Are You Happy With Your Social Media Monitoring Tool?

Why do businesses need to measure their social media efforts?

Well, if you look at it from a simple business perspective, then, you measure your social media efforts because you want to know for sure if the thousands of dollars that you spend on your social media marketing are yielding the desired, profitable yields or not. You have strategies and goals for social marketing, and the only way to find out whether those strategies have been successful and whether the goals have been met, is by measuring and analyzing your social media efforts.

And yet, you are not fully satisfied with their social media measurements, are you? You feel that somewhere, something is missing and you are not getting a complete picture. Well, you are likely to face this problem if you are stuck with a social media monitoring tool that does only a few of the several key functions of social monitoring or analytics.

In fact, what businesses actually need is a single comprehensive social media monitoring and analytics tool that monitors, measures, analyzes and provides critical business intelligence through actionable insights. Shout Analytics is one such sophisticated social media monitoring and analytics tool that offers businesses the best of both monitoring and analytics, including Sentiment Analysis, Predictive Analytics, Competitor Analysis and Intent Analysis.

                              

Shout Analytics allows businesses to measure the following critical metrics of social media marketing success:

1.Rate of Engagement:

Shout Analytics helps you find out how well your audience is appreciating and participating in your social engagement efforts. Apart from measuring ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, you will also be able to see the conversion

rate of prospects into customers.

      2.Share of Voice:

Find out the extent of social mentions and social conversations your brand generates as compared to your competition and explore the reasons behind it.

      3.Lead Generation:

Know precisely how much of traffic is referred to your website via social media. Also, learn how effective or ineffective your social pages have been in generating leads for your business.

      4.Sentiment Analysis:

Monitor and analyze correctly the sentiment surrounding your brand and products. Get insights pinpointing the reasons for positive, negative and neutral sentiments.

      5.Predictive Analytics:

Take control of future events likely to happen in your industry. Learn how present behaviours could lead to future trends and get your brand readied for challenges of the future.

This is not all. To learn everything about how Shout Analytics can help you in your social media monitoring and measuring efforts, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

How To Increase A Brand’s Share Of Voice?

Ever wondered how high or low is your brand’s Share of Voice on the social?
 

Share of Voice refers to the total amount of social mentions that a brand or product garners over that of its competitors. 

Here are some simple but very effective ways to increase a brand’s Share of Voice:

1. Measure and Monitor Your Share of Voice:

If you want to see an increase in your brand’s social mentions, then you must first monitor and measure your brand’s Share of Voice. You can do this successfully and most effectively by using a Social Media Analytics tool. 

To give you a very recent example, Using Shout Analytics, when we studied how the film Chennai Express was going to fare at the box office, we found that the film’s Share of Voice was this –

2. Get People Talking:

Getting people (your audience, fans and followers) to take notice of your brand is crucial to the brand’s Share of Voice. Hence, there is no better way to get people talking about your brand other than through awesome, engaging and shareable content. 

For Chennai Express, it was Deepika’s Tamil accented dialogue delivery and the film’s stereotypical South Indian look and feel that initially got people talking. On YouTube, there were videos of the film’s trailers, songs, scenes with popular dialogues and even behind-the-scenes snippets. These were interesting, engaging enough topics for the film’s fans to get talking on the social. Needless to say, the film’s Share of Voice simply catapulted to glory.

3. Now, Talk To Your Audience:

So, now that there is sufficient ‘talk’ about your brand on the social, the next step is engaging with your audience. Do they appreciate your social content – like it, share it, retweet or repin it? Then, go ahead, thank them. Tell them you appreciate their efforts. Similarly, are there dissatisfied or disgruntled customers complaining about poor service? Then, get in touch with those customers immediately, assure them that you’ll resolve the issue and keep your word. 

Good and effective customer service never goes unnoticed or unappreciated on the social.

Thus, the key to increasing a brand’s SoV lies in giving engaging content to your audience, then building an honest engagement with your audience and finally, to measure and monitor your SoV to identify the highs and lows of your social media engagement efforts.

What were your strategies for increasing your brand’s Share of Voice? Tell us in the comments below.

Top 3 Ways How Social Media Monitoring and Analytics Boosts Social Media Marketing

Is social media marketing only about aggressively selling products on the social or only limited to garner the maximum number of likes and fans? 

As someone who believes strongly in the business intelligence  of the social, I would say that brand marketers must explore and exploit social media for gaining actionable marketing insights. And if there is one trusted way to do this, it would be using social media monitoring and analytics tools.

Here are 3 ways in which Social Media Analytics tools can boost social media marketing:

Pick the Right Marketing Channel(s):

While your brands may be active on more than one social channel, it is extremely essential for the marketing team to know which social channel is best suited for achieving the brand’s business goals. Social media monitoring and analytics tools help you answer this question by correctly monitoring and analyzing your success rates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube etc. 

Measure ROI:

I have said this repeatedly – social content drives social engagement and such sustained engagement eventually materializes into successful sales. While social media allows marketers to do this easily, they can rely on social media monitoring and analytics tools to measure and gain insights from the engagement levels of their content to know if they are posting the right content or not. 

Also, through clear, in-depth analysis, these tools give insightful reports and inform organizations what their ROI, their social media marketing have been.

Convert Probable Customers Into Loyal Customers: 

While marketers are already successfully promoting and selling products on the social, wouldn’t it be great if they could zero-in on just the right prospects for their products? 

Social media monitoring and analytics tools help brand managers to list specific keywords related to their products, monitor the social channels for their mentions and frequency of mentions. Plus, with sentiment analysis and predictive analysis capabilities, the social media analytics tools accurately signals to the marketers what their customers want and expect from a product like theirs.

This critical information guides the marketing and sales team to target the right prospects, nurture them over time through greater engagement, build a strong relationship through exemplary tailor-made services and successfully convert probable customers into loyal customers.

Have you sensed the need for social media analytics for your marketing efforts on social media? Share your views in the comments below. To know how Shout Analytics can help boost your social media marketing, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Seeing Attrition in Customer Loyalty? Fix it with Predictive Analytics

Every brand or organization has dissatisfied customers. But  then it also has its most loyal customers. Such customers are your trusted brand advocates – their reviews and recommendations will drive your sales and their positive word-of-mouth messages will boost your brand reputation. Hence, it is imperative for brands to retain their ever faithful group of customer.

Predictive Analytics can help businesses a great deal in this direction. Here’s how:

Identify Anything Amiss In Customer Behavior:

Your loyal customers rarely complain about your products and services because they are generally happy with how you service them. However, if you suddenly come across complaints streaming in from any of these loyal customers, then it shows that something’s amiss – a customer servicing gone wrong perhaps.

Do you see a sudden absence or a dip in their transactions? Has there been a hitherto unfound spike in his complaints about your products? All these factors could be predicting impending customer attrition.

Plug Loopholes in Customer Engagement Efforts:

Customers devoted to you have always appreciated your content on social media channels; consistently sharing, liking, retweeting or repinning it. They were in fact your top influencers. In such a scenario, if you witness that their engagement level with your brand has suddenly taken a beating then it could be stemming from a plausible faulty customer engagement effort.

Inefficient social engagement efforts can derail your relationship with your most loyal customers, sometimes even forcing them to end their association with your brand. 

Improve Customer Relationship Service:

Sometimes all that brand loyalists need is a warm gesture on your part reminding them that you value them highly and their unceasing loyalty towards your brand is appreciated. Explore your social data and identify those customers whom you have ignored (in offering the best customer service) in spite of them being your top brand advocates.

At a time when your customers are spoil for choices and your competitors are playing hard to woo your customers with fancy offers and grand promotions on the social media, Predictive Analytics helps organizations to prevent possible future cases of customer attrition and in turn successfully retain its customers.

How do you deal with attrition in customer loyalty? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To learn how Shout Analytics’ Predictive Analytics capabilities can help you in this direction, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

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

6 Major Differences between Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Analytics

With everybody talking about social media analytics and social media monitoring, it is easy to get confused between the two. Did you know that the two are very different concepts yet very often (mis)used while referring to the other?

The fact is that social media monitoring and social media analytics, though different, often overlap and sometimes are even interwoven  whenever social analytics are applied. Most social media analytics softwares today, including Shout Analytics are incorporated with social media monitoring capabilities.

Yet, since the two technologies are often misunderstood, we decided to list out the factors that distinguish the two. I hope that this list will clear the ambiguity around social media monitoring and social media analytics, simplify separately their finer details and explain how the two are different from each other.

Social  Media Monitoring	Social Media Analytics
Qualitative in nature	Quantitative in nature.
Only tells what is being said about the brand or product.	Informs in detail how much is being said about      your brand or product.
Assists you best in defining a particular search term related to your brand and then monitor it.	Provides you with a detailed quantitative analysis   of the said term, complete with graphs and reports.
Gives you an account of the positive, negative and neutral sentiments surrounding your brand.	Enumerates how those different sentiments will affect your brand.
Limited to monitoring alone.	Social monitoring is a part and parcel of social media analytics.
Helps brand managers understand a brand’s social standing – explains on which social platform the brand is faring well and on which it is not.	Measures the social standing and even gives critical insights to help intelligent decision making – the quantified analysis provides enough input to direct the next course of action.

In a nut shell, while social media monitoring allows brand managers and leaders of organizations to get a clearer picture of their social media marketing efforts, social media analytics allow them to evaluate their social media efforts, correctly identify problem prone areas and most of all glean valuable insights from the analysis data. 

What do you think are the factors that differentiate social media monitoring from social media analytics? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To know how Shout Analytics can provide