Kim Townend

Social Media Listening & Strategy

The Blog

How Brands can use Social Media to Survive the Covid-19 Crisis

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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.

So – how does all this help us find a path forward?

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.

Social Media for SMEs in the Age of Coronavirus.

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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.

Don’t post if you don’t have anything to say

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…

If you do have something to say, make sure it’s accurate and appropriate for now

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.

Use this time to get to know your audience

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…

Create content that is useful/Support your social media community

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.

  • Are they concentrated in one physical location?
    You could share content about how to get involved in local initiatives.
  • Are they interested in a particular product?
    If you are a maker of things, you could ask your followers to leave comments letting others know of their other favourite maker accounts to support.
  • Do many of them share a similar profession or field of work?
    Ask them to share challenges they are having in the current climate and if other followers can offer advice.

Share positive things!

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.

I am currently writing a complete guide to Social Media for SMEs in the Age of Coronavirus. It will include:

  • more detailed information on running audits,
  • creating simple social strategies
  • using content pillars
  • tone of voice
  • using analytics to guide you
  • community management tips and tricks to ensure your posts are seen by the right people.

Please sign up below and I will email you when it is available (hopefully in the next two weeks)

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Until then, stay safe, stay home, and stay well.

Why you should be using social media listening

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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

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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:

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)

2019: The Year That Social Media Comes Full Circle

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I haven’t written a blog post for ages. Years even. I’ve been flat out with client work and haven’t really given myself a break. I’ve started a few but never got as far as publishing them before they feel out of date. And that’s the problem. When you’re writing about social, news expires within weeks. New updates and algorithms and rules mean that what worked last month, probably doesn’t work anymore.

But recently I’ve noticed a trend that I felt compelled to comment on.

It started last year with Facebook prioritising ‘meaningful interaction’ on the Newsfeed. This algorithm update really put a spanner in the works for brands and editorial sites who had put all their eggs in Facebook’s basket. Sure, organic reach had been declining forever but this update explicitly meant that to be in with a chance of your content being seen you either had to pay for it with ads and boosts, or you had to create content that actually resonated with your audience and probably try some actual community management, not the post-and-forget-about-it style of social media management that has become so popular.

Unfortunately, this update may have kick-started the decline of Western democracy, but hey, the engagement was up by 50% year on year.

The same thing is happening with Instagram, organic reach has dropped to less than 10% for most brands, and gaming the algorithm means getting actual engagement on your posts. That’s comments and shares and tags, not the lazy double taps that don’t really mean much of anything. This was the reason more and more small business were turning to Comment Pods, to try and stay relevant.

On Twitter things weren’t quite so dire, (in terms of content, obviously Twitter has other issues it’s busy ignoring) as the algorithm was always opt-out-ish. However a series of updates over the last year focused on making conversations easier to read and engage with.

Then I saw this article being shared across social as the new big thing. Influencers! With interests! Being authentic!

This was the stage where it all started to feel a bit 2009. Remember, way back when social media was in its infancy and the entire point of using any of the platforms was to find and interact with people with similar interests? Community managers were community building for brands who were genuinely interested in connecting with their online audience and finding out what made them tick? Before social media became a flaming cesspool full of clickbait content, trolls, and badly targeted ads? Back then every deck we presented was heavy on authenticity. Faking it won’t work! We declared. Trust is the most important thing!

It’s all about community

The way that we can save social media (and quite possibly the internet) is to rewind the last 5 years and go back to caring about what we post. Create content with your audience in mind. Not everything has to appeal to everyone. Chasing reach and vanity metrics is one of the reasons that we’re in this mess. (Also, great content really helps you with organic reach)

Need more evidence that people are thirsty for long-tail content?

Interest-based communities are quietly flourishing while the big 3 try and figure out what to do

Amino, a mobile app built around fandom and communities, had as of last year over 10 million downloads on the Playstore, and user numbers keep growing.

Amino raises $45M to bring fan communities to smartphones

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You all know how I feel about Tumblr being the undisputed home of fandom. Well according to SimilarWeb, Tumblr still ranks 10th globally in the Internet & Telecom/ Social Network category. (Even after the porn ban, the monthly uniques are on the way up again)

Reddit, another community where people engage around content themes (or subreddits) has been quietly growing and growing and “As of March 2019, Reddit had 542 million monthly visitors (234 million unique users), ranking as the No. 6 most visited website in U.S. and No. 21 in the world”

My point is this.

It’s still totally possible to connect with your fans online. But to do this we need to stop approaching things with a one-size-fits-all mentality. Take the time, do your research. Learn who your potential audience is, what else they like, what they use which platforms for. Then figure out what you can do to get them interested in you. Stop just pushing out content that nobody needs. Think about the user and make sure there’s a clear objective.

Years back, I used to put this simple diagram in every talk I gave

It turns out, a decade on this is still the key.

Let’s make social media in 2019 good again.

If you’ve got a project that you think I could help with please get in touch.