Recently I participated in an article where we outlined how to monitor and measure your brand in social media. It was a really fun article to help put together thanks to the great questions outlined by Debbie Hemley. One of the questions she asked I’ve been thinking a lot about: Have you changed your direction(s) based on anything you’ve learned from metrics? Now you can read through her article to find mine and a few other people’s answers, but it got me wondering what everyone is doing with their social media data.
I mean think about it: we’re all investing countless hours and dollars into our social media campaigns, but how many people are actually making adjustments from them? I think a lot of companies just like to know they have a presence on sites like Twitter and Facebook, but don’t actually take the time to learn from what they’re doing.
What kinds of things can you learn? Well part of that depends on what you’ve been tracking. Let’s take a look at the types of insights you should be keeping an eye open for.
What are common misunderstandings and complaints about your product/service?
Just about everyone is tracking sentiment which makes this an easy insight to start leveraging. The company I work for, Raven Internet Marketing Tools, offers such a large variety of tools that users often wish we had a feature that already exists. By keeping track of what users are saying we can then focus on educating them about these features. Based on what they are asking for, we create blog posts, webinars and push out links to our Knowledge Base to help show them that the feature already exists. It’s a great way to help with both customer retention and retargeting.
What’s the overall perception of your company?
A great example of this deals with restaurant owners. Take a look at the types of things people are saying about your menu and food. When I used to help a restaurant with their reputation management, I noticed the majority of people loved their food but always complained about how bad it was for you. They mentioned how they wouldn’t eat there frequently because of that.
After discovering that, we quickly launched a new marketing campaign that talked about the healthy food options offered at the restaurant. People had no idea that there were options that were both tasty and wouldn’t give them a heart attack.
What types of messaging resonates best with your audience?
Do they enjoy a more laid back approach or is it better to be more corporate? You can test this out anywhere you’re participating. See what type of messaging has the highest user engagement. That can help influence the copy on your site, your email marketing and even your offline marketing activities.
Those are just a few of the ways you can start taking action on all of the data your collecting in your social marketing. What types of social insights have impacted your marketing?
