Kim Townend

Social Media Listening & Strategy

The Blog

Why you should be using social media listening

· · 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

· · 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:

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

· · Leave a Comment

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

View Post

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.

How to really connect with your audience in the age of ‘Peak TV’

· · Leave a Comment

Earlier this year, I gave a quick talk at the TV Connect conference about how you can use social media to get right to the heart of your viewer base, even in the age of peak TV.

Below is an embed of the deck and a shortened version of my speaker notes.

So first a bit of background. What is peak tv? Put simply; it’s just that there are too many shows.

According to Research, 455 original scripted programs aired on American television in 2016, that’s up from 210 shows in 2009. A massive increase. Now I realise we’re in the UK, but with global release dates becoming more common, access to Netflix and on-demand programming, alongside satellite and cable, we’re in a very similar situation. There’s ‘too much’ great stuff out there.

I don’t know how much you guys know about fandom, so I’ll explain a little.

Fandom has been around for a long time. It’s not new. Fun fact, loads of the fandom vernacular (shipping for example) actually originates from the first Star Trek series.

Fandom essentially means anything that fans create around the thing they love, and the fans themselves. E.g Comicon is all about fandom.

Tumblr, a slightly lesser know social/blogging network is the home to all things fandom.

The takeaway here for social TV is that the fandom itself LOVES the show we’re trying to market. They’re overwhelmingly positive about it.

So, how do you find out about what your fandom are into? (click for gif)

Always start with Tumblr

Fandometrics is a weekly updated part of Tumblr that ranks all the different fandoms on Tumblr by subject. It is an invaluable research tool for Social TV with any kind of millennial/Z fanbase.

My strategies always start with talking to the fandom. Identifying these guys is like finding the biggest built in advocates for your show. So I start with them and then the social influencer and bloggers start to pay attention, and from there you can reach the mainstream.

Back to Doctor who again. While I was writing the strategy for the Mission Dalek campaign, I felt it was really important to understand the implications of the different types of audience who were fans of shows on different platforms. For example, when looking at the best way to connect with Dr Who fans on Instagram I identified a huge community of girls who cosplay as the various female assistants. I decided to leverage this as a way to get the often overlooked younger female Whovians involved in our competition, by allowing them to enter with cosplay images.

The US broadcaster CW knows this better than anyone else. Social TV champions from the get-go, they figured out which shows had the biggest audiences on which platforms and prioritised content there way back in 2014. Reign was all about Pinterest due to the costumes; Supernatural has always ruled Tumblr and the then new ‘The Flash’ was fast becoming a YouTube sensation.

Understanding which of your fans are on which platforms and the content that resonates on that platform will help you more than anything else when it comes to engagement planning.

And so to my final, and most important point.

When social first started, way back a decade ago, building communities was the whole point of Twitter. Then marketing came and suddenly it was a place just to advertise. Community was out of the proverbial window.

Well, the one sure-fire secret to really engaging with your fans in the age of peak TV, is to hire a great community manager.

A community manager is like a social media manager ‘plus’ They are tasked not just with publishing updates and responding to enquiries, but actively being involved in, and growing the community that they’re looking after.

I was writing the social strategy for E4 a couple of years back, and to test my hypothesis I took on community management duties for one week.

During that time e4 were airing Supernatural but weren’t really aware of the huge fandom around it. I created a strategy to truly engage with the fans by doing things like:

  • Creating content that would resonate with them
  • Speaking in their language ‘shipping terms etc.’
  • Live tweeting key moments of the shows

This resulted in not just an outpouring of love for e4 from fans during the week, but also with metrics.

The week leading up to my community management, there had been a paid campaign running, I won’t disclose how much, but it was a not insignificant amount of money. This achieved 572k impressions.

The week I took over, organically, we achieved almost 750 thousand impressions.

Which just goes to show what a combination of a good social strategy and a good community manager who knows your content can do.

What the hell is full stack social anyway?

· · Leave a Comment

Before we start this, I just want to reiterate, that I really, really hate stupid buzzwords. BUT. I have been looking for a way to describe what it is that I do succinctly, and I believe I’ve found it.

A full stack developer is someone who has an understanding of each part of the process, back end through front end. A full stack designer is a someone who knows how to code the front end stuff they are designing.

Here’s a great description of what full stack strategy is.

I do full stack social media

That essentially means I’m cross-disciplinary and able to take a project to completion.

Back when social started, it was one job: ‘social media manager.’ Then as Twitter and Facebook grew and more platforms were born, it stopped being a place for just the internet cool kids and people began to realise it was a slightly bigger gig than we first thought.

We saw the advent of community managers, and social media copywriters and social strategists and social media analysts. And then we needed to monetise it somehow, and we started seeing ‘paid social’ experts appear.

That’s where I come in.

I’ve been working in social since the very beginning, so I’ve worked across all the various disciplines at various points in my career.

For me, doing full-stack social manifests like this:

  • I will deep-dive research your audience. Using a bespoke suite of software that I have put together I offer social media audits, competitor reviews and more importantly full social listening capabilities to be able to identify very clear audiences for your project. 
  • I can write your social strategy for any or all of the social media platforms that are appropriate for you/your brand (this is most or what I do these days)
  • Does this strategy include a big creative idea? I can make this happen! I lead the creative and use a team of designers and developers to produce the content
  • I can also implement your strategy (My community or social media managers are skilled at writing for and managing all aspects of your social media.)
  • Need paid social advertising? (Probably, it’s 2019 – the best social includes an element of paid!) I write paid strategy that works alongside your organic social. What’s the point of having a media agency who don’t talk to your organic social team? I understand how to get your content in front of the right people, how to get them engage with it, and all importantly how to get people to convert. Across all platforms.
  • Want to know how it all went? I LOVE analytics. KPIS are my thing. What’s the point of doing something if you’re not going to use the learnings to improve?

What’s the advantage of having one person see the process through from beginning to end? There are a few.

  1. A strategist who also manages communities from time to time, will have a better grasp of what is possible in terms of execution
  2. Creative ideas work differently on social than other more traditional digital creative. A full stack social person is going to be able to help you understand how and where the content you’re creating is going to be distributed and what you need to consider during this process
  3. You don’t need to hire a separate copywriter to write updates/blog posts. That’s a thing we can all do!
  4. There’s less miscommunication, as one person who understands each element of the process is involved from start to finish.

So, that’s it. All it means is that I can work across any part of your digital output, and understand it. This doesn’t mean I want to community manage everything that I work on or be responsible for the creative, but it means I understand how to. And that’s always an advantage.