Tag Archives: social media monitoring

Brand Audit Best Practices

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Social chatter and noise can be very distracting when you try and measure what is being said about your company, key industry concepts and your site.   And as we all know the social networks are ever changing. We think conducting a brand audit is a good first step and a key elements of a successful social media monitoring campaign.

 

Brand Audit As A Baseline

 

Having an analytical baseline is a good starting point.  Some key points to look at when doing the brand audit are:

– Volume of Conversations
– Sentiment & Tone of Conversations
– Brand Attacks
– Customer Service Issues
– “Attaboys”
– Influencers
– Locations
– Sources

After getting all the data you find relevant, map it out.  Social Report will even let you export the data to make it easier.  Even if you have to use Excel to map it out, know what is being said, by whom and how often.

 

What Opportunities Are Present

 

With the right data, organized correctly any social media professional can look for the opportunities that the social graph is showing you.  Expediency in getting data and feedback is a key element of social media marketing, so watching frequently for social trends is crucial.  A few opportunities to monitor, advance and in some cases save your brand can include:

– customer service slip-ups
– confusion about your product
– brand attacks by competitors
– employee PR issues
– press that is praising your brand

Remember though, this audit can’t tell you everything.  Think of the brand audit as a global thermometer to gage the what, the who and the where of social conversations.  Knowing what the outcomes are versus what the expected outcomes are, is the first step to getting any social media marketing strategy on track.  Social media is no magic bullet but it can make the difference in many company’s bottom line with the right data.

Change is Necessary in Social Media

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There is an old adage that goes “change or die” and in today’s technology marketplace that is definitely the motto that drives much of the business practices in companies, ours included.

 

Social Media Networks Change Constantly, Rapidly

 

They have to keep up with changes with competitors, changing laws, marketplace demands and innovating technology.  It’s a good thing for you and your business although at first it can seem overwhelming to the uninitiated.  At Social Report, our social analytics tools, monitoring capabilities and discovery agents are constantly being updated and kept in sync with changes in the marketplace and to the networks we monitor.  We have had a rash of changes recently and thought we would take a break from discussing strategy and show off a bit of what’s been going on around here recently.
 
New Design!

Our website and our tool underwent a major design overhaul both for look and feel and for usability.  We love the way it looks and from your feedback so do you!  We are always open to hear more feedback so keep it coming!

One of the ways we re-engineered the tool was to rework the dashboard and here are some key changes:

 

Project Oriented Layout

Organizing your social and web properties is key. Whether you are doing it for your business or for your clients and customers, being able to manage them in logical groupings (projects) helps with reporting, clean separation of reporting data and with aforementioned ability to manage team access.

There is no limit to how many projects you can setup.

 

Team Access

 

Manage team and customer access to your projects. Setup authorized users who will be able to access the projects. Control their level of access (i.e. reports only, or campaign publishing, etc). You can finally stop sharing a single login, get others to help out with your day-to-day operation and perhaps even take a vacation!

 

White Label Management

 

White label and re-branding is now fully automated. Upload your logo, setup your domain, and customize links. This is available to all Agency and Ultimate subscribers.

 

Affiliate and Reseller Portal

 

There several great features offered in our reseller program like ability to sell our standard packages as well as ability to create your own subscription plans. Our latest version offers you full control over this as well as provides thorough reporting that enables you to track your reselling performance and earnings.

 

Exporting Data

If you are using SocialReport already you know we have some great reporting options. It is possible, however, that sometimes you may have a need to present a data in a special way. Instead of trying to build a complex web based utility that would enable you to do that, we’ve take a much simpler route. You can now download your data and build your reports utilizing the tool that does it best – Microsoft Excel!

 

Again our users have made all this possible.  We love to hear from you and we appreciate your support.  Onward and upward, my friends.

How To Win Fans With Customer Engagement

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What creates engagement in social media? Certainly, some posts and status updates get better responses than others. A part of the equation is simply knowing our audience. We are the creators of written stimulus. Our goal is to elicit a response.

 

How do we measure that response?

 

SocialReport provides some of the easiest to use and most advanced social analytics on the planet. You can track and analyze Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Analytics, Bit.ly, Meetup, Goo.gl, Linkedin, Yelp, WordPress, MySpace, Digg, Bebo, and Foursquare; all in one place and all using a single tool.

MThe words we post are useless we are creating an affinity for the brand we are representing. For those of us who participate in social branding, our job is writing entertaining, engaging, and informative status updates that create an affinity for the brand we are posting for. Using an analytical tool-set like those provided by SocialReport, we can monitor the number of actions taken on our posts.

 

What is brand affinity?

 

Brand affinity is when customers have an emotional connection with our brand and ultimately become our best marketers. Those customers feel a sense of ownership in our brand. (Think Apple Inc. or Harley Davidson.) These feelings aren’t typically based on logic but then again, the majority of people respond or react based on a gut-level and then rationalize their responses later. People will comment, re-tweet, mention, share and reply when they feel something.

MOur job is to stir emotions and direct actions. Ideally, we will create a positive connection to our brand. Making the right word choices with precision is the key. We write for our audience. We are trying to ring a Pavlovian bell and create positive attachments to the brand we are writing for. Social media allows us to build a bridge to our customers and win them over as fans… Fans.  Not just customers. The people who have the deepest affinity for our brand will write about us,  re-tweet us, comment on us and engage with us.

MVery rarely do I see a detailed analysis of how to achieve positive response and actions. There’s a lot of posting, measuring and adjusting in social campaigns followed by tracking and reporting. Again, SocialReport is an excellent tool to help us with just that.

 

Story telling is a key to creating fans.

 

We are telling a story about our brand. The story we are telling is told in small chunks of status updates that when connected paint a bigger picture. Making the right word choices is the single most important action we can take when creating status updates.

MThe only way to communicate the feeling behind our words, is to include those feelings in our words. That’s not a task that is easy to accomplish. I’m not just typing in 140 characters, I’m typing in 140 character bursts and 140 character chunks. I use kinesthetic tone and imagery. If I feel that my posts are starting to get boring, I’ll switch back over to first-person narrative mode and remind people that I’m a human being. I will connect with others in conversation. I will infuse my posts with literary devices, imagery, metaphors, and analogies. And I will do so in a way that allows my readers to feel an emotional connection to the brand I’m writing for.

MWhen are readers are in a heightened emotional state, they are more likely to take an action and to remember our message. They are more likely to share, re-tweet and respond with comments. Social media is a people business and our posts should be aimed squarely at human emotion. If we write boring messages instead of writing status updates that spark an idea, stir some emotions, or allows our readers to see a little bit of themselves reflected in our words, we’ll fail to make that critical connection with our readers, followers and fans.

MSo much has been written about Twitter and Facebook… Often using words
like “value”, “engagement”, and “authentic”. I’m not big on buzz words. Mostly because these words tend to be nebulous at best.

MWhat I’m looking for is response. The closer I can come to stepping inside the experience of my audience and ringing that Pavlovian bell, the greater the response will be. I write behind a keyboard but as I write, I tap into my own experience. I’m reflecting on my own thoughts and feelings. I’m seeking to create a connection with my readers.
 
• Sometimes I seek to solve problems
• Sometimes I seek to share my experience
• Sometimes I seek to spark an idea
• Sometimes I seek to entertain
 
I will tell you a truth about Twitter and Facebook. People want to be stimulated. We want to feel something. It can be as simple as something funny that causes us to laugh or something that inspires us to take action. It can be as simple as something that causes us to look at a problem in a new way. It doesn’t matter what we write so much as it matters how we write.

MStir emotions. Provoke thoughts. Share ideas. Be a catalyst for conversation. Listen. Engage. Measure. Monitor. Metrics. Improve. When you remove the human element from social media marketing, you are destined to failure.

MI will expand upon these concepts more in my next blog post. In the mean time: Try SocialReport for free for thirty days and see what the data tells you about your social media campaigns.

4 Steps to Instant Social Network Omnipotence

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Social Report is committed to continually adding features that will make social reporting and curating your social media efforts easier. With Social Report, you can now have a daily summary of all  your social events delivered to you encapsulated in an email. The benefit to you is that you can now access this data very simply and easily right on your smart phone.

MHow many times have we had something important to say while travelling, weren’t necessarily able to open our laptop and post status updates from our smart phone? Shouldn’t we be able to access our social reporting from the same device? With a few clicks of your mouse, you can activate a daily event summary email in your Social Report account. Your daily email notification will bring together all the relevant events across your social channels: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, LinkedIn, Yelp, WordPress, Digg, Bebo, Google Analytics, Foursquare and more. That’s a pretty exciting and powerful tool. Again, as simple to access as checking your email. You can scope out new followers and mentions on Twitter, new comments on your blogs, views of your videos on YouTube, web site activity analysis and much more.

 

The Daily Alert is Your Social Heart Beat

 

Quickly look at it on your mobile phone or a tablet to gain an immediate understanding of what’s happening in your or your customer’s world. You are in control. You are empowered. You have your finger on the pulse of your social activity.

MMore importantly, you can give answers on the fly when your client or boss calls to ask you how the conference is going and if you are gaining traction while away. You’ll know because you are up to date. (And BlogWorld Los Angeles is just around the corner.)

MScrolling through the daily event summary is efficient and the information you want is easily identifiable. Instead of spending an hour collecting this information daily by going into each and every network trying to figure out what’s new, quickly glancing through the daily summary report will give you an instant cognition of your social activity.  Events are organized in a simple and intuitive listing. Each social account is presented with a network specific section. You can also forward this email to others, like your customers. MHow easy is it to activate the Daily Social Report? 3 mouse clicks and 30 seconds of your time.

1. Login to Social Report.

2. In the left hand sidebar is the Settings widget, all the way at the bottom. Click that.

3. When the menu opens, click Notifications at the bottom of the list.

4. What you want is the Daily Digest, click Save and you are done.   M

The daily notification email will now provide you with a detailed summary of all events across your social channels for the previous day.   Try SocialReport for free for thirty days and see what the data tells you about your social media campaigns.