FreshNetworks Blog

Some brands are very successful on Twitter. They might be using it for customer service, to engage with customers or to discuss issues that they might be interested in. For many brands, Twitter is a great way for brands to engage directly with consumers, to learn what they are saying and to react and respond to this where relevant.

The question for many brands, though, is why would people want to engage with them on Twitter. In some instances this is clear. For example, when Twitter is being used as a servicing channel it is a way for customers to ask questions, complain or get support. In other instances it is less clear. And as with any social media strategy, it is critical that you think about why people will want to engage with you as much as why you want to engage with them.

When discussing this with clients and others recently, the question that always comes up is if brands should aim to gather a lot of followers on Twitter (as opposed to engaging a lot of people regardless of whether or not they follow you). And with this goes the question of whether brands are expected follow people back who follow them.

This week we published the final report in our Review of Social Media Monitoring Tools (download the final report here). Reflecting on the report and its findings with clients and others this week, we have found ourselves discussing the importance of not just listening (although this can often be a good first step for those who are not yet doing it) but also acting on what is said about your brand and other terms of interest in social media. As the report shows, the different social media tools are of value for different purposes and choosing the one that is most suited to your brand and your needs is an important step.

Even before you have your social media monitoring in place, any brand can benefit from working out a plan for what you will do with all this information you are going to gather. Dashboards and reports can be useful, but the ability to take actions or make decisions using this information is much more useful for any brand. What you do with your social media monitoring is as important, if not more important, than getting the monitoring in place in the first place.

Different brands will want to engage with the conversations they discover online in different ways. The following are three great ways for any brand to engage with these conversations. The first two are ways in which you can capitalise upon the outputs of your social media monitoring internally and the last one on how you can use it to engage externally. They all require you to connect with different teams and functions in your brand and may need internal process change to make a real difference.

1. Inform the language of your marketing and communications

Observing and analysing the way people talk about your brand, competitor brands and the market you are in more generally can be a real and valuable source of insight for marketing and communications teams. It lets you learn how people talk about you, the language they use and how they compare you to other competitors and substitutes in the market. By properly searching not just for brand terms but also the terms that people use in relation to them you can start to explore the language that people use. This has a number of benefits. You can use the language and keywords to refine and ammend your search strategy. You can use relevant language and expressions in your marketing and PR activities. And you can start to use the same language when you are engaging in social media.

This relies on you ensuring that different teams across your brand are connected to what your social media monitoring reveals. And probably more importantly that you set up the reporting and analysis to ensure you are looking not just at what is said, but more importantly at how you can change your own communications and language on the basis of this.

2. Predict market changes

One of the real benefits of social media monitoring is that it allows you to track over time the things that are discussed in relation to your brand and your market. By tracking what is discussed over time allows you to identify when more conversations about certain issues being to emerge. Imagine, for example, that you are a large chain of pizza restaurants. One of the the things you might monitor is references to pizza being bought in a supermarket or eaten from take-away restaurants. Your social media monitoring should be set to alert you when and unusually large number of conversations of one of these kinds are present in social media. What is causing people to talk more than is usual about a topic and what can you do about it.

This kind of trend spotting can be of huge value to any business but relies on you having the mechanisms to capitalise upon this knowledge. Usually this would be a good indicator for your insight or research teams, or a marketing function to explore the trends that appear to be emerging and to make sure you are putting plans in place for any changes it may be spotting early.

3. React and respond to mentions of your brand online

Finally, any brand should consider its process for reacting and responding to what people say abotu you online. Whilst the previous two activities are very internal, this is external and involves engaging directly with people in social media.

There are many ways in which people refer to and mention a given brand online. And in most instances there is typically no need to respond. You can just leave the mention and monitor it if you think relevant. We have written before about how to react if somebody writes about your brand online, and the process described here is a great starting point. The next step is to integrate this with your own internal processes and to change these to ensure conversations online are engaged with and responded to when relevant.

This touches heavily on the importance of sentiment analysis – often negative comments need to be responded to in one way and by one set of people, and positive comments in a different way by a different set of people. We’ve written before about the problem with automated sentiment analysis and the best advice is to make sure that you keep a level of human involvement and analysis to make sure you’re responding to the right things in the right ways.

Read the other posts from our social media monitoring review 2010 or download our final report

Over the last few months we’ve been conducting an in-depth review of the leading social media monitoring tools in conjunction with our sister company, FreshMinds Research.

We’ve compared how Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos performed when monitoring conversations about global coffee brand Starbucks. We compared over 19,000 online conversations and have written about the following topics:

• The basics of social media monitoring
• How to set up the tools (search strings, comparison challenges and coverage)
• The location of social media conversations
• Social media monitoring and duplication
• Data latency and the tool with the most up-to-date results
• The problem with automated sentiment

If you’ve enjoyed our posts so far you can find a more detailed analysis of all these topics and more in our final report – “Turning Conversations into Insights: a Comparison of Social Media Monitoring Tools”.

Download the final report from social media agency FreshNetworks

When working with the big banks and insurance companies, as they embrace the potential of social media, their adoption of change can be fairly slow. The highly regulated (and risk averse) financial services industry often lacks the appetite to engage in online social conversations and (they could argue) “why do we need to?”. The answer is that, if you don’t, then you get left behind. There are competitors and some new entrants already building a successful social media presence.

As an example of a new entrant, in the banking sector, I’ve been following Zopa for some time. It started in the United Kingdom, and promotes itself as the first marketplace for social lending. This means that members of the Zopa community lend and borrow money with each other, sidestepping traditional banks. The premise is that both lenders and borrowers get better rates, because Social Lending is more efficient than traditional banks, which, with large overheads, must take bigger margins on the money that passes through them.

With over 400,000 members, Zopa appears to have hit upon a successful formula, and one that is now being copied in other countries, such as Prosper in the US, Smava in Germany and Boober in the Netherlands

And because it has empowered their online community, it becomes natural for it to add the social media features that further enhance its proposition, such as frequent blogs and online conversations between its members.

Time will tell whether this business model will be successful and sustainable. But it demonstrates that a new entrant into the marketplace such as Zopa can shake-up an otherwise cautious banking industry, and maybe move them faster towards embracing social media. It’s going to happen – it’s simply a question of when.

Read all our posts about social media for financial services

At FreshNetworks, we aim to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities, marketing and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in May.

1. Social Media Monitoring Tools – 2010 Review (intro)

Introducing the FreshNetworks social media monitoring review 2010, a series of detailed tests and analysis on seven of the leading social media monitoring tools – Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos. The purpose of the report is to provide an in-depth comparison of buzz tracking tools that accurately depicts their individual pros and cons.

We’ve put the tools to the test by tracking well-known international coffee company Starbucks. We compared over 19,000 online conversations, giving us some really unexpected results and highlighting some staggering differences in the way each tool performs.

2. 20 Social media speakers and experts

We’ve spoken at more social media conferences and events in the last three months than in the first three years of FreshNetworks’ existence. One of the benefits of all the talking has been the opportunity to listen to other social media speakers and experts.

We were asked to recommend a few social media speakers for events (particularly in London and the UK), so thought it might be useful to note down  some of the people who have recently impressed us and why.

3. Social media monitoring review 2010: Test 1 results

The second post from our Social Media Monitoring – 2010 review series. In it we give an insight into how we have set up the comparison of the seven tools (which in itself proved rather a challenge) and the volume of online conversations that each social media monitoring tool was able to uncover. And even at this top level, it’s clear the tools are each doing something quite different…

4. Russia: the fourth largest social networking market in Europe

In a post from last year we look at data showing that Russia was the fourth largest market in Europe for social networks behind the UK, Germany and France.

5. Social media + online shopping = social shopping

Social shopping can benefit retailers in several ways, especially if it is integrated with a wider online sales strategy. In this post we look at some examples that were then built on in our social media and retail breakfast briefing.