For the vast majority of people all over the world, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram continue to be among the most trusted information resources. Some, like Google+ (if you can even remember that network), die out while others, like TikTok and Instagram, explode in popularity. But, since that everything is done on mobile devices, anyone can produce and distribute material in a matter of seconds. Likewise, marketers need to step up their game when it comes to social media analytics if they want to keep up with their target demographics.
Many companies make the mistake of using social media as a marketing tool, rather than for what it was originally intended: two-way communication. One could argue that the level of commercialization on social media has increased as a result of features like Instagram’s shopping tags.
Do some research on your target market
Your goal as a marketer, no doubt, is to craft compelling advertising copy that convinces consumers you have total insight into their lives and requirements. As a marketer, you should also be aware that gaining new insights into your target audience is an ongoing effort. The first step for companies is to verify that their assumptions about “the customer persona” were true and that the individuals they plan to sell to actually require the goods or services. The next step is to try out fresh demographics in order to expand into untapped areas. After that, there’s internationalisation, which entails discovering and adapting to local cultural norms and practises. There are countless examples where changing your perspective on your target audience is necessary.
Find out where you excel and where you fall short
Positive or negative feelings about a product, service, or company is the first and most fundamental yet important statistic. Analytics software for social media is getting smarter about determining if a message is positive, bad, or neutral based on its context by using machine learning. Brands can then quickly adapt to changing consumer preferences.
It’s critical to keep an eye on mention and sentiment spikes, but it’s even more crucial to figure out what’s causing them. An image of a KFC-themed birthday party for a young child was posted, for instance. The adorable scene received a lot of favourable feedback online, and people started actively sharing the article, leading to more mentions.
Evaluate your product in relation to the market
In addition to keeping tabs on their own metrics, marketers are always on the lookout for new ways to learn about the metrics of their competitors, and social media listening is a great way to do just that. Whilst you won’t learn anything truly “secret,” gaining insight into how your brand stacks up against the competition will help you develop a solid strategy and respond swiftly to any major shifts in the tactics used by the competition.
You can establish numerous subjects at once with today’s social media analytics tools. It’s possible that some of them would highlight your items or brands, while others will compile data about the competition. You may learn a lot about a community by analysing its demographics, its most popular sources, the characteristics it emphasises, the people who mention it the most, and much more.
Visual listening is an effective tool for generating fresh marketing concepts
Let’s take a closer look into visual listening right now. To begin, only a select few social media analytics solutions are able to monitor both textual and visual brand mentions, where the company name was not mentioned in the description but appeared on the image. You may be wondering how it achieves it. Logo identification is the highlight of this function because it can identify logos whatever their size, orientation, or clarity.
You might be wondering, though, just how useful visual mentions actually are. Amazing price for the quality! Let’s get into the figures first. In recent years, there has been a meteoric rise in the number of images posted online. On Instagram, for example, 1,074 new images are added every second.
Meanwhile, pictures shared on social media are the most real depictions of our life and the globe. Whether on purpose or accident, we have a habit of sprinkling logos and company names into our photographs. Suppose you tweeted a picture of some KFC spicy wings without tagging them. Although they probably won’t admit it to themselves, your friends and followers may feel the same way after reading this post in your feed and deciding to get a bucket of their own.
Monitor the outcomes of advertising efforts
Finally, social media analytics may be used to monitor and assess the efficacy of your advertising and public relations initiatives. It can be challenging to measure the efficacy of multiple public relations or marketing activities at once. It’s important to pick a programme that lets you make personalised dashboards, which are like mini-boards that can be populated with different kinds of widgets.
There are a number of methods available for collecting and representing the relevant performance measures. The first method involves making separate dashboards for each campaign. If these efforts are being handled by different persons and do not overlap, this could be quite helpful. You can also add the same metrics next to each other in a single file to compare different marketing strategies and determine which one is more successful. Results can also be monitored over time by incorporating data collected both before and after a campaign into a single dashboard.
The Bottom Line
As you can see, the capabilities of social media listening tools have expanded well beyond the simple collection of brand mentions, allowing them to provide marketers with a wealth of information.
Whether you’re just getting started with social media listening or already have a programme in place, it’s important to find a provider that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases and provide insightful data.