Social Media Listening & Strategy
Those of you who have read my previous posts know how highly I rate Pulsar Platform as the best way to do social listening. I talked to them earlier this year about the ways that I use their platform and how effective is has been in allowing me to craft strategies with brilliant results.
Click the image to head over to Pulsar and read the full piece.
At the beginning of lockdown, I wrote about how brands could use social media during the crisis. At that stage everything was new and we were in the panic stage of the crisis, since then although we still don’t know how long these measures will last and what their impact might be, we’ve had the chance to amass some data and better understand how we can respond now.
We now know that consumers are looking to businesses (both global and local) to help support them through this uncertain period. In the UK consumers are more likely to look to smaller local businesses during this time.
At the same time we’re seeing a global deterioration in mental health, with 45% of internet users in the UK and the US reporting that their mental health has worsened – with anxiety and stress being the two main ways that this is manifesting.
We have also learned that social media continues to play a key role in brand discovery for both markets, predominently through social ads and friend recommendations, but also through organic social posts.
I talked in my last post about making sure your social content was helpful. This still stands but now we have a better idea about the type of content that you can create.
Anything that supports your users health, mentally or physically is a great place to start, as long as it falls within your current brand content pillars. I can’t count the amount of updates I have seen from brands who are suddenly talking to me about meditation when they’ve never mentioned it before.
You want to approach the content creation from your brand lens, and think about how you can be supportive to your community and remain authentic.
I’d also recommend boosting (or putting some ad spend) behind your most popular helpful posts, to aid with content discovery, and that you encourage tagging and sharing.
Everything I said about building community and actually having conversations with your users is still absolutely the best course of action. Not only is it the right thing to do, but consumers will remember the brands who were helping when there is once again money to be spent.
As more information is accrued, I will post here again about ways we can use social in a post Covid/lockdown world – but it’s currently still too early to make predictions.
As always, feel free to get in touch if you have any questions.
All the data came from the Global Web Index Coronavirus hub.
With much of the world on lockdown for the foreseeable, social media has become more important to businesses as both a way of supporting their communities and helping to keep them afloat financially during these tumultuous times.
With this in mind, I wanted to offer five quick tips for ways that smaller and medium-sized businesses can use social media effectively over the next few months.
It’s tempting during this time to either keep to your regular social marketing content or to post more than usual given that many of us find ourselves with more free time on our hands.
Don’t.
People are scared and adapting to an unprecedented way of living, now is not the time to tell them about your new product launch (unless it’s actually useful for right now) and definitely not the time for any April Fools content!
I understand that everyone is trying to make a living, and I’m not saying halt all sales-based posts completely. I’m saying make sure that they are necessary and…
In these changing times, we need to adapt our tone of voice.
This doesn’t mean every post must be sombre and joy-free (quite the opposite) but it does mean think carefully about how your posts will be received.
When you’re creating posts always try and think about how they can be helpful to the people reading them, even if you are directing them to a sales link.
I don’t recommend sharing news about the pandemic via business accounts at all, but if you are going to do this, please make sure that any third party content you share is accurate.
There is a lot of misinformation flying around to help combat this you should check any information before sharing. Infotagian is a new site that has been set up to fact check any news/claims about Covid-19.
Finding the time to write a proper social strategy without a dedicated team is hard to do, but if you find yourself with some downtime now is a great time to take the first steps towards this by running a social media audit and starting some audience analysis. If you have the time/budget, I recommend doing some social listening to understand customer issues and pain points during the pandemic.
There are many free tools available to do this, depending on which platforms you are using.
By gaining a better understanding of your audience you’ll be able to identify common interests, which in turn will allow you to…
Social media is not just for marketing; it’s a really useful community-building tool – and community building is key to a good social media strategy.
Think about what you’ve learned about your audience.
The world is a scary place right now, there is a lot of news and not much of it seems good. People are being inundated.
If you’re doing something to help, or you know of someone else who is, let other people know!
Stories of positive action and hope are even more important during this period of isolation. (This works better if the news you’re sharing is local or specific to your audience, I’m not suggesting you turn your account into a ‘good news memes’ only feed).
As things change and a path forward becomes clearer I suspect we will all be adapting our social media strategies to make the best of the new normal we find ourselves living in.
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Until then, stay safe, stay home, and stay well.