company said during its announcement that this move is “likely to engage 50 per cent of its monthly active users” over the next few years, while currently, it engages about 20 per cent of them. The company aims to push out about 1,000 hours of video content per month.

M-Live is a real-time, interactive experience that can be found on the shopping app and is currently live. “M-Live is also the nearest to an expert-assisted offline shopping experience that is fully experienced online.

The core benefit is the users’ ability to get interactive descriptions of products independently curated by experts they can trust and identify with while getting instant advice on various aspects like styling, fitment, product quality, and material,” the company explained.

“With several concurrent users joining the live sessions, it also gives users the opportunity to shop as a community and benefit from the community’s knowledge, observations, questions, and comments, enabling a more confident shopping decision that is backed by social validation,” it added.

This community feeling is one of the core benefits of live commerce and the only one that effectively can recreate the social experience of being able to shop with friends and family.

Live commerce has other perks too. For example, it is the best way to publicise and optimise product launches, thematic sales (like Diwali or Black Friday sales) with the aid of celebrity interactions, product demos, and influencer videos. And another very significant feature that live commerce can optimise is impulse purchases.

To make the best of impulse purchases, all that apps, websites, and brands need to do is to embed a clickable layer that presents users with a shortcut to making the purchase fast and smoothly. The good news here – for brands looking to get on board with this – is that there are apps that can help you.

“Indians spend on average over five hours a day online with a large part of that time is dedicated to two activities: consuming content and shopping,” said Firework’s President of Global Business Jason Holland to Business Today. Holland’s company, Firework helps bring these two concepts together to help brands create live commerce experiences on their platforms.

“Global e-commerce growth accelerated dramatically as a result of the Coronavirus pandemic, and it shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. This, combined with recent forecasts that 82 per cent of global Internet traffic will be video by 2022, make the growth of live commerce in India seem practically inevitable. As a blend of two of Indian consumers’ favourite online activities – content consumption and e-commerce – livestream shopping is arguably the most important factor in the evolution of shopping, both in India and around the world,” Holland said.

Conceptually, all this sounds fair, but would it work in India as well as it did in China? Holland thinks it will.

“India has all the right ingredients to become one of the top three global leaders in livestream shopping, and it’s only a matter of time before it does,” he said. And Holland has data to back his belief.

He points out that according to Comscore’s data, online retail sales increased by 43 per cent over the first several months of the pandemic, from January to October of 2020. “And even now, long after the lockdowns ended, online retail sales still clock significantly higher. This suggests that COVID-19 has not only driven digital adoption in developing nations but has also accelerated digital maturity and established habits,” Holland pointed out.

“The responsibility now rests on brands to embrace live commerce and seize the massive opportunity to be among the first movers in these emerging markets,” he added. And Holland isn’t the only one to think this way.

Achint Setia – VP & Business Head – Social Commerce at Myntra – argues that livestream shopping is that perfect confluence of aspiration, on one hand, and innovation, on the other.

“We are always on the quest to build innovative fashion-tech shopping experiences for our customers that can strengthen our relationships with them by garnering higher trust, creating inspirational and immersive experiences while deeply engaging them.

Livestream shopping is the perfect fit for fashion and beauty shoppers as it blends both aspirational and informative content with commerce, it democratizes fashion, and is a convergence of many current trends, such as influencer-led shopping and social commerce,” he said.

So, what’s the best way forward for brands looking to step into the live commerce space?

“I think it is important for brands to embrace the change first. Brands need to understand that establishing a social media presence isn’t the best path to digital transformation. Additionally, with a significant share of shopping happening online, brands need to remember that competition is only a click away – which is a significant departure from brick-and-mortar retail. That heightened competition makes it incredibly important to offer a differentiated shopping experience – one that embodies the brand identity faithfully, while also delivering on the promise of entertainment,” Holland explained.

The most important factor for brands to succeed in this space is data.

With social media platforms that have incorporated more sophisticated e-commerce elements, businesses end up forfeiting all access to their first-party data, which is an invaluable resource for any brand.

If data is unavailable, that combined with very low engagement and conversion rates can lead to hugely inefficient marketing spends. Brands need to thus pick the right apps that give them access to all the numbers like Firework does so that they can understand their audience.

Live streaming and the influencer

The job of getting all this right lies with the brand – obviously. But there’s a massive lot that content creators and influencers can make off this as well, and short video apps are paying attention.

This year two short video apps, Moj and Bolo Live, ventured into live streaming, while Glance’s Roposo too took a step ahead and moved from live streaming and into live commerce.

“The next decade belongs to creator economy globally and live streaming influencers from India shall dominate the same. Just India is expected to see over a $300 million market for creator economy by 2023 end,” said Tanmai Paul, Chief Product Officer and Co-founder, Bolo Live.

Paul said that pivoting into live streaming from short videos has helped democratise monetisation opportunities for content creators by giving them opportunities beyond brand partnerships.

“Fan-to-creator microtransactions on Bolo Live has led to over 4x increase in creator earnings in just last six months. Already more than 18 live streamers are earning over Rs 1 lakh per month from our platform,” Paul added.

Influencers and content creators will play a significant role in live commerce and its proliferation in the retail space, at least for starters. Live commerce is an ecosystem that can benefit the brand, the content creator/influencer, and the customer, it is only a matter of time till everyone cashes in.

By Jhinuk Sen

Sourced from BusinessToday.In

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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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