Day: Apr 14, 2020

Decoding Social Media Analytics: What Does It Mean?

“Social media analytics is the process of gathering and analyzing data from social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. It is commonly used by marketers to track online conversations about products and companies” (Wikipedia, 2020). You will use these analytics to collect data from social media websites. With this data, you can evaluate and research further to make successful business decisions to drive your brand and goals forward. With analytics adequately used, you can find in-depth information about what your consumer wants and who they are, allowing your business to find their right consumer, which in theory should create brand awareness and community engagement. Not only do analytics help you understand the audience you have, but it also shows the best social media networks for your product or service, what type of data tracking you need to create better content, information to understand competitors, and statistics to help create a better social media strategy. If you have correctly integrated your company into social media platforms, you may also succeed with users buying products directly from your social media posts or ads. This can be beneficial as users do not have to leave the website to purchase the advertising product. If your community is striving and the engagement is high, you will see your analytics improve; you need to carefully watch over, and be sure to study why you are having success, or it may start to implode if not managed carefully. Social media analytics is an essential tool for all companies.

Driving Measurable ROI on Each Channel

In the age of social media and where the internet runs rampant, you will need a platform that will give your brand and organization success. Each platform is different. Whether you advertise or sell your product solely depends on your current market and key performance indicators you have set; are you looking to generate revenue or create brand awareness? Some of the top-performing social media websites are Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. If you plan to advertise or sell on any of these platforms, make sure you have aligned your social media goals with your business objectives. Suppose you have created a recognizable brand by following the steps provided and using analytics and software to gain insight into where you need to succeed. In that case, you will have a higher chance of creating engagement and can earn more revenue and views with your social media posts. If you have trackable goals, you may also monitor visitors and define the actions needed for your brand awareness to improve. The key is to manage and measure so you can have a substantial increase in your investment into these platforms. You will want to understand the insights and why buyers are engaging with your product and efficiently optimizing keywords so you can improve your search reach with customers.

Bonus Strategies for Maximizing ROI

To maximize return on investment you can, manage metrics and analytics, follow likes and engagement within your community, or see why and how social media creates value for your organization; these are all great ways to manage and create healthy brand awareness. Still, there are also more subtle things you can do to help too. To help marketers fully succeed, you can follow the main four pillars, but to get an advantage over your competitors, you can also use smaller or “bonus strategies” to create growth. Some of these strategies include creating website visits using Twitter cards, sales with Instagram stories, writing short and engaging paid posts, built-in YouTube tools, and the Google Campaign builders. These are just some of the necessary side steps that can enable you to get that advantage and the right number of viewers for your product. These are not all crucial to your development or four pillars but may be necessary to get to the next community engagement step.

Conclusion

For this blog and the idea about social media and creating engagement, I have an example that can be applied directly from my life and how I went about creating ads for a particular interest I had. My goal was to create a community for selling and trading high-end clothing. Think of it as a unique personal page to sell and interact with individuals with the same interests in clothes and fashion. When I advertised, I was not selling one product and was not trying to seek a return on investments for the ads I created; I was merely trying to create a community to engage with while also hoping to sell some designer or hype clothes. When I started this community, I followed the metrics after researching and watching a few videos, I did not know as much as I do now, but my community still grew over time. My philosophy on the project as if I just had some individuals interested after creating a little awareness, they may tell their friends and create more. In my opinion, I succeeded as I had a few hundred join in my own privatized group where we would all trade and sell and post information on new clothing drops. I was also able to make a fair amount of profit from some of the items I sold. Overall I believe social media marketing is essential for every company and individual. I used it as just one person, but imagine the possibilities a company with tons of revenue and marketing can do.

References

Wikipedia Contributors. (2020, February 28). Social media analytics. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_analytics

(2020). Linkedin.Com. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/social-media-marketing-roi-2/reading-facebook-insights-data-on-business-pages?u=2109516

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The main direction I believe of this course is “the new way of marketing” (Adams, M. 2018). This involves the usage of social CRM, which helps to combine all the info from social media analytics to determine how an organization may use this information for their best interests. With the correct use of CRM, companies can discover secrets and techniques to correctly engage with their audience and maintain efficient forecasts for market trends; if organizations use these tools properly, they can also predict behaviors of an individual. “The integration of social CRM into your organization’s marketing strategy will enable you to create exceptional experiences, products, and services for your customers simply by listening to them and acting on that information so you can see that social CRM is the new way of marketing” (Adams, M. 2018). The best way to manage your social CRM is with a set of tools, and there is a bunch of tools designed for specific scenarios so choosing what goes best for your operations must be picked carefully, that way you can monitor your customers while also receiving the best benefits towards your companies mission statement. When you are ready to introduce a social CRM framework into your business you must have appropriate resources as well, new technology is rather tricky to implement so having adequate resources, organizational support, and being able to identify any outliers or problems within your company will help profoundly when adopting new systems into your organization’s culture.

Develop Your Strategy

To maintain proper branding and social CRM, your business needs two critical criteria; these are humanization and personalization. Often a brand representative is a faceless identity with no personality, how can you have a conversation with some you do not honestly know? It is hard to have a conversation with a brand. This is where humanizing your brand comes in handy; this will shape your business and allow it to grow, giving it a much-needed personality lift to help ensure your customers want to continue to communicate with your organization. Secondly, for personalization, this is having your customers creating impacting ways it can connect with your business; it allows them to play with the brand and specifically have an impact on what happens and how things get done. An excellent example of this would be ordering through any fast food service, which allows you to earn rewards, customize products, and even get employees to call you out by your name. Your brand is there to help you as an organization is distinct from competitors, so using humanization and personalization, you can create a lasting impression with your customers. Organizations have limitless opportunities to be a well-known due to impacts of social CRM and branding, and even unknown customers can be highly involved with your brand if you can create marketing campaigns with social CRM in mind.    

Manage Social CRM

“True influence drives action, not just awareness” (Baer, J). To expose your brand, you need to find networks with influencers that have thousands of followers. An influencer is “a form of social media marketing involving endorsements and product placement from influencers, people and organizations who have a purported expert level of knowledge or social influence in their field” (Wikipedia, 2020). You have the potential to expose your brand with just a simple blog, tweet, or post to thousands of users, and, if done correctly, will drive potential followers to your brand. Influencer marketings are so useful as it is reliable and cheap. Engagement is just another way an organization can continue to evolve their social CRM. With tools, you can create engaging actions that will lead your organization to the ideal customer, listening to what your customers are saying about you, and what they want or need from your business is just one of the many ways to help create an engaging business. This is valuable because it can lead your company to find more targets exposing your brand, similar to what influencers will do. Be careful when trying to make your brand more engaging, though, as customers can misinterpret many things. To create a successful brand, the best rule to follow is to value your customer, you want to show why they should be involved with your organization, and how you value their purchases. Creating value is not as hard as it seems with the right customer service team. If your brand already has a more humanization outlook, the interaction between the customer and the company should help maintain a long-lasting relationship. Your business has many ways to communicate in the age of the internet; whether it be landline, email, text, or internet, you will always have some way to have an interaction with customers. Social CRM integration is key to customer service as it will allow your management to resolve issues quickly, and will allow your employees to identify and understand issues the customers have. “When your digital customer service channels are fully integrated, agents can work simultaneously on email, social, live chat, while providing seamless support and a great multi-channel experience for the customer” (Adams, M. 2018).

Your Tools

Social CRM strategies are imperative for long term success within your organization. A strategy is usually created when efforts between an organization’s marketing team, sales department, and customer service are using resources to better engage with customers and to create better overall brand awareness; it is not only about gathering data. Every business will run different strategies for what suites their business, but more often now, companies are implementing social tools to help their organization. Your first goal is to always identify the evident problems and to figure out what goals you have. With the use of tools, you can not only identify problems within your organization, but you can also create a strategy that will have analytics, monitoring, and engagement with your customers. With analytics, you can create measurements that will enhance the overall customer experience, and see what type of interactions your company has with its customers.

Conclusion

I believe that social CRM is significant. An excellent example of it is when either a business or even a customer create a fan page for your company, product, or art. If someone has an interest in your product or brand, this is basically creating free awareness just by having a great social CRM business. If you create a way for customers to receive value while also integrating proper elements for branding, you will have a unique following and gain an advantage over your competitors. This does not always happen though; I would say more often, it is easier for your business to have social CRM if you are a video game, movie, tv-show, or anime company. The more appealing your product is, the more others will find a deep connection, this will always be seen as a benefit towards your business and its goals. That is how I feel anyway, as whenever I grow a connection towards something I enjoy, I have a more significant impact towards it than say my bottle of shampoo, so each company has to make sure they are competitive enough and have a great product to have a strong following.

References

Wikipedia Contributors. (2020, March 6). Influencer marketing. Wikipedia; Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influencer_marketing

(2010). Linkedin.Com. https://www.linkedin.com/learning/social-media-marketing-social-crm/process-documentation?u=2109516

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