4 Right Ways for Listening to Your Customers on Social Media

On social media, listening to your customers is most vital for the success of your business.

Social listening is important for businesses because this is one way to understand what their customers and target audience are saying on social media– what are they talking about, how they feel about their brands/products/services, and what are their needs and wants, what do they expect from customer service et al. Using Social Media Monitoring tools, businesses can use this vital information to improve products and services, enhance customer service, find the correct takers for their products and above all, offer customers tailor-made services.

But the question still persists – how to use Social Media Monitoring tools for effective listening?

Here’s how:

Understand Your Goals and Objectives:

Business organisations must first be very clear about their business goals and objectives. Once you are clear on this one, you can structure your social listening methods around your goals and objectives. Else, you will be listening to everything on the social and not know which piece of information is beneficial to your business and which is not.

Pay Attention:

Not just listen to your customers’ conversations but pay close attention to what they are saying. How is their tone of voice – good, bad or ugly? Do they seem happy with your products or can you sense a palpable dissatisfaction? What your customers say and more importantly, how they say it are all critical indicators of your brands’ reputation and its customer perception.

Filter Signals from Noise:

Once you have understood what part of your customers’ conversations are useful to your business goals, the next step is to separate the usual talk from that relating to your specific objectives. Social Media Monitoring tools are a huge asset to businesses in this aspect.

Covert Customer Talk to Your Tactic:

As I mentioned earlier, your customers’ social conversations are enriched with actionable insights. Therefore, business cannot afford to take this phenomenon lightly. Therefore, along with social media monitoring, it is also essential to analyze, decipher and decode your customers’ conversations.

Henceforth, businesses must equip themselves with tools that offer both social media monitoring and social media analytics to make sense of what they are listening and glean critical, actionable business insights from their customers’ conversations.

To learn how Shout Analytics can help your business with both social media monitoring and analytics, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Social Media Analytics Tools: The Most Reliable Source For Amassing Social Intelligence

In my previous post on Social Intelligence, I discussed the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of the importance of Social Intelligence. In this post, I will delve into the ‘how’ of it.

I will begin by reiterating that organizations and brands cannot afford to merely collect data and not explore it for actionable insights. Social Intelligence or Social Media Intelligence is clearly the vital key to business success. Therefore, apart from monitoring, collecting and storing their social data, organizations must, using Social Media Analytics tools, also analyze it well. However, no organization can benefit from Social Intelligence if the amassed Intelligence does not support its business objectives and goals. 

This brings us to the question – HOW can organizations use Social Intelligence to their benefit?

The trick here is simple – once an organization gets its goals and business objectives in place, it must invest resources and time in collecting social data that is relevant to their business. Effective Social Media Analytics tools are the most reliable sources to separate signals from noise.

Angela Hausman, quoting one McKinsey report points out that unlike in traditional media where data analysts spend more than 80% of their time just collecting data, in social media, data collection is “ubiquitous and real-time”. Not just that, by providing instant but detailed reports, Social Media Analytics tools makes data analysis and interpretation quick and hassle free.

What’s more, when an organization’s social media efforts are analyzed and interpreted with precision by Social Media Analytics tools, heads of units and senior leadership can improve communication and engage in constructive discussions based entirely on quantified facts and figures.

The bottom line here is that Social Media Analytics tools are a great source for gleaning and amassing Social Intelligence. I firmly believe that Social Intelligence will be extremely crucial for the future success of businesses both big and small. Therefore, it is imperative for organizations to leverage the power of Social Media Analytics tools to the fullest in order to empower themselves with Social Intelligence.

Do you also believe that Social Media Analytics tools are the most reliable sources of Social Intelligence? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To know how Shout Analytics can equip you with Social Intelligence, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

The Fidor Bank Story: A Lesson in How and Why Banks Must Utilize Social Media

In April this year, computerweekly.com published an article based on Ovum’s various studies of the global banking sector where the research agency predicted that “social media will become a significant channel for retail banks in Europe within three years”.

Let me give you one of the finest examples of a bank utilizing social media. Germany’s Fidor Bank was established in 2007.  It is the world’s first online-only bank that operates only through the internet and using social media. From customer service, communications and engagement to new product development, everything happens on social media at the Fidor Bank.

Fidor Bank’s success through social media is best described by Karl Finders in his article when he says, “Fidor currently has more than 200,000 people registered and 150,000 community members. It has €160m worth of deposits, and its lending totals about €100m. With only 34 staff, no branches and a cost of only €3.50 to set up a customer with full banking, the overheads are low compared with traditional banks”. He adds, “Fidor’s customers trust it because it listens to them all the time through social media and customers have a trusted community supporting them”. 

How did Fidor Bank achieve this?

At a time when customers’ trust and faith in their banks was at an abysmal low, courtesy global economic crisis, Fidor Bank’s leadership took a bold move. They were brave enough to rely entirely on social media to restore that trust through personalized social media interactions. They communicated openly about issues related to banking and personal finance on social media. They opened channels on Facebook and Twitter for their customers to interact candidly with them, thus creating a high level of operational transparency. In no time Fidor’s customers realized that this bank was genuine and trustworthy. So, customers who came to Fidor Bank, stayed with it. In fact, even the bank’s customer service is handled by loyal customers on their social community.

Key takeaways from Fidor Bank’s strategy:

• Use social media to overcome the cost and complexity of traditional banking
• Always listen to your customers.
• Make social media a customer engagement tool.
• Increase customer trust through an online community
• Increase sales and improve customer service through enhanced customer communication strategies.

So, would you like to emulate Fidor Bank? To know how Shout Analytics can help you, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com.

FIVE KEY METRICS FOR MEASURING THE SUCCESS OF YOUR BRAND

Businesses, irrespective of their scale of operations, use social media marketing to drive visitors to their website. However, the real success of these campaigns lies in analyzing and understanding how it impacts and effective your social media marketing efforts were in driving visitors to your site.

Listed below are 5 metrics that will help you measure this:

1. Visitor Bounce Rate:

If you have a large percentage of people who visit your landing page but leave or deviate instantly without reaching their goal (finding relevant information on your website), then your website suffers from high bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to the number of people who leave your website too soon, without spending much time on the landing page.

Studying your website’s bounce rate numbers will help you to attract and retain customers more effectively.

2. Visitor Conversion Rate:

If you notice that visitors go beyond the landing page, navigate through various pages and perform desired tasks on the page, it indicates a healthy conversion rate. This refers to the number of people who come to your website with a goal to do a predetermined task and their successful rate in achieving that goal.

3. Visitors’ Time Spend:

Do you have a steady flow of new visitors every day or are you stuck with a group of loyal old customers alone? While your website content should be informative and engaging for your already existing visitors, efforts should also be made to incorporate such content that gets the attention of people hitherto unaware of your site.

Analysing and understanding the visitors’ time spend will help you to take the necessary steps to enhance the content of your site.

4. Click Path:

Do you see a pattern in your site visitors’ navigation? If yes, have you pondered over the reasons behind it? What does it tell about your visitors’ (read customers) behavior? Click Path analysis helps you decipher customer behavior on your site, and find ways to improve it.

5. Keywords and Traffic Sources:

Analyzing which keywords are leading visitors to your site allows you to understand what words/ phrases are used to describe your products and services. Knowing this will help you in your efforts to match the right keywords with your products thereby ensuring greater visibility and top ranks in Google search.

Similarly, studying traffic sources of visitors tells you how they first found you. In other words, it gives you an insight into other online arenas where your site is mentioned. 

Public Data: What It Is and How Can Your Business Benefit From It

Public Data is any data on the vast online platform that is accessible by anyone. It is that data which is available to the public. In that sense, even social data qualifies as public data because it is available on the internet and is accessible to the public too. 

 

As businesses continue to create their online presence, they also create a lot of Public Data. Here is what comprises your Public Data on the social channels – 

  Face book posts

• Tweets and Re tweets 
•  Likes
• Comments
• Shares
• People talking about your product/ page.
• Favorites
• Fans and followers

If this was about social channels, even your company blog and in fact your website itself are all sources of Public Data. The content on your website pages, external and internal links within the websites, blog content, blog comments and shares all constitute your Public Data.

Importance for Businesses

As Public Data is accessible and most importantly visible to anyone and everyone who visits your online pages, it acts as a public profile of your business. It tells your visitors and customers everything about you. In other words, your Public Data will give insightful information of your perspective to existing customers as well as to your competitors, about your business and how well or badly you are doing. 

Similarly, for you as a business house, Public Data is an essential and useful resource to learn all about your customers and competitors. If they can glean insights from your Public Data, so can you. Closely analyzing your customers’ likes and dislikes, product and brand affiliations, service requirements will open up a whole new world of opportunities for your business to explore and exploit for revenue building. 

In the same way, analyzing and understanding your competitors’ Public Data will provide you with actionable insights loaded with critical business intelligence on their product and service strategies, their marketing tactics and promotion techniques.

Public Data is here to stay and it is very important for business houses to make the most efficient and valuable use of it. In fact, I believe that the future of business will largely be defined by how business organisations use their Public Data. 

So, have you explored the benefits of your Public Data yet? If not, now is the time to do it.

The Social Media Effect on Banks and Financial Institutions

Banks and financial institutions have felt the social media effect in a big way. With the advent of social media, the banking and finance industry has seen a sea change in the way it conducts business. From being a conservative industry, it has changed into social media backed enterprise. Today because of the critical business benefits that it offers, banks and financial institutions have made social media an inevitable part of their marketing strategy.

Take a look at how social media has transformed banks and financial institutions in India and around the world.

Citi Bank’s official Twitter page for Customer Service

Yes Bank promoting its Money Monitor on Facebook

HSBC’s YouTube Channel. Note the different sections for advertising, sponsorship and ideas exchange.

Aviva India launched its Customer Centre on Facebook on May 1, 2013.

HDFC Bank’s Pinterest page

What next?

With growing data streams both structured and unstructured, increasing customers’ expectations and their seeking never like before engagement, the need of the hour for banks and financial institutions is to leverage social media for gathering actionable insights to make informed decisions. BFSIs must explore social media analytics to tap greater business intelligence.

 Using social media analytics tools, banks and financial institutions can take their social engagement to the next level; understand their customers’ exact needs and service/product/brand affinities to drive customer-driven product innovation. Social media analytics tools also aid and simplify online brand reputation and market research

.

Put simply, banks and financial institutions can use social media analytics tools to not just ENGAGE but also to LISTEN, MANAGE AND MONITOR.

Have cases of social media transforming banks or financial institutions in your area? Please share with me. How do you think social media analytics tools can benefit BFSIs?  Send in your comments I’d love to hear from you.