Did you know that consumers are now spending more time on social media networks than any other form? It is amazing how fast you can learn from social strategy tips, Social media sites and new ideas are spreading fast. Are you a social media strategist? What are you doing to take advantage of a proactive social media strategy?
Facebook has a monthly audience of nearly a billion visitors. That’s a B as in billion. Other top sites, like Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, attract hundreds of millions.
By now, nobody doubts the power of social platforms. However, few marketers have been able to exploit them as well as they can.
As Harvard’s Mikołaj Piskorski makes clear in his new book, A Social Strategy, businesses have a long way to unlock the potential of the social web.
Most marketers, in fact, use social media. Why? They use ordinary media to broadcast messages.
We need to work hard on engagement and building relationships.
And the real potential lies in building relationships and utilizing social platforms to create solutions for customers’ social problems.
Consumers are understandably skittish about corporations interjecting themselves in their conversations. They appreciate the opportunity to meet and build relationships. And that, it turns out, this is an enormous opportunity.
That’s why it’s important to make the distinction between a digital strategy that involves social platforms and a true social strategy.
Most breakthrough organizations aren’t built on a bundle of wonderment, novelty and new ideas. In fact, they usually involve just one big idea. The rest is execution, patience, tactics, and people.
The ability to see what’s happening and to act on it. The rest is doing the stuff we already know how to do, the stuff we’ve seen before, but doing it beautifully. You probably don’t need yet another new idea. Better to figure out what to do with the ones you’ve got.
Before I get started, let me ask you a question. What do you think is the best way of being proactive in a social media strategy?
We would love to hear your answer. Could you do us a favor and insert your answer in the comments section? Our readers and we would much appreciate that.
Here are some good ways you can capitalize on social media and improve your customer engagement and relationship building.
Put these seven social elements a social media strategist should use in their business’s proactive strategy:
Market Research
Nothing new here, as this was always important to the business.
What is new is the access to millions of consumer communications, which represents a gold mine of data, available at the low cost of your ability to mine it.
Top social media strategist.
Public Relations
Social networks represent a direct channel to consumers.
You need to craft new, compelling messages for them, without selling.
Brand Marketing
Increase the value of your brand through this communications channel. Reinforce old relationships, build new ones, and stretch the real-life of both with the value utilities you can provide.
Social media gives us a great opportunity to listen in on what people are saying (with lots of emphasis on listening). It has been long known that word of mouth is incredibly powerful, and I’d say it is the best marketing technique in one’s arsenal.
Social listening tools are still somewhat primitive, but they are improving quickly and are already being deployed to help monitor conventional marketing efforts in real-time.
Rishad Tobaccowala, on his blog, gives a nice overview of social listening. Among his insights is that you shouldn’t keep your efforts sequestered in an isolated social unit any more than you would wall off other types of research.
Rather, you need to make sure to integrate social listening into your overall marketing and customer service efforts.
He also makes the apt observation that heavy influencers are not necessarily heavy users (in fact, they don’t need to consume your product at all). So social media may be the only real shot you have to interact with some of those who can affect how your brand is perceived.
Another nice thing about social listening is how easy it is to integrate it into the rest of your marketing intelligence. It can help shape and augment focus groups, monitor mass media campaigns and combine with other real-time resources such as Google Insights.
In the end, your strategy should tell your story in a way that builds on your brand image and integrates all of your marketing efforts.
Consider our list of enablers for a proactive social media strategy we use with our clients:
A customer’s experience … creates the best marketing. It gives your customers something good to talk about. Ways to improve your customer experience needs to be a plank in your strategy.
Customer conversations … are the basis of word of mouth marketing, your most important strategic element.
Marketing strategy … needs to be about service and value, not product and price. You don’t want to be a commodity … ever, so keep your eye on your value discrimination and your service.
Customer relationships … are the backbone of building trust. Customer trust is the most important reason a customer selects a business. What are the ways you are attempting to build customer trust?
Advocates … are your best promotion method. Use them to spread your messages and lead the conversations among customers.
Customer retention … is much cheaper than acquisition. Spend your maximum time and money on retaining your best existing customers.
All customers … are not equal. Know who your best customers are and put most of your attention on them.
The bottom line
Social media is a ‘pull’ and not a ‘push’ medium. It is two-way conversations … where response time is very important.
Being social with a great positive engagement isn’t a new way of marketing; it’s a way of doing business. Follow these simple tips, and you will be leading the way.
How many of these strategies have you tried in your business? Please share a story or two about some of your social media campaigns.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
Are you listening to members of your audience? There are lots of ways to listen, yes? These ways include many social media monitoring and marketingtools.
As I have said many times, all of us need to treat social media more like a telephone and less like a megaphone. This is an important fact to know about social media monitoring and marketing tools.
Social media monitoring and marketing tools.
However, some might not know how or where to listen. This is important because you want to know what’s being said about you and where are they saying it. You’ll also want to know how to respond. It’s an essential part of online marketing.
Finding and tracking conversations on social media was once a hurdle for digital marketers. Now, with a range of tools available, the challenge is finding the ideal one.
And since listening to social conversations can deliver clear business benefits, many community managers are quickly looking for an option. Luckily, social media monitoring tools that differ between price, user experience, and tracking capabilities are filling the market.
Before listing my recommended social media monitoring and marketing tools, it’s important to set a few definitions.
What Is Social Media Monitoring?
Don’t think of social media monitoring as a one-time, or sporadic, activity.
Also called social listening, it’s the ongoing process of tracking online conversations to find information about customers.
The goal of this process is to understand better differenttarget markets, ranging from prospects to competitor customers. Specifically, digital strategists can use social media monitoring to determine how a brand is perceived, analyze consumerbehavior and identify issues those consumers may have.
Now that we’ve clarified the definition, here’s our list of the top tools:
TweetReach
TweetReach is a great monitoring tool for your business if you’re interested in checking how far your Tweets travel. TweetReach measures the actual impact and implications of social media discussions.
It is a good way of finding out who are your most influential followers, implicitly guiding you towards the right people you should be targeting when aiming to share and promote online content.
HowSociable
HowSociable is a handy tool for measuring your and your competitors’ social media presence.
A free account allows you to track 12 social sites, including Tumblr and WordPress. However, if you’re interested in 24 more, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc. a pro account is required.
HowSociable’s approach to social monitoring is a bit different as it breaks down scores for different social media platforms, allowing you to see which social media platforms work best for you and which ones need further development.
Use HowSociable to measure a keyword’s “magnitude score” — its level of weekly activity, given on a scale of 0 to 10. The tool provides the keyword’s score on 36 sites, ranging from major social platforms to forums such as 4chan and Reddit. Pay extra to receive historical data going back to the platform’s launch in May 2008.
Klout
Klout is probably one of the most controversial social media monitoring tools. There are those who hate it and claim that its scoring system is completely inaccurate and that trying to interact with them is an impossible mission (a curious thing as they provide interaction-measurement services).
On the other hand, some people find it useful, as it measures influence through engagement on Twitter. It is a good means of keeping an eye on what people think about your brand, and to see what influences them the most.
Using the Klout score, you can adjust your posts according to your target audience’s interests and increase your engagement rate.
Widely known as an influence measurement tool, test out Klout to monitor which types of posts and topics are most talked about. By grading your ability to engage on each social platform and giving you a mark out of 100, you’ll learn which content pieces best drive conversation and resonate with your audience.
Social listening platforms.
Keyhole
Use Keyhole to track URLs, hashtags, keywords and @usernames on Twitter and Instagram. It collects data and posts in real-time, offering historical data separately or in advanced plans.
The platform gives a timeline that illustrates flows and spikes in posting frequency. It provides a stream of posts to complement this feature. Along with sentiment data, Keyhole has demographic information such as heat maps that measure activity levels across the world and United States.
Addict-o-Matic
If aiming to get an overall view of a brand, Addictomatic can be very useful and as straightforward as Twazzup. The only difference is that Addictomatic focuses on a variety of platforms, including Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, WordPress, Bing News, Delicious, Google, Ask.com, etc.
Type a keyword into Addict-o-Matic’s search bar to scan platforms such as YouTube, WordPress and Bing News for mentions. The results are somewhat customizable — if you don’t value a given platform, you can delete its feed or move it to the bottom of the page. Bookmark the page and visit again whenever you want.
Social Mention
Quite popular among social media enthusiasts, Social Mention monitors over one hundred social media sites. It is probably one of the best free listening tools on the market, as it analyses data in more depth and measures influence with four categories: Strength, Sentiment, Passion, and Reach. It also displays top keywords, hashtags, and sites.
Use Social Mention as a search engine with a complementary analytics suite, collecting data such as sentiment. Inputting a keyphrase will generate results pages filled with user-generated content up to a month old from more than 100 platforms. But since the program doesn’t continuously monitor your terms, you’ll have to start a new search when you need an update.
CyberAlert
Social media monitoring software.
Try CyberAlert if you need to monitor mainstream news. Along with some popular social media platforms, the tool can track keyword mentions from 60,000 online news sources in more than 250 languages. It allows you to segment these mentions by brand, campaign, media type and more criteria.
Twazzup
Twazzup is great for social media beginners looking for a Twitter monitoring tool. You just enter the name you want to track, and you instantly get real-time updates, meaning the most active top influencers, most retweeted photos and links, and most importantly, the top 10 keywords related to your search.
Brandwatch
Give Brandwatch a shot to monitor and collect data from 80 million sources. These include blogs, forums, review sites, news sources and popular social platforms such as Facebook. It adds context to online conversations by measuring analytics such as audience interests and gender ratio. You can also receive alerts whenever specific terms are mentioned.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck covers the basic needs of any Twitter user, so is a good option for beginners. It’s a great tool for scheduling tweets and monitoring your interactions and messages, as well as tracking hashtags and managing multiple accounts. There is a web app, Chrome app, or Mac app. The Windows app ceased functioning in April 2016.
Mention
Track your mentions on major social media platforms, including Twitter and Facebook, with the aptly-named Mention. Not only can you interact with posts using your tracked keywords directly from the dashboard, but assign them to different team members. The platform can also alert you whenever someone includes your keyword in a post.
Mention monitors million of sources in 42 languages, helping you stay on top of all your brand mentions on social networks, news sites, forums, blogs or any web page.
The app lets you keep track of your team’s actions, share alerts and assign tasks. Generating reports and exporting mentions can help you get a snapshot of your mentions by source or language over a selected period. They offer a 14-day free trial.
Twitonomy
Twitonomy offers a range of metrics for free, with premium features enabled for $19/month. Simply sign in with your Twitter account for robust monitoring and metrics about your account.
You can add your competitor’s Twitter handles to gain insights about their activity too.
Twitonomy shows you details of your Twitter lists, followers and followings, your most popular Tweets, engagement statistics and much more.
You can track conversations on Twitter based on hashtags, users, or lists. The details are displayed in graphs and easily digestible stats.
Followerwonk
Focusing specifically on Twitter, Followerwonk is the right tool to find, analyze and optimize your online presence for social growth.
The tool is perfect for planning outreach campaigns by allowing you to search Twitter bios, connect with influencers or fans and break them out by location, authority, the number of followers and more.
Interestingly, with Followerwonk you can compare your social graph to competitors, friends or industry leaders and measure how well you are doing.
Little Bird
Described as an influencer marketing tool, use Little Bird to monitor close-knit social media communities. For example, you can identify and listen to conversations topic thought-leaders are having about a relevant keyword. This allows you to spot social trends before they become widely popular.
IceRocket
Acting as a blog and Twitter search engine, try IceRocket if you value a range of results filters. You can narrow results by domain, author, language, publishing date, and secondary keyword use. But since you can’t save or continuously update your mentions, you’ll have to perform a new search whenever you want an update.
This tool offers a blog, Twitter and Facebook monitoring in 20 languages, as well as results graphs that you can play with. It allows you to choose the period you are interested in monitoring.
It can be used for keeping an eye on blog activity mentioning your brand, as they have around 200 million blogs in their database and they also provide the possibility of finding the latest trend terms related to your search.
Social media monitoring and marketing tools … NetBase
Targeting enterprise-scale brands and agencies, use NetBase to read and analyze social media posts in 42 languages. The platform tracks keyword mentions from millions of sources around the world, advertising that it processes posts nine-times faster and 50 to 70% more accurately than other tools. Subscribers can also receive up to 27 months of historical data.
Synthesio
Another social media monitoring tool that targets enterprise-scale brands and agencies try Synthesio to track mentions from more than 195 countries and 100,000 websites. These include niche social networks in China, Russia, South America and the Middle East. The tool delivers analytics such as activity heat maps and common phrases used with your keywords.
Sysomos
Use the Sysomos “Heartbeat” tool to monitor up to two years of historical data, along with real-time conversations in almost 190 languages. It scans major social media platforms, plus blogs and news media sources. You can tag different conversations to analyze and compare against each other, helping identify engagement opportunities.
The bottom line
For social analysts with general needs, there might not be a clear, must-use option. But as your focus grows more specific, some platforms should emerge as favorites.
Use this list as a guide — you’re sure to find a social media monitoring tool that tracks the platforms you value and delivers the information you need.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREEquote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Are you devoting enough energy innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not. Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations. Yes indeed, Seth Godin. Is your business employing social media to engage customers and encourage the right sort of conversations? The changing social media landscape is surely making it difficult to keep up, isn’t it?
But keep up you must, to stay ahead of the constantly changing and moving parts.
The changing media landscape.
In recent years, the sheer number of social media marketing channels and options has overwhelmed more than a few small business owners. Factor in the current mélange of tools, technologies, and operational requirements, and marketing has begun to resemble nothing less than a three-dimensional chessboard.
It’s critical to identify the sharp touch points that actually allow marketers to connect with consumers.
Before we continue, let me ask you a question.
What social media design techniques work best for your business? We would love to hear what it was. Would you do us a favor and post it in the comments section below? Be the one who starts a conversation.
Related: How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement
Defining a social media strategy to socially engage customers to build better customer relationships is particularly challenging these days because the rules are continuously changing. A decade ago or so, businesses mostly sought to create buzz and increase brand awareness. Now they need to build compelling customer experiences that keep them engaged.
However, the old ways have not entirely disappeared, they have just expanded in size and scope. Here are 5 new additions to the social media landscape that small businesses need to incorporate into their marketing strategies quickly.
Social media listening, also known as social media monitoring, is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand on the Internet.
Both social media and person-to-person information-gathering have value, but social media listening is quickly becoming a valuable customer intelligence tool.
There are several ways to use social media to gain insight, including monitoring online customer support forums, using software tools to gather comments.
In an enterprise, social media monitoring tools can mine text for specific keywords on social networking websites and blogs and in discussion forums and other social media. Essentially, control software transposes particular words or phrases in unstructured data into numerical values which are linked to structured information in a database so the data can to be analyzed with traditional data mining techniques.
Here is an explosive example of social media listening where KLM used Twitter to add a flight to its roster.
It all started when a Dutch filmmaker tweeted his disappointment about the lack of a direct flight from Amsterdam to Miami. Specifically, he was looking for a hangover-reducing direct flight to/from the Ultra Music Festival taking place in Miami on March 21st, 2011.
A KLM rep rapidly responded with a wager – if the filmmaker could book an entire flight (351 seats) before December 6th, KLM would add the non-stop flight to its schedule.
Beyond all expectations, the resulting campaign Fly2Miami sold out the entire flight within 5 hours.
Media landscape changes … data-driven marketing
At its core, data-driven marketing centers on one thing and one thing only: creating value by engaging customers more effectively. That may sound straightforward at first, but the task is anything but simple, and it’s becoming more and more sophisticated every day.
New technology and digital disruption are throwing the physical world into disorder and on the flip side, customers are more demanding than ever before.
Most marketers already leverage data, of course: customer service data, customer satisfaction data, digital interaction data and demographic data. But the new era of data-driven marketing combines collecting and connecting larger amounts of data, rapidly analyzing it and gaining insights, and then bringing those insights to market via marketing interactions tailored to what’s relevant for each customer.
Small businesses need to combine the traditional data their companies have collected with communication data (like data pulled from social media), integrating both online and offline data sources to create a single view of their customer. They also need to glean and apply customer insights from this data.
Changing social media landscape … social commerce
Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce that involves using social media, online media that supports social interaction, and user contributions to assist in the online buying and selling of products and services.
More succinctly, social commerce is the use of social network(s) in the context of e-commerce transactions.
The concept of social business was developed by David Beisel to denote user-generated advertorial content on e-commerce sites, and by Steve Rubel to include collaborative e-commerce tools that enable shoppers to get advice from trusted individuals, find goods and services and then purchase them.
Customers today engage with businesses in many different ways, leading to numerous touch points and tremendous opportunities for positively influencing their customer experience.
If one considers the hundreds of interactions each client has throughout his/her lifecycle with a company, how do you define a customer experience to focus their limited resources?
Here are some examples of ways to engage customers socially by talking about the positive aspects of business and work:
The pleasure of meeting and talking … with different people every day
Rewards … that come from helping staff take on new challenges and experiences
Fun and laughter … in a relaxed and healthy work environment
The fascinationin work itself … and in the other people’s work and businesses
Great feeling … when you finish a job and do it to the best of your capabilities
New things … you learn every day – even without looking to do so
How is the media landscape changing … visual design
We could say that visual design in one of the new aspects of the new social media landscape, but that would be incorrect by a few miles. It has been expanded, however.
The visual design focuses on the aesthetics of social media and just about all elements of media. It is about strategically implementing images, colors, fonts, and other design elements. A successful visual design does not take away from the content on many media. Instead, it enhances it by engaging users and helping to build trust and interest in the brand.
A successful visual design applies these elements and effectively brings them together in a way that makes sense. When trying to figure out how to use the essential elements consider:
Unity has to do with all items on a page visually or conceptually appearing to belong together. The visual design must strike a balance between unity and variety to avoid a dull or overwhelming design.
Space is defined when something is placed in it, according to Alex White in his book, The Elements of Graphic Design. Make whitespace an important part of your layout design.
Hierarchy shows the difference in significance between items. Designers often create hierarchies through different font sizes, colors, and placement on the page. Usually, items at the top are perceived as most important.
Balance creates the perception that there is equal distribution. This should not always imply that there is symmetry.
Contrast focuses on making items stand out by emphasizing differences in size, color, direction, and other characteristics.
Scale identifies a range of sizes; it creates interest and depth by demonstrating how each item relates to each other based on size.
Dominance focuses on having one element as the focal point and others being subordinate. This is often done through scaling and contrasting based on size, color, position, shape, etc.
Visual design is not about what a piece is saying literally through words, but it is everything about what a piece is saying visually and emotionally–solely through appearance.
Here is a four-minute Samsung ad with 15-20 new features shown for their iPhone. No talking. And so simple that you quickly grasp the features and don’t lose interest. And the coordinated music has a way to keep you tied in. Creating customer interest doesn’t get any simpler than this, does it? A very simple, yet entertaining design, don’t you think?
This ad subtly grabs and holds attention based on a great music soundtrack, no speaking, and a total reliance on superb visuals. Letting the visuals totally carry the messages.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LHv1FPd1Ec
Creating customer interest doesn’t get any simpler than this, does it? A very simple, yet entertaining design, don’t you think?
Social media channel integration
Social media channels should work seamlessly to promote your online brand.
The findings a new study from global analytics firm Frost & Sullivan, titled Analyzing Customers’ Social Voices, show that the most crucial trend in social media analytics is cross-channel integration.
Brendan Read, an ICT industry analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said social media analytics has the capacity to show most of the almost unobtainable information about consumer behavior and the more extensive market. And more companies will adopt it as they carry out multiple campaign strategies to offer a stable, valuable, profitable customer experience across all channels.
Related material: Some Great Story and Storytelling Examples to Study
By integrating social and social media into your site you can: add relevance, amplify your ability to create word of mouth marketing, enhance your site’s ‘stickiness,’ and build better relationships with your customers.
Consider these social media marketing tips for the integration of social media channels:
Enable feedback … of all types, including reviews, comments, dialog. And of course, this takes lots of conversation on your part.
Employ games … an excellent means to amplify customer engagement. Many types of games to choose from and put to use.
Maintain … fresh, up to date material. It takes a lot of effort but the payoffs are significant.
Collaborate with customers … create, curate, exchange ideas and solicit their material. Their involvement can make a world of difference.
Employ … what you have learned from your insights. This will be a key component of your website refresh strategy.
So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is entirely up to you. But believe in the effectiveness of social media and word of mouth marketing. And put it to good use.
It’s up to you to keep improving your social media marketing efforts.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And this struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your marketing strategies? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with potential clients?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And this struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improve your marketing, branding, and advertising?
Do you have a lesson about making your marketing strategy better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on marketing platforms from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Case Studies to Evaluate New World Marketing Concepts
How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement
Jaw Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Lessons and Examples
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
