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Kim Townend

Social Media Listening & Strategy

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Archives for February 2020

Why you should be using social media listening

Kim · Feb 26, 2020 · 2 Comments

When brands first started using social media, few even had defined strategies. We were all figuring this new strange beast out. Not everyone was here yet, there were no algorithms, we were actually interested in the content that was being shared.

Fast forward to 2020 and it’s a very, very different space. By next year it is predicted there will be 3.1 billion social media users globally. Everyone is here, and they are all talking.

When brands create content for social media, they’re not just competing with other brands, they’re competing with memes, and pictures of dogs and whatever is trending on TikTok today.

A social media strategy helps with getting your content in front of eyeballs, (it’s imperative if you actually want to social media to perform for your brand). But how can you be sure that your social media strategy is actually going to deliver?

The answer is social media listening

Social media listening is simply the practice of using some kind of software (I favour Pulsar and consider it best in class) to listen around keywords/brand names across a variety of social channels.

Why is it so useful? I’ve broken it down into 3 sections below.

Understanding who your social audience actually are

Almost all brands have an idea of who they want to reach on social media. This is oftentimes either anecdotal or based on real life/traditional research methods. But the internet isn’t like real life. It’s like the internet. I’ve worked on so many projects where the client has had a very clear idea of who their social audience is, and social listening has revealed something very different indeed.

Take Sherlock for example. When I was approached to write the digital strategy for the Sherlock immersive escape game, the offline data said Sherlock fans were mostly male and predominently boomers.

Anecdotally this didn’t make sense to me, everything I knew about the online fandom suggested different. So I did a big chunk of social listening before the project even began. I looked for Sherlock fans and their interests and differences based on location and platform and it became incredibly clear that the Sherlock social fandom was incredibly female, and mostly under the age of 35. (Offline data was skewing more toward the literary fandom/Sherlockians)

Using data from the social listening I was able to create a strategy that played to the global audience, spoke their language, actually engaged them on platforms they were already using and drove an incredible amount of organic traffic.

Competitor research

Most people will do a social media audit of their own brand, and look at what competitor brands are doing themselves on social media. In my experience it’s uncommon for people to dedicate the time to doing social listening around key competitors, oftentimes the brand in question won’t even be doing this themselves.

This is important as it’s far easier to get a realistic idea of the general feeling about a brand by listening to what people are saying when they aren’t addressing the brand directly. (Pulsar leverages IBM Watson to actually understand the key mood of the conversation alongside the sentiment)

This can help your brand by identifying current issues with competitor products, pain points, and even understand what consumers are actually looking for (that’s right, social media listening isn’t just for marketing, R&D teams hit me up!).

You can use this data for creating a robust content strategy for any part of the funnel, or even for product development.

Identifying influencers, micro-influencers and detractors

So many brands have got influencer work so wrong, just going for the biggest name with the broadest appeal. Although this can be brilliant for reach, I tend to favour a more micro-influencer based approach. Social listening is brilliant for finding the people in your communities of interest who talk about your keywords all of the time.

The other side of this, is it’s also very easy to identify trolls in the space too. I look at the people who are talking the most around the keywords, switch the sentiment to filter to negative and then I have all the biggest detractors in any community listed out for me- ready for my community managers to keep an eye on. (This was helpful when crafting the social strategy for the Climate Assembly.)

I’m going to stop here, although I could add many more reasons that listening should be a part of your social media strategy going forward. As always, if you have any questions or would like to work together – get in touch!

The Same-ification of Social Media

Kim · Feb 20, 2020 · Leave a Comment

It’s been happening for years…

Little by little, the social networks all started to steal from one another and adopt similar functionality until all the platforms allowed you to share the same types of content. This just encouraged brands to share the same content across all the platforms (with slightly different pixel dimensions if they were really making an effort).

But it wasn’t just the platforms. The things users were posting became suspiciously similar too. I’m sure you all remember this article from a couple of years back about how similar Instagram posts were becoming.

And it’s not just influencers. Over the last year I’ve worked with a variety of alcohol brands and run social listening projects for all of them. I became really discouraged by the sheer amount of bottle shots on Instagram.

I understand that brands are proud of their bottle designs and labels and rightly so, they are an incredibly important part of the brand experience.

BUT! What if not all the content on the internet looked the same?

What if you took a chance and crafted a strong brand tone of voice and social identity that wasn’t just ‘honest and friendly’ and the same as what everyone else was doing.

As social media becomes ever more overpopulated with the same style of copy and posts from so many brands – it offers up a perfect opportunity for your brand to stand out.

Sure, all the beautifully curated shots are getting reasonable engagement, but are they delivering on actual objectives?

Consider MoonPie

MoonPie were included in almost every agency case study in 2017 for having such a strong brand personality and really generating the kinds of organic engagement people just weren’t seeing anymore. Fast forward 3 years to 2020 and they are still at it. Going from strength to strength:

What’s in the MoonPie box
_______
/  /  / /|
| ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄| |
| 🌙 🥧 | |
|_____________| /

Linda surprise it is me I have changed
   ____
 /(´・_・`) /\
| ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄|\
| 🌙 🥧 | |
|      |/
 ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄

— MoonPie (@MoonPie) February 17, 2020

The MoonPie example wasn’t just about generating engagement though, this was reflected in sales. Within the first year, they had increased sales by 17% just by using Twitter. They currently have over 320k Twitter followers and only post about once a fortnight. That is some good ROI!

Good social media strategy always starts with a strong brand strategy – but it’s only really great when brands are brave enough to do something a little bit different.

(This is where a good social listening project comes in! Being able to identify who your online audience is, where they live, their different interest clusters, how they behave on different platforms, etc. This ‘real people’ insight allows you to craft a social media strategy with real personality and content that will actually resonate with your target audience on the right platforms for you – get in touch if you want to talk about how I can help you achieve this)

© 2023 Kim Townend

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