With billions of active users across various platforms, social media has provided brands with an unprecedented opportunity to connect with new and existing customers to build both brand awareness and loyalty.
Nike has a whopping 289.2 million followers across Instagram alone. To put it into perspective, that sphere of influence is nearly 200 million more than the NBA itself on Instagram, and circa 10x the entire Australian population!
Whilst we are talking big numbers here, you don’t need a huge following to end up dealing with a large volume of messages and comments on any given day, and managing social media channels can be a daunting task even for the most experienced of community managers.
Just ask any of the social media teams of the big four Australian banks…
So, if you’re getting smashed with comments from clients in response to an issue which sees your brand under fire, or event which puts you under the spotlight, any social media or community management tool that you choose to use must have the ability to allow you to bring all your content planning and community management together under the one roof. No jumping between platforms or managing things on the cheap natively. You need to be able to schedule and plan your content across TikTok, and LinkedIn just as seamlessly as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in the one calendar as well as bring in targeted streams of posts and comments.
We are talking cross-channel feeds into a single customisable inbox – with multiple feeds, labels and filtering for prioritisation which all allows you to reply to posts, ads, comments and direct messages all with a workflow approval process, ability for templates and importantly, an always-on visibility for the whole team wherever they are.
Why should you care?
Maintaining timely, and consistent on-brand messaging across all social media is crucial to help build brand recognition and trust regardless of which community manager is looking after which channel. Being able to plan, create, manage, measure and share any type of social media campaign or piece of communication in the one spot makes light work of the challenge of different people representing your brand.
In a world where you’re seeing brands that you’d expect to be far more prepared, fall victim to cyberattacks and showcase poor customer communication, your data partnerships mean even more when you could easily be next. The flexibility to engage on relevant B2B or B2C social media channels such as Brandwatch can with LinkedIn and TikTok to reach wider audiences and different markets alongside the usual suspects, all of a sudden starts to make even more sense.
What this doesn’t mean for you is to post the same content across every single social media channel. Your audience on Facebook isn’t necessarily your very same audience on Instagram, and nothing screams amateur hour than seeing the same Facebook post shared on Instagram every single time. Think about it. Do you jump onto Instagram looking for the same things you do when you jump on Facebook?
Adopting the idea of a ‘growth mindset’ can be very valuable to any social media strategy. Rather than feeling limiting your brand perception with a fixed approach, be willing to take risks with a belief in the ability of your team to ability to improve brand recognition and trust. Encourage your social media team to embrace challenges, learn from their mistakes, and persist in the face of obstacles by experimenting with new ideas, as they looking to continually improve your brand’s social media presence.
I’m waiting to see which Australian company is brave enough to run an unfiltered, live AMA on Reddit and direct their customers there from other channels during the next cyber-attack as it’s happening. Get bold, brave and beautiful.
Customer satisfaction isn’t simply your wonderful ability to monitor and respond to enquiries and comments in real-time to quickly address any issues. Whilst it’s a no-brainer to take every opportunity you can turning negative experiences into positive ones, if you want to make more of a positive impact, it’s equally crucial to engage with customers proactively and stop playing it safe.
Letting your attitude and personality shine through is one thing, but having the right voice that connects with each audience is mission critical for success online. If you take the ‘copypasta’ approach to your social, your brand can become quite tired very quickly and disconnect you from the very audience you are looking to build brand equity with. So in order to do things different on each channel, you need access to a community management platform that has in-built, ‘no extra cost needed’ data access to wider social research. Only this can allow you to readily understand which type of content outside your own channels is making an impact with your audience, let alone keep your fingers on a wider pulse.
You’re getting left behind if you haven’t got a view of engagement from open access to the full Reddit firehose from every single subreddit as well as the ability to capture Instagram and Facebook public page posts off-channel to learn what customers are reacting to in shaping any relevant content and communications strategy. Learn what is being said by customers about you, your products and services to your face and behind your back. Learn the same for your competitors. Your wider data access needs to be robust to give you a clear understanding of not only what type of content is driving engagement more widely, but offer the NLP and ML tools to quickly make sense of the topics and questions driving engagement as well as your customer needs, and preferences as you drive sharper insight into your business strategies.
This also means you need the ability to build an unlimited amount of cross-channel reporting and dashboards which are shareable with live links so you can report key information back to executive stakeholders. No user creation and login setups everytime you need to share something or a limited number of users with hefty fees putting a restraint on your ability to democratise data and insight across the business. You want secure links you can share with live data to custom information. Remember, ‘simple is’ doesn’t always mean ‘simple does’ for every platform, and plenty out there love to charge you for more reports. The idea of putting a cap on reporting is insane, and if you are paying extra for more reports and dashboards in your social media management platform, you are getting ripped off, plain and simple. In this instance, don’t believe any regurgitated bullshit that ‘you’re paying more for more insight’.
There is no secret to doing this better than most, just the effort to learn what is available to you, what you are getting and what you need. There is some secret sauce however in not just simply relying on a social media dataset, but leveraging other relevant tools to make what you do with your social even more effective. There are analytics tools traditionally used for search engine optimisation which can supercharge your social by letting your community team learn the questions people are also asking around your brand, competitors, topics or emerging issues. These tools can reveal actual intent and engagement through what people search for so you can also use them to reveal not only what media type people are responding to in a specific context, but also which competitors and thematic (or advertising) sites are in your specific social media, brand and product conversations.
So if you haven’t already, hit up your tech boffins in SEO and leverage what they have up their sleeve the way we do; find out what other data they are sitting on to reveal some amazing insight and enhance your content strategy to the next level by tapping into your Google search data. If they haven’t got what we are talking about, hit us up and we’ll happily share some of the cool things we do with another one of our amazing data partners in Pi Datametrics. Also don’t be afraid to do the same also if you think you might be getting the raw end of the stick with your social media vendor and you want a partner that can help you make sense of it all. Either way, just don’t let outdated tech hold you back with it.
