No matter how you slice and dice, social media’s key emphasis is “Social“. To be social, you need to understand people, think about what they say, and respond in ways that show care.
Listen
Social mentions and unintended reviews, endorsements, gripes happen anywhere, anytime, and propagate anywhere. How do you capture these conversations in one single platform? Of the dozen platforms out there, which one fits you the best?
Listening is first and foremost in understanding consumer preferences and their behaviors. The technique to listen to conversations about your brand sometimes is more than queries on search engine or alert setup. There are at least a 2 dozen services created in the past 2 years to tailor their services to corporations as well as to small businesses. See Media Monitoring Platform Comparison for PAID and FREE social media monitoring services.
Analyze
Where do you position now? How much volume of online conversation is there about you now? How do you stack up against your competition? Should you launch a new campaign? Where are you influencers and influential websites? How can you use analytics to improve marketing efforts?
Here is a complete list of tasks that need to be carried out after choosing your social media monitor or tracker.
- Build monitoring dashboards and panel
- Create different ways to visualize data with chart types, data range, sentiment and other parameters
- Identify focus of analysis and content groups (influencers and influential sites)
- Read native content and applying advance filters
- Categorize negative, neutral, and positive sentiments
- Analysis of data, reporting to upper management
- Recommend creative launch campaigns
- Determine seeding strategy
- Recommend message approach to target content group
- Manage relationships with partners
Engage
Finding your target audience and delivering relevant messages at the proper time is the key to any marketing success.
Some social marketing principles and practices are:
- Bring people together
- Build a community
- Connect with an existing community
- Trivia
- Promote a new service
- Raise new awareness to company
- We’ll promote you if you promote us
- Show off fan work
- Get best company testimonials
- Work for us (not literally employment but thinking for us)
- Getting the best help for free
- Creative brainstorming
We will apply our experience and insight to generate new revenue channels in social media such as virtual goods, mini-games, or VIP lounges for exclusive discounts by leveraging interactive and informational quality of a brand experience.