With nearly two-thirds of US adults (65%) using social media daily, the number of online responses is growing exponentially. Social Insights: Customers often turn to social media sites as the first stop along the way to evaluate a purchase of any kind; and 66% of people, trust opinions posted online, even from strangers.
The importance of social media in the sales/marketing funnel is now undisputed, but the visibility of the insights each platform can provide is often obscured by meaningless statistics. Are you sure your marketing team members are taking the time to determine the importance of this information and where to look as data flows from the dashboards?
Here are three ways your team should use social media information to make important marketing decisions.
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To understand your audience
Getting 1,000 new Twitter followers looks good on paper, but it doesn’t necessarily move the needle for your brand. But creating a positive, organic conversation can solve the problem. Understanding your online audience means looking beyond superficial retweets and shares.
Instead of focusing on what’s being said about your brand, focus on who’s speaking. How does your specific target group relate to your competitors and how do they describe themselves? This audience tends to write their own characters (literally); The Twitter biography features subscription capabilities in 140 characters or less.
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To detect trends in target segments
Once you understand who your audience is, the next step is to get to know them a little better. Marketers need to understand what is happening on social media in their target markets and what it means for their brand if they are to keep up with the next big trend that is emerging.
For example, identifying an affinity group with a shared love for the Harry Potter series within it can lead to marketing insights based on trending topics within the group. Social Insights What was the group’s general feeling towards the other groups after seeing the last movie? Are they excited to buy Harry Potter merchandise? Do they see any gaps in the Harry Potter products available in stores?
Social media is a place to identify the types of topics that are important to your brand’s audience and incorporate the topics into your content strategy to bring marginal followers to the group. Be careful not to exploit your interests or sensitive social issues. Public brands are often placed under social scrutiny when they enter the trend movement.
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Determine the success of your marketing campaigns
Social data can also be used to deepen brand awareness in specific marketing initiatives. Finding keywords related to your most recent branding campaign is a good start, but measuring sentiment is where it gets interesting.
Suppose you recently received a large (ie expensive) ticket from a famous person. Your team will likely want to assess the ROI. Use keywords associated with celebrities associated with keywords to measure volume. Social Insights Then extract general phrases and rate sentiment from positive to neutral to negative to get a full picture of the social landscape helping you make your big recent purchase – is the answer completely positive? How many conversations did this famous person generate compared to previous campaigns? And most importantly, is a new audience being introduced to the conversation?
This comes down to:
There are many tools available to extract useful social media data for your marketing team, but nothing is more valuable than just looking beyond scheduled publications and direct mentions of your brand. Dive into your list of followers and get to know them. Create Twitter lists to reach your audience. See trends in each segment and act accordingly.