Experts Predict Greater Use of Social Media Monitoring by Marketing & PR in 2016

Increasing use of social media listening monitoring will be one of the major marketing and PR trends of 2016.

Marketers often focus on the “talking” side of communication and neglect its listening aspect. That will continue to change in the coming year. A growing number of successful case studies, better monitoring and measurement tools, a more sophisticated understanding of data analytics, and the proven value of online listening in gaining insights into market opinion will prompt more brands to become more diligent in their social media monitoring during 2016.

More marketers will listen to social media conversations and analyze the data to reach strategic decisions, experts predict. Brands will increasingly turn to social listening to resolve customer service issues, locate user-generated content, and better understand their audiences and their needs and wants.

Brands, it is predicted, will also increasingly use media monitoring services for more thorough and timely coverage of blogs, message boards and forums, and the major social media platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Major social media monitoring and measurement services such as Brandwatch, NetBase, Social Studio and CyberAlert are gearing up for substantial growth in 2016. CyberAlert’s new dashboard was recently named the best new measurement technology in 2015 by The Measurement Advisor.

Obtaining Valuable Insights

“The insights gained from social media listening can often be just as valuable as the revenue generated from social media and certainly more valuable than a flippant like from a passive follower,” Davina Rapaport, Pulse and social media manager at Maersk Line, told eConsultancy.

Amir Zonozi, chief strategy officer at Zoomph, predicts higher demand for real-time marketing as brands listen for trending conversations across social media platforms. “Brands will build larger social media and digital teams to keep up with the social listening demands,” he says.

Social media monitoring is a “must have” for social media marketing budgets, says Dina Shuqom of digital marketing agency ParkerWhite, in a Business 2 Community article. By searching for certain keywords, companies can locate specific posts and conversations relevant to their business. A concrete example: A hotel can send its promotion directly to people who tweet that they are stranded at an airport and need a place to stay.

Most companies in 2016 expect to compete based on quality of customer service, not price, according to Adobe’s 2015 Digital Trends report. Experts point out that organizations can better attain superior customer service by utilizing social media monitoring to understand their audiences and provide more personalized marketing.

PR departments are also becoming more tuned to using social media monitoring and measurement services for corporate reputation management and to assess consumer sentiment about corporate messaging and business issues.

Listening Benefits for Nonprofits

Nonprofit organizations will also benefit more from social media listening in 2016, writes Jeanette Russell, marketing director at Attentive.ly, on LinkedIn Pulse.

“For nonprofits, what’s exciting about advances in social listening is that data processing is more affordable,” Russell says. “This means that causes can use a proven strategy once reserved for the largest commercial brands.”

Nonprofits have a tremendous opportunity to recruit supporters by encouraging people to reshare their messages and identifying and understanding social media influencers. By accessing the networks of their supporters, nonprofits can increase their reach exponentially.

In 2016, nonprofits will place a priority on listening to and monitoring the content shared by influencers, she predicts. Nonprofits will adopt new workflows designed to continually listen to their audiences, providing then an “always-on” engagement program.

Bottom Line: Growing use of social media monitoring and measurement will be one the major marketing trends of 2016, most experts agree. More powerful, user-friendly tools and greater use of data analytics and social media marketing strategies, such as user-generated content, influencer marketing and personalized marketing, will drive the trend.

This article was originally published on the CyberAlert blog.
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Meeting consumers on their turf: the value of social media in search marketing

As the digital marketing industry matures, it’s important to revisit the basic reasons why it needs to be a greater area of focus for any company. To put it simply, we market online because that is where the customers are in ever-increasing numbers.

Flawed as they can be, statistics do tell a story. The Pew Research Center statistics clearly show that the trend is positive and rapidly climbing from year to year.

Additionally, Digital Insights reports some of these mind-blowing 2014 facts are impossible for any responsible digital marketer to ignore:

• 75 percent of the engagement on a Facebook post happens in the first five hours.
• 53 percent of interaction between Google+ user and a brand is positive.
• 44 percent of users on Twitter have never sent a tweet.
• 84 percent of women and 50 percent of men stay active on Pinterest.
• More than two users sign-up for LinkedIn every second.
• 23 percent of teens consider Instagram as their favorite social network.
• Weekends are the most popular time to share Vines.
• Number of snaps sent per day on SnapChat is 400 million.
• 40 percent of YouTube traffic comes from mobile.
• B2B marketers using blogs generate 67 percent more leads.

Method, process, and justification

Access to digital information is globally expanding. This widespread access to information necessitates that we cross markets over many digital channels. Now brands can no longer influence customers by controlling the information they see. Rather, branded content must deal in facts, features, offers, and benefits in a two-way, community-focused way. Customers will seek out the opinions of their friends, family, and social media contacts to find out what they think about your brand. Then they will go in search of truth by visiting independent, unbiased sources to validate the claims you’ve made about your brand with your content.

SEO content marketing must deliver customer-centric information via blogs, website content, and advertising content that responds to customers’ sentiments, questions, and anticipated questions, as a means to develop leads and ultimately convert them to customers.

The traditional marketing funnel of AIDA (attention, interest, desire, and action) will always exist, but the process has become more dynamic and sophisticated. Not only are potential customers using word of mouth to seek the advice and counsel of other potential customers when making a decision to buy brand X or brand Y, but they are now doing it online in real-time with digital search and social media channels.

Prospective customers are already beyond the interest stage – they have demonstrated desire to buy a product based on much of the SEO content you already have published to the Web. Since the customer is now omnipresent online via the use of one device or another, the process of AIDA is rapidly giving way to the new idea of mapping the customer journey. Brands are no longer engaging the customer at discrete points in time. Rather, it’s a continuous flow of engagement across digital channels and devices – it’s a journey.

Customer behavior

What does this mean for marketers as we strive to acquire customers, increase conversions on e-commerce sites, and earn customer loyalty?

1. We must engage customers where they get their information, in their digital environment.
2. We must make sure that the answer from their social media friends, family, and acquaintances to the question, “Does brand X really do that?” is an emphatic, “Yes!”
3. We must be able to measure, target, and repeat this for similar customers across our marketing channels.

The social conversations from customers are part of the new data-driven, personalized approach to understanding customer sentiment, developing marketing insights, and predicting their behavior.

This concept of a brand being a person just like you and me may seem counterintuitive; the brand represents the “system,” thus many distrust it. However, that’s changing in the age of social media. When we engage socially, it’s all about stamping a face, personality, and identity on a brand. So brands must become one of them – a friend, a neighbor, or a respected and trusted source of information. 

What is the SEO strategy?

So, what is the plan? What can SEO marketers do to optimize the customer’s experience?

SEO marketers are ultimately responsible for ensuring that websites are set up for high conversions, customer satisfaction, and visibility in social and search channels, so it is important note that SEO and social media follow a repetitive content-driven cycle. 

When consumers want to buy something, they always have questions. Therefore marketers need to be the people with answers that are credible and influential, and they have to be online in the places their customers frequent in order to talk to them. They should provide useful information in forums that customers may frequent, without doing the hard-sell or hyping the brand. Part of that conversation should involve making it easy to find any brand content that can help answer customers’ questions, or can direct them to a reputable, trusted, and unbiased third-party. A brand’s content should clearly differentiate it from other competing brands and have the ability to uniquely capture customers’ attention to increase engagement. It also needs to reflect objective truths and definitively illustrate the benefits of the brand’s offerings, because customers will inevitably want verify what they read through an independent third-party.

This is the power of information and social media at work, under the control of the customer.

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How to Kill it with Instagram Marketing

Are you using Instagram to its fullest potential?

If you have a visually striking product or brand (and even if you don’t!) and you’re not on Instagram, you’re missing out on one of the biggest visual trends on social media today. And considering that images are often the most engaging aspect of social posts, that’s saying something.

Whether you’re new to Instagram marketing or you’re struggling to find the ROI of your photos, we’ve got a four-step process to help you kill it with Instagram marketing.

Step 1: Pre-Campaign Data and Insights

If you want to find success on Instagram, you’ve got to do more than just publish beautiful photographs. Your strategic thinking should begin well before you post a single image.

Before launching an Instagram campaign, consider exploring all of your available data and insights. What do you know about your audience? Who are they? What is their browsing behavior like? Where do they shop? What is their lifestyle?

If you are using a social insights platform, you should be able to apply what you know about your audience on other channels, like Twitter or Facebook, to your Instagram marketing to give yourself a great head start.

Step 2: Campaign Execution

Now it’s time to launch your campaign: Snap photos, create captions, insert hashtags and engage your audience.

Be sure that your bio is completely filled out, and that you are posting fresh, new content on a regular basis. Whether you’re running a one-off seasonal campaign or a long-term brand awareness campaign, you’ll need to keep your presence active in order to be successful.

Some tips for great Instagram photos:

• Set your smartphone camera settings to “square” if available, so that all the photos you snap will be Instagram-friendly
• Drive traffic to your website by always including a URL in your caption
• Plan your Instagram photos in tandem with other posts across your social networks
• Encourage your community to share photos of your product, using a branded hashtag

Step 3: Post-Campaign Measurement

After your campaign, or (better yet) at regular intervals while it’s running, you’ll want to capture metrics that show how successful your efforts have been.

Examples of Instagram metrics:

• Number of comments
• Number of likes
• Number of followers
• URL clicks
• Branded hashtag mentions

What you measure will be determined by the goals of your campaign. Is it to drive traffic? Measure URL clicks. Brand awareness? You might want to look at comment sentiment and hashtags.

Step 4: Analysis

No social media strategy is complete without analysis. During your campaign, be sure to check in on the metrics you’ve decided to measure, and see whether they’re indicating growth.

You can analyze the demographic and psychographic makeup of your audience; the reasons why certain images performed better than others; what time of day gets the most engagement and more.

Analysis is a key component of a great Instagram strategy, as even not-so-successful campaigns can teach you what works and what doesn’t. By feeding this information back into your strategy for the next campaign, you’ll be in a better position to reach and engage your audience with your beautiful photos.

Try applying these four steps to your next Instagram campaign to better connect your content with your audience, and get the most out of your branded visuals.

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Email Interaction: Tell It Like It Is

One-click emails are an efficient way for consumers to share personal preferences with brands and provides email marketers actionable data that can be used to enhance the customer experience.

As humans, we are accustomed to dealing with yin and yang, good and evil, happy and sad. Whether in the tangible world or the digital world, one can expect for the good to always come with the bad. Recently, Facebook has announced that it is testing a "Dislike" button to convey the notion of disapproval and complement the Like button. 

Whether Facebook winds up implementing the Dislike button or not, it's clear that it understands the value in knowing the likes and dislikes of its members. Testing the Dislike button demonstrates that simple question and answer content has the potential to generate extremely valuable information, and email marketers can borrow from the polarity of these options. You don't have to be Facebook to reap the rewards of this information; email marketers can also use a variety of techniques to learn what their consumers like and dislike.

Some consumers absolutely love what’s landing in their inboxes. Others may dislike it to the point of unsubscribing or complaining that messages are spam. Yet, these sentiments and points of input remain a mystery for many marketers. Fortunately, an email itself can be used to gather input related to the root cause of possible complaints and disengagement metrics.

First, email marketers must recognize that messaging and brand communication is not a one directional valve that drops information to the masses. Brands can tap into the true potential of the email channel while simultaneously empowering their customers to vote for the next promotional offering, the next product to stock up on, or the next cover of the catalog. These types of communications create an opportunity for subscribers to tell it like it is.

Using input data to determine a customer's likes and dislikes enables email marketers to bring more innovation, interaction, and reality to an inbox. Email clicks provide a wealth of explicit and implicit input data from a consumer that immediately translates into an actionable data point. This triggers an automated touch point in the consumer journey, which allows email marketers to develop more use cases for inbox interaction and data gathering, providing a more meaningful inbox and overall brand experience. 

With email now open on mobile more than any other device, a Like/Dislike or Yes/No option is a fast track to capturing actionable data from consumers on the go. A quick input approach also works well on mobile push notifications, which makes all digital communications inherently more interactive.

Essentially, the beauty of one-click email is that it lets recipients have a voice - they can tell it like it is on the spot. Here are three examples of brands using one-click emails to prompt automated lifecycle messages based on the customer's direct influence and proactively address issues that could culminate in the form of a block, complaint, or even an unsubscribe action.

1. TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor can gather valuable input via one question about travel destination preference.

 

2. Shop Your Way

Shop Your Way uses coupon value to gather fast feedback.

3. Amazon

Amazon asks for input on delivery status as a means to collect actionable data.


There is virtually no limit to the type of data you can capture with these types of binary questions. The first step is to understand what kind of data you could easily capture. That enables you to deliver a more relevant message and customer experience. Next, build out a plan to collect this information over a series of messages and touchpoints, whether via email, mobile push notifications, or any other channel. Once your customers see that you're using the data to create a better user experience, they will continue to participate in this type of progressive profiling.

Is your email program allowing your audience to share its sentiments? Are you putting this data into action with relevant, timely communication? If not, consider these possibilities and open up new lines of communication by encouraging your audience to tell it like it is.

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The 4 Generations on Social You Ought to Know

There are many things in my life that I love, and dinner parties are one of them. Before I hosted my first ever soirée, my mother made it a point to instill a statement in my head. “Know your guests,” she said. While she also said, “Your chicken tends to be dry,” it was, “Know your guests,” that stuck with me for years—even to this day.

At first it took me some time to really understand what she meant, but after hosting a few parties it all became crystal clear. When you’re hosting a dinner party, you’re essentially creating an experience, and the best experiences are shaped by the preferences and behaviors of your guests. To this point, the more I knew about my guests, the more I was able to personalize aspects of an event for each person—making them feel valued and special. 

And isn’t that what we’re all about on social? As marketers, aren’t we hosting experiences on social media networks so that customers feel valued and special? It’s like an ongoing dinner party with an open invitation—one where we hope audiences happily consume our content and share their enjoyment with others. As such, knowing our audience is imperative to the success of our social strategy.

And that’s what we’ve done here. For this piece, we’ve mined through reports about age to gain more insight into a few audience segments prevalent on social. More specifically, we’re examining the four primary living generations: Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z. You see, your audiences will be comprised of all ages, so it’s necessary that we analyze behaviors and preferences in aggregate. It’s the only scalable way to create personalized content that will resonate with large audiences. By getting to know these generation types, you will be able sift through your own data to identify trends and opportunities that can help you build a more informed content strategy.
 

Baby Boomers

(Born between 1946-64)

Qualities:  With an age range of 51 to 65, this group’s key life experiences span mostly throughout the twentieth century. Baby Boomers were born into post-WWII cultures. They are considered the “rock and roll” and first TV generation. They lived through the wars of the ‘60s and ‘70s, creating a “me” attitude that ultimately broke from the traditions of generations past: such as women working outside the home, divorce acceptance, and a “buy now and use credit” mentality. Baby Boomers are also identified as people who see technology and innovation as a learning process and, unlike their parents, think of retirement as more than just a stay-at-home part of life, but an exciting time to travel and enjoy life. Most importantly, they are a very populous group. In the U.S., Baby Boomers secure one quarter of the population.

Key Social Insight: 60% of Baby Boomers are actively using social media. Studies also show that Americans over 55 outspend younger adults online 2:1. (Source)

Takeaway: Today, Baby Boomers are making strides toward learning these platforms in hopes of making their lives better. These audiences are either retired and/or their children are now adults, which means there’s more disposable income and time—a big opportunity for online sales. While it’s taking this generation a little longer to grasp all the major social networks, when they are on, they are ready to learn and spend. Look through your analytics and see if they’re consuming your content. If they are, think about how your product or service can benefit this demo and test a few pieces with them. If they’re not, consider tactics relevant to your brand that might peak their interest.  

Gen X

(Born between 1965-80)

Qualities: Children of the above generation, these now 35 to 50 year olds were once kids of two-income households or a single parent unit. This type of “empty home” produced a generation that is very individualistic and entrepreneurial. They are seen as short on loyalty and commitment and they desire exploration and contribution. This may be the reason why Gen Xers have an average of seven career changes within their lifetime. Currently, most are homeowners with children at home. 

Key Social Insight: 86% of Gen Xers are online on a daily basis and are multi-tasking professionals that are actively seeking information. They are the second largest percentage of Pinterest users and nearly two-thirds have used Facebook in the past month. (Source)

Takeaway:  Gen Xers are a well-informed, goal-oriented audience. People in this generation are reaching the height of their careers, with many out-earning Baby Boomers. On social, marketers have a chance to build long-lasting product value and brand loyalty with this generation. And the way to get there is through authentic, trust-worthy information. If your intent is to target people identified as Gen Xers, then the content must be easy to understand, insightful, and offer a benefit upfront. Transparency is key with this audience.

Millennials/Gen Y

(Born between 1980-98)

Qualities: Ages 17 to 34, most Millennials came into this world nurtured by focused parents. Millennials grew up with fast food, video games and computers, which shaped them into placing a high emphasis on quick information and instant satisfaction. They tend to have a sense of entitlement and a keen understanding of the digital space (since they grew up with some type of digital appliance). One significant trait of this generation is that they value work, but do not live to work. Having a social life outside of work is a necessary feature in life that they strive for. Lastly, Millennials represent more than a quarter of the U.S. population (more than Baby Boomers). 

Key Social Insight: 62% of millennials say that if a brand engages with them on social networks, they are more likely to become a loyal customer. They expect brands to not only be on social networks, but to engage with them. (Source)

Takeaway:  This tech-savvy generation knows exactly what they want from brands on social media. They’re active on most of the major networks so planning a connected social strategy that spans across multiple networks is a critical step toward reaching this audience. In order to generate content that resonates with a Millennial, marketers must be creative, clever and quick. This audience wants to feel like a valuable customer, so baking that message into your content is a powerful way to nurture customer loyalty.
 

Gen Z

(Born between 1999-Present)

Qualities: From babies, to toddlers, to teens, Generation Z is the youth of today’s world. For this group, digital is all they know. This audience is the mobile device generation. So much so that the second screen is a necessary component to the television experience. Because of the easy accessibility of information from digital tools, Gen Zers are adept researchers. Where Millennials use an average of three screens, this group uses five. Due to the immediacy at which content has been delivered to them, this group has a lower attention span than the generations before them. Gen Z is also the third largest group in the U.S. (trailing behind Baby Boomers), but by 2020, they'll account for 40% of all consumers. (Source)

Key Social Insight: Consumers age 19 and younger prefer social networks like Snapchat, Secret and Whisper, and a quarter of people age 13 to 17 have left Facebook this year. (Source)

Takeaway: While the purchasing power of this group is no match for the aforementioned generations, they do have influence over some of them because they are their children and grandchildren. But the main thing here is that Generation Z is an audience interested in the next big thing. Emerging networks—ones that their parents are not on—are far more attractive than Facebook and Twitter. Testing on new social frontiers is the only way brands can really capture the attention of Gen Z. And it’s not just being on these networks, it’s also about standing out and creating highly visual, fascinating content. Unlike Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, Gen Zers are more open to experimentation and risk-taking content—so have fun with it. If you do, they will, too.   

Note: Data from the "Qualities" section of each generation was provided byMarketingteacher.com 

What are your tips for marketing to certain age demographics? 

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