a marketers guide to social media tools
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A Marketers Guide to Social Media ToolsTRANSCRIPT
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A Marketer’s Guideto Social Media Tools
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Introduction
Social Media Management Platforms
Social Listening Tools
Social Media Advertising Platforms
Social Analytics Tools
Conclusion
Key Differences Table
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In 2014, the market for social media tools will continue to grow based on the continued growth of the social media industry, and the number of suppliers in each market will also grow to keep up with demand. This can lead to even more confusion for marketers looking for the best tools to optimize each of their social media platforms and hoping to maximize the value to their business.
For those making their first venture into the marketplace of social media tools often as a result of a growing need for social insight, publishing and advertising the various offerings can be quite difficult to understand at first. This white paper will outline the main types of social media tools, explaining each in turn with their key benefits and main features, but primarily the value they bring to your business.
Social Listening Tools
Social Analytics Tools
Social Media Management Tools
Social Media Advertising Systems
Each type of tool is very different, both in terms of purpose and the features they possess, and this will be discussed in greater detail below.
The key purpose of this paper is to help clarify the marketplace of social media tools available to marketers, and to ensure that they are in a better position when it comes to evaluating the types of tools they need, and then picking their chosen solution.
The tools are listed in the order that they might be used. This refers to our recommended Social Media workflow: Analyze - Engage - Promote
Introduction
Engage
Interaction is everything that happens as part of an online conversation. From making original wall posts to answering comments and sharing. Fan interaction -- aka, engagement -- is critical to social success, and using social media man-agement tools helps you do this efficiently.
Analyze
Understanding where a brand fits into the social landscape requires that they practice listening and use analytics to enhance their social activity (and keep an eye on the competition).
Promote
Many posts will receive a low reach. Generating organic traffic is becoming increasingly dif-ficult as the various platforms continue to change their post-ing models. This is the ablity to optimize posts by using social media advertising tools to boost reach in relevant news feeds.
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Social Listening ToolsSocial listening tools are one of the most common social media tools. Social listening tools allow a company to listen for mentions of their brand, and focus on metrics such as share of voice. These tools generally work via keyword search, so the data that’s provided depends on the input to find the right data. In other words, just as keywords are important for good search results on the web, choosing the right keywords when listening definitely affects the quality of what’s found.
Businesses involved in social media -- as all brands should be -- need to listen for mentions of their business name, or other key terms related to their product, service, industry, region, etc. There are a number of reasons for this, which will be discussed below.
Picture 1 A map showing the geographical source of the mentions.
Picture 3Split between Positive, Neutral and Negative sentiment.
Picture 2Wordcloud of Socialbakers’ mentions.
Why Listening is Important
The first reason is the need to be proactive in social customer care. Just as in everyday life, if a customer starts saying negative things about a business on Twitter, social listening tools allow them to pick these comments up immediately and react - providing an opportunity to diffuse the situation publicly before widespread complaints start. After all, customers are listening too and the faster a brand responds, the better the chance of recovering from a potential disaster.
Alternatively, being proactive in listening to discussions about your business can allow you to generate sales - someone may be querying how your service works or what your delivery times are for example - this allows your team to dive in and give the relevant information to guide the user from being a prospect to becoming a customer. You can generate sales by responding to the way Fans are reacting and engaging on a macro level with your content and about your products or services. Listening gives you the power to be proactive instead of reactive.
Social listening tools also often allow you to measure brand sentiment, defining a percentage of positive vs. negative conversation about a brand. They work by automatically analyzing the words in the conversation (picture 3). This isn’t completely foolproof due to reliability issues, language variations and appropriately measuring irony and sarcasm, but it gives a reasonable indication of how a business is being talked about online. Many brands measure this on an ongoing basis and try to ensure that the sentiment is at least consistent, and preferably improving, at all times.
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With social listening tools, there is also the ability to generate engagement, not only by jumping in on conversations that are relevant, but also by analyzing the conversation trends over time. Monitoring trends helps predict the performance of the next post, and possibly provides clues for what needs to change.
Listening in on a wide range of topics and about specific businesses, and getting a feel for their overall sentiment enables a marketer to more easily identify the key influencers on a topic. By knowing who the influencers are, marketers can begin to develop relationships, which could lead to mutually beneficial promotion. A sign of a truly social brand is one that engages with the key influencers as well as the grassroot fans, and also attempts to convert detractors into brand ambassadors over time.
Picture 4Adding a keyword with appropriate search parameters.
Picture 7Search results.
Picture 5Social media platforms that are used as sources.
Picture 6Choosing countries and languages for mentions.
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Social Analytics ToolsSocial analytics tools allow you to easily interpret a wide range of social media metrics, primarily based on your content and audience. They will allow you to understand and compare metrics across platforms, and across brands to allow you to benchmark your activity.
Social analytics tools will lay out a range of key metrics such as audience growth, engagement rates, response rates, reach and more, such as:
By understanding current performance, a number of actions can be taken - from optimizing content strategy, to changing focus entirely, all of which would be done blind without the help of effective social analytics tools.
One of the key benefits is the ability to get a clear view of engagement and interaction over time. Seeing the trends gives valuable insight as to where to improve, and which days and content efforts are reaping the best results. Again, understanding data helps to optimize content strategy for better results, as well as providing clear data for reporting throughout the business (picture 8).
This wealth of data aids in optimizing social media strategies and ultimately in improving results.
Fans/Followers/Subscribers
Fans/Followers/Subscribers Growth
Interactions
Interaction Types
Engagement Rates
The most engaging type of content
Response rates and times
Volume of user posts/questions
Key influencers
Top performing posts
Shareability
Views and view time
Like/dislike ratio
Post sources
Aug01,2013-Aug31,2013
AstonMartin vs. Jaguar AutomotiveLabel
RelativeFanGrowth FanCountOverview TotalFans
LocalFans LocalFans LocalFans
AdminPagePosts PostsOverview
AdminPostTypes
MostEngagingPosts
PostTypes: Activity Album Link Offer Other Image Question Status Video
PagePosts
MonthlyExecutiveReport
Week32
(05.08.)
Week33
(12.08.)
Week34
(19.08.)
Week35
(26.08.)
0%
0,25%
0,5%
0,75%
1%
2,5M 2,2MTotalFanCount
56,1k2,16%
52,2k2,28%
FanCountChange
+21,3kWeek35(26.08.)
+20,4kWeek35(26.08.)
MaxFanCountChange
1,8k 1,6kAvg.FanChangeperDay
12,2M
142,9k
10,8M
195,8k
5,9M
120,1k
5,8M
83,1k
2,5M
56,1k
IN 15%
US 9%
GB 8%
FR 8%
Other 60%
IN 32%
US 5%
EG 5%
PK 5%
Other 53%
IN 13%
US 9%
MX 7%
IT 6%
Others 65%
Week32
(05.08.)
Week33
(12.08.)
Week34
(19.08.)
Week35
(26.08.)
0
10
20
30
40
86%
13%
1%
0%
100%
0%
0%
0%
98%
2%
0%
0%
100%
0%
0%
0%
106
95
68
3429
Page1/3ReportgeneratedbyAnalyticsPRO,Copyright©2013Socialbakers,www.socialbakers.com
Picture 8Excerpt from An Executive Report on Aston Martin vs. Jaguar focusing on Fans and Fan Growth. As we can see from the report, Aston Martin has a bigger Fan base. But while Aston Martin has grown more in absolute numbers, in relative numbers we can see that Jaguar has grown faster.
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Another key aspect of social media analytics tools is the availability of competitive analysis. It’s not enough to know how your posts and interactions are performing, you also need to know how the competition is doing. Publicly available metrics for other business’ social profiles will be available in these tools, allowing you to contrast and compare their key metrics and activity with your own. It is essential to monitor your competitors and also benchmark yourself against the market and region (Picture 9).
For anyone responsible for social media accounts, a social media analytics tool is a must in order to be successful. It may be cliche but knowledge is power. And social media analytics platforms empower users to improve their social media presence by knowing what is going on across all channels and compared to competitors in a user-friendly way. This is absolutely core to the ‘understand’ element of our social media flow.
Abs. Change in Fans 119 950 117 524 259 898,17
Rel. Change in Fans +0,96 % +1,89 % +3,26 %
PTAT 98 903 54 747 130 269,83
Admin Posts 163 23 73,17
Avg. Page ER 0,17 % (+0,01 %) 0,18 % (-0,14 %) 0,33 % (-0,19 %)
Avg. Post ER 0,03 % (+0,00 %) 0,12 %(-0,09 %) 0,16 % (-0,10 %)
Total Interactions 652 594 178 806 554 697,00
User Posts 1 653 645 1 152,00
RR for Questions 0,00 % 4,69 % 4,50 %
LamborghiniFerrari Luxury Cars Label
Abs.Changein Fans
Rel.Changein Fans
PTAT
AdminPosts
Avg. PageER
Avg. PostER
Total Interactions
UserPosts
RRfor
Questions
Picture 9KPI check example which shows the Ferrari and Lamborghini brands and a custom-made label, Luxury Cars. Labels like this one can serve as custom made benchmarks that aid comparison with a group of competitors, or any segment of the market. From this comparison alone we can see that when it comes to Fans, both brands are falling below average for their category. Ferrari is more active when it comes to posting and absolute interactions, and Lamborghini is more successful when it comes to relative Fan growth and Engagement Rate.
Picture 10Dashboard of analyzed brands.
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Social Media Management PlatformsSocial media management programs have been around for almost as long as businesses have had a pres-ence on social media platforms. Currently, there are a host of relevant tools to aid marketers in this area.
A social media management system in this context is defined as a tool that focuses on page or profile management. This primarily relates to content posting and response monitoring (Picture 11).
A social media management system is especially necessary for agencies or other businesses that manage multiple profiles. Whether running multiple platforms for a business, or for numerous client accounts - a social media management system will be vital in helping to effectively manage the workload .
Typically, social media management systems will provide a column-based layout where users can see multiple profiles next to each other. This allows you to see all content and interactions across profiles and platforms in one easy view. Likewise, some tools also show exactly what the competition is posting and who is interacting with their posts.
For agencies and larger brands, this provides scalability as these dashboards can be shared between users, allowing more social media managers to create content and monitor customer interactions whilst responding.
Where social media management tools also add value is in their scheduling and automation function-alities. The peak time to publish content may not necessarily be during office hours. A lot of social engagement happens in the evenings, for example, when users are on their phones while running about town, or relaxing at home after work. These tools allow the user to work around these issues, as well as schedule posts by timezone and more.
Picture 11Dashboard example for the social media management platform, Builder, with tabs covering competitors, incoming, sent & direct messages, outbox and unpublished posts.
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Social media management tools often allow you to organize team management in a more efficient way. The job of managing social media often sits across various departments and can involve external agen-cies, so these are powerful collaboration tools that allow user rights, approval, and internal performance reporting (Picture 12).
Social Media Advertising PlatformsSocial media success is becoming increasingly driven by paid social advertising. With Facebook in par-ticular, organic reach is decreasing, leading marketers to boost their content within the native news feed. At present this can be difficult to set up, and knowing which posts to promote can be hard to determine.
Social media advertising systems are growing in the number of tools available, and in terms of the number of marketers using them. The number of social media advertising tools will continue to grow as the need for paid social activity increases throughout 2014.
Social media advertising systems incorporate social advertising campaign creation, management, optimization, post boosting, and reporting.
Picture 12Excerpts from a report on team performance in the social media management platform, Builder
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There are a number of benefits of using social media advertising tools. The first is the ability to set up complex campaigns quickly, particularly with Facebook. Many of the tools offer bulk uploads for advert creative and targeting options, allowing the user to test multiple variants from the beginning of a campaign. This is a huge time saver in terms of set up, and puts you in a strong position to be able to optimize campaigns for better results over time (Picture 13).
Another key benefit would be the ability to set auto-bidding and optimization rules. Setting auto-bids and optimization rules means that a company can run advertising campaigns without having to worry about the budget. Once set up, the system will decrease bids as needed, or pause any poorly performing adverts. The system can also boost the impression share of the top performers, and continually optimize some versions of adverts to try to increase their performance - all based on live data. Not only does this give the marketing team some breathing room, it also allows them to optimize much quicker. As as soon as performance hits the specified level in the rules, optimization takes place.
With paid reach becoming even more important for your content, particularly on Facebook, some social media advertising systems also allow you to automatically promote your best performing posts. They view interaction levels, and when they find a post that is performing above average, they can automatically boost it to a relevant audience (Picture 14). This ensures that any strong engagement performance is capitalized on quickly and efficiently in an automated environment. Organic reach of posts is naturally declining on Facebook due to the competition for NewsFeed placement, so placing your best content in the NewsFeed on a sponsored basis is key.
Picture 13Impact of timing on organic, paid & viral impressions, as well as engagement.
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Social media advertising systems often enable you greater targeting capabilities and flexibility too. They often allow you to choose more audience targeting types such as custom audiences (based on emails, user ID’s or phone numbers), lookalike audience (users with similar profiles to those in your custom audience), and partner categories in the USA (which is based on external consumer data) (Picture 15). Many tools allow access Facebook Exchange (FBX), Facebook’s re-marketing solution that allows remarketing (re-posting) to users based on their cookied browsing histories.
Competitor:Pilsner Urquell
Country: Czech Republic
Overlap:19%
Competitor:Budweiser Budvar
Country: Czech Republic
Overlap:16%
Staropramen
Pilsner Urquell
Staropramen
Budweiser Budvar
Many social media advertising systems will analyze advertisements as well, in terms of the audience targeted. Socialbakers’ tool for example, let’s the user overlap their target audience with that of competitors to see the uniqueness of the targeting set.
No matter whether the goal is to achieve fan growth or boost content on Facebook, or dabbling with promoted tweets and accounts on Twitter, social media advertising systems are crucial to scaling adver-tising operations and adjusting budgets.
At Socialbakers, we’ve predicted that social advertising will become bigger than digital advertising this year. Whether this happens or not, it’s important that social media marketers have the flexibility in their budgets to boost posts at different times to make the most of their strongest content.
Picture 14Auto-boost trigger enabling automatic boosting of posts with pre-set organic reach.
Picture 15Fan overlaps on Facebook between competing breweries.
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Regardless of the level of social media expertise in an organization, it is essential that they understand the types of tools available. As described above, there are a number of different tools with varying functionality, and a wealth of different suppliers. Naturally we recommend the tools available from Socialbakers, which covers the full range of recommended tools, and plugs into your web analytics platform.
Large brands especially need to consider using a full suite of tools to fully be able to analyze their data, engage their customers, and promote their content. Smaller operations may be able to choose between the tools to find the right mix that fits within budget.
Social media is everywhere, from a proliferation of data on performance and audiences, to the 24/7 openness of customer service and content interaction. Staying on top of everything and performing strongly requires some automation and tool-based support.
We’d recommend marketers test a number of different tools to find which exactly covers their current needs. Our social media workflow is to Analyze - Engage - Promote. We highly recommend it to every social marketer that wants to experience social media success. And that also means using the right tools at each step. The data is out there whether it’s used or not, so why not make it work for you?
Conlusion
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Key Differences between Social Media Tools
Listening Tools Social Media Management Tool
Social Analytics Tools
Social Media Advertising Tools
Dashboard
Demographics
Alerts
Workflow Management
Influencers
Ad management
Text Analytics
Industry Based Benchmarking
Web Traffic
Keyword Search
Engagement
User Rights Management
Automated Sentiment Analysis
Geo Based Benchmarking
Ad Analysis
Reporting
Customer Service Metrics
Third Party Software Integration
Manual Sentiment Analysis
Follower / Fan Growth
Auto-biding
Comeptetive Analytics
Posting & Scheduling
Make the Right Decisions Based on Comparative Social Analysis
of Your Competitors & Industry.
www.socialbakers.com
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