How To Find The Right Influencers on Twitter

Influencer marketing isn’t complex. It’s applying the age old concept of having a brand ambassador on a micro level to your digital marketing. However, what's complex is finding the right influencers to target. In the age of content marketing, influencer-driven recommendations encourage purchases. Studies by McKinsey, Augure, and many others agree. In this article, we take a look at how a marketer can find and engage with the right influencers.

For starters, you can find influencers by simply analyzing your Twitter or Facebook to see who engages with your content frequently and then assess mileage your brand would get out of a personal recommendation from them. While this can be a makeshift way of finding influencers, for larger brands that are serious about social media, a data-driven approach is essential.  

Unmetric Analyze allows you to sift through your hottest influencers so you can find the apt people to engage and boost your content with. Here is where and how you access that data on Unmetric Analyze.

Step 1. Head over to the Analyze Tab

Once you’ve logged into the Unmetric Analyze app, on the left top corner, click on the drop-down list and choose Twitter. Once the Twitter dashboard opens, click on the Analyze option.

If you already have brands chosen, click on the brand you want to find influencers for. If not click on the add brand button and with a simple search, add the brands you like.

Step 2. Under Account, click on Influencers   

Once you go to your brand’s Analyze page, in the left menu, under Account, you’ll see a menu option for Influencers. Click on it and this will open your list of influencers.

You can find the most important and largest Twitter accounts that have Mentioned or Retweeted you in the past. You can even click on the tweet number to see which tweet this was. This isn’t just a list of influencers that your brand can leverage, but since they’ve already engaged with your brand in the past, these are a list of qualified influencers that are more likely to endorse your brand message.

Step 3. Sift through & rearrange the results

Influencers are two types - those with the larger fan following, and those that might have a smaller following but are more frequent in sharing your content. Based on your campaign goals, using Unmetric, you can sort the influencer list by number of Followers or Tweets

What’s more? You can even export the data for easier access.

You can also change the time period to find seasonal influencers/ influencers that have endorsed your previous campaigns. Or you can even view your competitor brands' influencers and leverage that list to maximize on reach. And there you go! In just a few simple steps you can find a list of qualified influencers using Unmetric Analyze.

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8 Elements Behind Every Successful Social Media Campaign

Every social media campaign, contest or giveaway is different. And as everything else in social media, success is dependent on many moving factors – an even further, these individual factors differ per business. Although this sounds like an absolute headache, there are basic building blocks to ensure your business gets the most out of its social media initiatives. In this post I’ll review 8 elements of every successful social media campaign:

1. A PLAN & EDITORIAL CALENDAR

At the core of every successful social media marketing campaign is a solid plan and editorial calendar. Knowing what tasks and important dates are coming up keeps your team on the same page, and gives you the freedom to spend time on interacting with those participating in your campaign, or taking advantage of spontaneous opportunities to push your initiative. Put together (or plan) content, content messaging, related hashtags you’ll be using, what networks your audience is active on, etc.

2. CLEAR GOALS

Defining clear goals before you begin a campaign can help you keep track of progress and identify points at which you may need to ramp up efforts. Focusing on clear goals will give you and your team direction on where to concentrate your energy.

3. THE RIGHT PLATFORMS

Here, I am referring to the right social media network(s) for your business, the right tools and social networks for the contest itself. Make sure your contest or sweepstakes “works” on the social media networks you are running this social media campaign from.

4. KNOW THE RULES

This point applies to both knowing the ins and outs of your own campaign as well as learning the rules and terms of services of the social media network(s) you are using to run it. Getting familiar with the networks’ functionalities will ensure you are getting the most impact from each post – and keep you out of trouble.

5. THE RIGHT PRIZE

The right prize sets the tone for enticing qualified participants. You will attract whoever wants to win your specific prize, so remember who you want to target. Keep prizes fun, but relevant to your audience and product or service. You can also try giving away smaller items and give your participants the opportunity to sign up for extra entries for a larger prize.

6. LANDING PAGE

A well optimized landing page can increase your campaign conversions. People have short attention spans, so when you send a visitor to a landing page it’s a moment for them to absorb all the information about your offer. Your landing page should include a clear headline, info about your offer and of course a call to action. P.S. Videos force people to stay on your landing page longer, and can increase conversions.

7. HELP FROM EXISTING CUSTOMERS/INFLUENCERS

Help from existing customers or influencers will give you a great initial boost and aid in getting the word out. Email your existing customer base or reach out to some influencers to be part of your campaign. The extra work is worth all the effort when you see your campaign reaching fresh sets of eyes.

8. ANALYSIS & MEASUREMENT

Every social media campaign – successful or not should measure and analyze every part of the campaign from the creative used to the emails or info collected – this is where your plan and clear objectives come in handy. Repeat the parts that worked and don’t repeat the things that didn’t.

Not every campaign will be a run away success- but each will leave you with key take-aways for the next attempt – don’t get discouraged! Including the elements we’ve reviewed and being prepared will only increase your chances of getting the results you want from your social media campaign.

As always you can leave any questions in the comments below.

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7 Ways to Use Social Listening (Being the James Bond of eCommerce)

Isn’t it cool how James Bond always gets the bad guy? That’s what happens when you are an elite spy. You may not be an international spy that represents your country, but that does not mean you cannot be a spy for your online business!

So what does spying have to do with your ecommerce business? Tons, but we’ll call it social listening or social monitoring from here on out. In today’s post I will giving you a run-down of how and why social listening should be part of your business strategy.

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What is Social Listening, A.K.A. Social Monitoring?

Social listening and monitoring are exactly what they sound like – listening to conversations on various social media networks (social media monitoring) and websites – to understand what is being said about you, your competition, and/or on your market.

We’re not in 2005, so luckily you don’t need to manually search keywords whenever you want to see what is being said. You can use the various tools available (as will be mentioned toward the end), to filter what conversations/mentions are relevant to helping you grow your business.

By using an automated tool to get some much needed information on what’s going on in various social circles, you can gain instant access to any and all negative vibes regarding your brand, leverage positive comments, and dive deeper into the market, to build a stronger online business by constantly knowing what is going on.

The American restaurant Arby’s used social listening to score a grand slam back in 2014 by using Tweetdeck – a social media listening/monitoring tool for Twitter – to cash in on a hat that recording artist Pharrell was wearing.

Now it’s your time to cash in on your listening skills.

Why Social Listening Must Be an Integral Part of Your Business Strategy

Conversations, and communication in general, are moved by what we are able to grasp via listening, and by how we respond to what is being said.

“The art of conversation lies in listening.” — Malcom Forbes

So why should you listen, and not just carry on with just doing what you have been doing until now? Here are 7 reasons why every eCommerce business should make social listening part of their ongoing business strategy.

1. Attract New Customers

Depending on what niche you are in, you most likely find yourself using different social media networks, advertisements on Google or other social sites, influencers, and SEO to attract new customers. The thing is that attracting new customers via all of these different channels can take time, knowledge, and money that you may not have available.

Even with time, knowledge, and money things can go unnoticed because you can’t be everywhere on the internet at one time. For example, we were not using a tool for social listening a few months ago, and unfortunately we missed an opportunity to attract new customers.

Had we jumped into this conversation in a timely manner, we could have gained yet another new member for our growing community.

Today we are happily locked in and listening, and now fortunate enough to notice when there is an opportunity to join a discussion.

Let’s take for example someone that sells wooden watches. The number of keywords and brands active in this niche is growing and becoming a hit. Do you want to spend a full day searching Google, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram for every time it’s mentioned? Here’s the answer, no you don’t.

Using Google Alerts (check out a few other tools by scrolling down to the bottom) you can easily set up different settings for a variety of different keywords so that you are constantly up to date with what’s being said.

Customizing the settings to show you specific results, and combining different keywords sure does beat randomly searching Twitter, in which case you will get a mixed bag or search results that are only sometimes relevant.

For better results:

• Narrow down the keywords that you are monitoring so that you are not dealing with unnecessary noise, but don’t get too specific that you are only getting a small sample size
• Track your competition to see if there is anything negative going on. Try [competitor’s brand name] can’t or [competitor] isn’t/doesn’t. See what they are not doing to fulfill the customer’s wants and needs

2. Customer Service

Once it was said that all PR is good PR. It’s time to let you in a news update: not all PR is good PR. The internet is full of good and bad thoughts on every brand – every brand! Social listening enables you to see that.

For instance, if you were mentioned like this, wouldn’t you have wanted to leverage this on your site, Facebook, or in some other fashion?

The above case is one in which the mentioned brand did not lose by not reacting, however by knowing about it, they could have either responded or leveraged it to make themselves look even better.

On the other end of the spectrum, Starbucks, had they known, probably would have liked to respond to this thread, titled “WTF Starbucks” that was upvoted 69 times in Reddit (and seen by tens more).

You want to nip these issues before they turn into a wrecking ball. In a study by Zendesk (one of the leading authorities on customer service), it was shown that of B2B and B2C customers, 66% and 52% respectively, stopped buying after a bad customer service interaction.

Taking care of an issue or ticket that gets to you via email or on one of your social media profiles is the easy part. It’s the issues that don’t ever make it to you that make even more noise, and that’s exactly where social listening steps in.

From a simple Twitter search of “don’t buy from” I easily found various brands that were getting plenty of bad PR! Using tools that notify you of these statuses enables you to minimize any potential damage before it gets out of control!

For better results:

• Track the different names or references for your company. For example, we track StoreYa and StoreYaCom, StoreYa.com
• Track the name of your most popular products or all of the products you sell
• Track negative comments, like “Don’t buy from …”

Bonus: Pre-Sales

If you are actively using social listening in your business strategy then you have the power to make sure that you don’t miss out on purchases that are begging to be made.

To make the pre-sales social listening process a piece of cake, make sure to track your brand name in any and every variation as well as the names of your products (the same tips that we offer for social listening in customer service).

Had we been listening then, we could have capitalized on these questions.

Don’t worry though, we’ll catch it now :). We did not get tagged, but we still caught it!

3. Identify Influencers

Discovering the “big voices” in your niche is not a problem, as you are probably quite familiar with them. However, depending on the size of your business, there could potentially be another hundred (or more) influencers on the web, whether on social media or on their own sites, that could do wonders for your business.

The problem is that you have not discovered all of them, but again, that isn’t completely your fault. To find influencers that can increase your sales and popularity in the market, you’d probably have to dedicate a few days to searching every social media platform and various search engines for every keyword that could have an effect on your business.

Does that sound fun, or productive? No, it does not. Manual research is necessary before you launch, but once you’ve launched your business, and need to dedicate time to customers and growth, putting time aside for this task is not always doable.

For example, if you sell leather bags and need to find an influencer, how would you go about finding all the possible influencers without social listening tools? How can you properly filter through 101,000,000 search results efficiently? I Don’t think it is possible.

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Searching the web just isn’t a productive option.

For better results:

• Who’s covering you already? Track the title of one of your press releases or an announcement you sent out via email or social media about a new product.
• To find relevant influencer marketers in your industry, use these tools: XXXX
• Use social listening tools that are targeted toward helping you find these people
• Use keywords like “influencer”, “blogger, “ X Twitter/Instagram followers”

4. Understanding the Market

Here’s are a couple of big name companies that went from the top of the food chain to the bottom: Nintendo and BlackBerry. Both of them fell behind the rapid changes that took place in their markets, and today hardly resemble what they once were.

By being a business that uses social listening, you take a lot of heavy lifting out of necessary market research. You can now listen to tweets, conversations in online groups, and social statuses talking about how the market should look based on what people want.

You spoke. We listened. http://t.co/kVNhXqL1

— Maker's Mark (@MakersMark) February 17, 2013

 For better results:

• Track time periods, such as [X winter 2015]
• Track your market based on customer types, such as millennials, retirees, new-parents, etc.
• Track spending and income details for your target customer. Spending habits change!

If you understand the market, coming up with the right products is no problem.

5. Get Ahead of Consumer Trends (A.K.A Business Development)

There isn’t much of a market for summer clothing right now in the northern hemisphere. However, now is just around the time that we will all start to understand what will be “in” next summer. Obviously you won’t have a crystal clear understanding until we’re into the end of the first quarter of 2016, but now is the time to start.

Without having to do any work, you can get automatic email updates on what the near future holds for your market. What would I do if I was selling bathing suits? I’d create an alert for related keywords and create a spreadsheet that exemplifies the different trends that I can expect to see.

For better results:

• Start early – The early bird gets the worm!
• Monitor products in your niche that you don’t sell to see if they are trending
• Segment your different types of customers
• Monitor influencer resources, regardless of whether they’re working with you

6. Watching Your Competitors

In a recent guest post, knowing your competition (and the market as a whole) came up as one of the four corners of starting an eCommerce website.

Checking in on your competitor’s’ site every once in awhile just doesn’t cut it – there’s a reason corporations use corporate espionage to get a leg up on the competition. You want to know, as often as you can, as much as you can about the ones on the other side (the dark side).

If you track your competitors you’ll be able to know what they do well and what they are struggling with, and accordingly, either target new customers (as mentioned earlier) or make changes to your site or business to capitalize on what you have learned.

Just as you listen to your own customers, you can and should do the same regarding your competition. Listening to what your competitors can of course help you attract new customers (as pointed out at the start), as well as help you discover what your competitor does which elicits a very positive or a very negative response so that you can use this with your own customers.

For better results:

• Track their brand names in both a positive and negative tone
• Monitor the personal social media accounts of management and marketing team members

Using Facebook Page Insights (this can be found in your business page dashboard under “Overview” by scrolling to the bottom):

Last but not least…

7. User Generated Content

It would be fantastic if you got tagged or notified every time someone shared an image or some other sort of rich digital content of themselves with your product! That however is not reality. It’s not always on someone’s mind to tag you when they just got a new garment in the mail, but you can bet that it is on Facebook or Instagram.

Use relevant tools for each of the different social media platforms so that you are able to use the content when it matters, and not six months after it was posted.

For instance, yesterday (October 27th was “National Chocolate Day”). I hope Godiva found these awesome tweets (notice there are no direct tweets to the brand). They could use the images anytime, but over the next 24 hours these tweets could make their social status jump even higher.

Social Listening Tools

• Mention: track keywords across the web and social media platforms including Instagram
• Google Alerts: get notified for keyword mentions across the web
• Social Mention: trending keywords in social media
• SimilarWeb: get to know your competition
• TalkWalker: see spikes for influencers, see what’s working for competitors, and understand market trends
• NutShellMail: keeps you up to date via email about all that happened across your social media accounts
• FollwerWonk: a tool from Moz to help you better understand your followers and who you’re following on Twitter
• Tweetdeck: real-time tracking of what is being said on Twitter
• Keyhole: this is a great tool for keeping an eye on the ever popular hashtags that are making waves across Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook
• Commun.it: aside from the social media scheduling you can use it as a tool to track your competition on Twitter

Social Listening Summed Up

A) Decide what are your goals

B) Create a list of keywords

C) Pick the right tools

D) Dedicate time to using the results

Now you know the benefits of social listening (and the identical twin “social monitoring”), so really all that is left to do is to get started! If you have any questions or comments, we welcome your comments in the comment section below. If not, good luck and hopefully you’ll find yourself making progress at the same, quick pace as Bond.

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12 Essential Tasks Every Social Media Marketer Should Do Monthly

Social media marketing is often about simple routines that need to be integrated into daily life. This post covers such routines, twelve of them in fact. We focus on the twelve things that you should try and include in your “beginning of the month” to-do list. Hopefully, they will all combine to ensure that you get most out of your social media marketing activities.

The first thing you need to do at the start of every month is get your data head on. Check out all the stats from the last month and see how your social media has performed. How’s the follower rate going? And do you know what the engagement rate has been? At what time during the month did people engage the most? Knowing the facts means that you can gain a fuller understanding of the impact of last month’s efforts. If they’ve left you dead in the water, change up your strategy. If they are bringing engagement, intensify your efforts. By being aware of the difference certain actions make you can ensure that you are always improving, and making progress.

Then you need to get the benchmarking done. Benchmarking means simply looking at how your competitors are doing and comparing your output and impact with them. You also need to ensure that you take a look at the bigger picture (not just your enemies) by looking at major players in the industry. This doesn’t necessary need to be only data driven either. What kind of trends are there with content and marketing in your industry, for example? Keep on top of this particular wave and you’ll be riding it for months to come. Ignore your competitors and the industry and they will ignore you.

image: http://cdn2.business2community.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/resource-12-monthly-tasks-03.jpg.jpg

A content marketing strategy is not meant to be just a piece of paper that is left on a desk (even if it’s your desk). Pick up and review it at the start of every month. First of all, you need to know what has been completed or left at the wayside, and has it mattered? Then, you need to ensure that you have a clear plan for the month ahead. Take time, also, to be certain that you are doing the best you possibly can to optimize the content you are producing. Is everything in place to create great content? Do you know?

Every company should have at least one big content calendar meeting. And the start of the month is the best time to do this. It sharpens the various minds and makes sure that people know what is expected of them for the month ahead. Go through the content calendar with the team, and make it your job to be certain that everyone knows all that needs to be done in the next 30 days. Challenges can be discussed, and the good stuff that came out of last month can be celebrated. This is the perfect opportunity to check that everyone is on point for the month ahead when it comes to creating superb content.

You’ve been managing the reporting side of things, right? All data and insights need to be sent out to the executives and other stakeholders. The people who greenlit your marketing. Ensure it is easy to access, has key takeaways and focuses on the value you are bringing to the company and its goals and objectives. And make sure it comes in a pretty folder too (this last part is optional). Quick Tip: Stakeholders are interested in quantifiable data. Make everything about the money the content marketing is going to bring in via branding, earned media and conversions data.

Social media has advertising very much at the core of it now. You cannot grow organically. You need to review what has happened with this particular aspect of the game over the last month. What ads are working the best? Which targeting has the lowest pay-per-click? How are the sales and conversions? Then, make sure this is all in order and accessible to all concerned, so you’re ready for the next part of the process.

Set up the social advertising campaigns so that they are informed and optimised by the data that you found in your review. Twitter? Facebook? Instagram? Google? Follower growth or reach? Where and how is spending to be allocated so you get the maximum ROI from your budget?

Set up your goals for the month. How can you change up your approach so that you gain even more engagement? What new things can you try? Set performance goals, so you can keep pushing the envelope and add more value to the social media marketing in the month ahead. If you set clear and concrete goals, you should be able to be on the road of continuous improvements. Quick Tip: Use a combination of data and clear thinking to set up measurable goals. Always tie goals to data when you can.

And this leads us onto the next step at the start of every month. Be bold, and choose at least a couple of experiments to implement. This could be all about using more visuals. If you’ve never, ever created an infographic, try one out. If the video has so far not been a major thing for your company, start down the road of creating some high-quality video that you can share with your audience. Quick Tip: Give as many people as possible the empowerment they need to try something new. Celebrate the success publicly, and encourage experimentation.

Identify influencers. It is always important to identify influencers that you can aim to make a connection with. Influencers can help you leverage your social media content, give it credibility and spread it to a larger audience. One of your goals should be to find at least one new influencer every month to reach out to and try to establish a connection with. It will help boost your social media presence.

Create at least one social media event and include it in your calendar. This could be something as simple as a hangout, a live stream or a webinar. Or it could be a full on virtual summit with people from your industry. If you are going big, don’t be afraid to plan it out over a couple of months. These things take time to build, but the important thing is that they get built. Quick Tip: Whatever it is that you’re building ensure you plan in advance and start raising awareness and expectations at least a month before the big day.

Plan ahead for the next month after this one coming up. Think about the month itself and the seasonal aspects that may affect your content marketing. Be aware that many people in content marketing don’t understand the impact of national holidays on their efforts. Be one step (and one month) ahead of that game. It makes sense to see where you are in the calendar year and plan accordingly. Otherwise, you could miss out on a truly useful marketing opportunity. Quick Tip: Have a brainstorming session on the upcoming holidays and other relevant events on the calendar. Work out how you can create unique content opportunities around that event (Father’s Day for example).

Follow the above 12 steps every month and you should see a continuous level of improvements in your activities and your results.You should integrate these steps into your monthly routine to get the most out of the work you do.

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