Being rated as one of the most coveted fast food brands in the world doesn’t come easy. Apart from keeping the best quality standard around the food making it ‘talk of the town’ requires a robust marketing strategy. Like all other businesses fast food brands have endorsed ‘Social Media’ as the new marketing mantra, and are in the race for more Facebook page likes.
The big question is how many of them are doing it right? We had shared with you in an earlier story about how McDonald’s went wrong in its strategy and we assumed that this may just be the approach of food brands in general, till we witnessed a 400,000+ surge of likes on the Facebook page of an internationally renowned fast food brand! No guesses here, yes we are talking about KFC.
Facebook Analytics by Social Bakers
#HowDoYouKFC
KFC wanted to promote its limited-time Extra Crispy Boneless Chicken (sorry the product is off-shelf now) with an aim to elevate and empower its real user connection and hence devised a comprehensive campaign for the same with the hashtag #HowDoYouKFC, striking the right cord with the audience. March 27th, 2014 became an epic day in the history of KFC when this campaign broke all barriers.
The campaign gave the consumers an avenue to connect with the brand in a minimalistic and informal way. What made #HowDoYouKFC work was the basic principle of any business i.e ‘Customer is the king’. Let’s dive in to analyze this campaign better.
Keeping it Simple
“If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself” – Albert Einstein
Social Media strategies that are elaborate are passé, especially when the target audience (read: customers) have the very little attention span. A crisp and clear strategy thus would work best for any brand. KFC kept this campaign very simple by directing customers to upload a review on any chosen social network with the hashtag #HowDoYouKFC using their iPhone and then pasting the link in the pre-assigned URL bar on their website and voila it’s done! This user-generated content gave the brand, opportunity to analyze the consumer’s authentic love for KFC products and also provided a unique opportunity to its followers.
The #HowDoYouKFC strategy is pretty simple.
Cross Promotion Through Facebook
#HowDoYouKFC campaign gained momentum since the customers could participate in the run without compromising on time. The growing herd of food Instagrammers propelled the campaign further. All in all, this integrated approach increased the social footprint of the campaign.
#HowDoYouKFC was propelled by Food Instagrammers
KFC also cross promoted entries from another platform on its Facebook page such as YouTube videos and vine videos which added to the virality of the campaign thereby boosting the Facebook fan page growth. The presence of celebrities added the right fuel to the fire.
Keep the Conversation Going
Ask any Social Media manager about the biggest challenge while managing their brand’s fan page and they are sure to mention the constant conversation. Daily comment moderation can get pretty daunting especially when the volume of conversation is huge. In contrast to this situation, the customer psychology works pretty differently. For a customer, interaction with a brand through social media has become much personalized and everyone needs to be attended to especially when the comments are negative. KFC stuck to this philosophy and handled huge volumes of conversation on their Facebook page during #HowDoYouKFC campaign as well, without disappointing its loyal and new fans.
KFC managed negative comments during #HowDoYouKFC pretty well.
Great Content Always Wins
We harp on this aspect over and over again, but isn’t it true? Great content goes a long way with your audience. There is also much truth in the fact that for a brand to gain such a hiatus during a campaign doesn’t happen instantly. KFC has been sharing high quality content on its Facebook page consistently. In contrast to McDonald’s content strategy, KFC has made sure to infuse a variety in their content by talking more than just pleasing ‘food images’. During the campaign #HowDoYouKFC the brand shared posts and visuals which had a much personalized and emotional extension. KFC’s Facebook page also consciously showcased how families can have fun with KFC products . Needless to say, this keeps the followers engaged in the brand beyond the food offering.
KFC played on the emotional aspect with #HowDoyouKFC
Gratifying the Customer – Win Hearts
Social Media contests and gratification go hand in hand today. To say that a campaign would lack momentum in absence of gratification is partially true. KFC used the same concept however with a twist. The best entries got a chance to feature on the cover picture on their Facebook page. The unique videos created by followers could also be used by KFC in their future ads. 14 chosen winners each week could also win $100 Visa Gift card!
Fans could make up on the Cover pic of KFC”s Facebook Page!
The #HowDoYouKFC campaign is more than just a marketing campaign and has indeed taken customer relationships to a new level. This campaign is great learning for all online community managers, in plain English ‘It’s Finger-Lickin’ Good!’
Social Media trends are changing globally at a very abrupt rate. The power of Social Media is getting recognised not only from a communication perspective but also from an engagement and business opportunity by many brands. Having said the same, this aspect of marketing and branding is quite futile without proper monitoring, analytics and reporting. With no dearth of evaluation tools available today the choice for the best becomes a major task for brands and agencies alike.
The big question here is how much would a brand/agency invest in these specialised tools. According to a latest research it is quite evident that only 31.2% brands today are interested in PAID analytics! This may sound shocking too many however it is the ground reality. An interesting edge to this aspect is seen when brands understand the importance of a PAID channel however have budget constraints. What happens then? We discovered one such tool for our readers however could not miss the similarities with Radian6.
Both the tools have loads of common features however it would be inappropriate to compare the giant tool with an upcoming one. The key feature that makes a lot of difference here for many brands is ‘budget’ . Meet Konnect Social an online reputation, social media management, monitoring and analytics tool all under one roof.
“We all know the importance of Social Media Monitoring and ORM tools. There are loads of conversations happening about brands / products / personalities; on online forums, blogs, mainstream news and social media. These conversations have impact, they influence decisions. The thought process behind developing Konnect Social was to create a powerful and an Easy-To-Use tool that will give a complete picture and help make sense of all these conversations. Top priority was to create ‘one-tool’ for all ORM and social media needs”, says Sameer Narkar – Founder Konnect Social.
The tool has a clean interface and provides information on two parameters broadly classified under two separate tabs as Analytics and Monitor.
Analytics Tab:
The analytics tab provides in-depth page analysis that includes Facebook, Twitter and Google+. It also provides a comparative analysis platform for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Youtube and Four Square, brands can utilise this aspect for an effective ‘listening’ and understand their competition better.
Konnect-social-Dashboard
We tested the analytics segment for the automobile segment in India and had a crisp data being reflected across various levels. On Twitter the dashboard provided data on total follower, total engagement on twitter, mentions over time, influencer mention, most engaged users, replies, interface used and tweets over time data. For Facebook it provided data on total engagement, engagement over time and total fans. The tool displayed total subscribers, most rated videos and rating per video data for Youtube.
The dashboard also reflected data on word cloud for the chosen brand, top website traffic source and brand sentiment. The sentiment analysis is very accurate “because there is a provision of setting user defined rules in the system in addition to NLP (Natural language processing) to identify and extract subjective information in source materials”
Comparitive Analysis of top Auto brands by Konnect Social
In Sameer’s words “The feedback that we received from the agencies was although they get numbers from other tools they can\’t really figure out “So what” & “What next”. Konnect Social has addressed that problem by simplifying the tasks for the brands and agencies. The best part post analysis is that the analytics reports can be downloaded in excel and word file and they come with automated conclusions and not just bar and pie chart, thereby saving a lot of time. These reports are customised and white-labelled as well!
Konnect Social does not depend on third party data providers; instead they have their own “crawlers” that help them to be a lot faster especially when it comes to ORM (Online Reputation Management).
Monitor Tab:
The tool displays relevant conversations about your brand under its Monitor segment. The data can be further filtered basis region and website.
Track
Track relevant conversation by the Monitor Tab
In 2014 Konnect Social plans to have three major changes this includescreating dynamic infographics. As a user you have to simply select a template and boom! Konnect Social plans to make few improvements to their ‘news by publication’ report as well. This was earlier restricted to a few countries however it would have a global edge this year. In the Social Media analytics module they plan to introduce “KonnectSocial recommends” tab which would compliment there automated conclusion.
Experience Radarr, the world’s most intuitive and comprehensive social listening platform. From analyzing trends to sentiments, news and share of voice, 20/Twenty goes beyond just monitoring and helps gives your brand the best information to make informed decisions.
Right from its inception in 2006, Twitter has been a constant platform for unique engagement across the world. Due to lack of its native analytics tool, Twitter analytics were dependent on third party applicationsservices and till date the native tool does not provide the very best, hence more and more brands across the globe have been collaborating with tools to measure, quantify and analyse Twitter dynamics.
We at Beta21 have been sharing details about noteworthy tools to simplify Twitter engagement for some time now and during one such research we came across SocialBro, a web based application. The company was founded in 2011, and today has the biggest giants using its services that include Google, McDonald’s & Coca Cola to name a few.
So what made these giants dwell into this application, and more importantly what does SocialBro offer as an ‘extra’ to its users. As per Javier Buron, CEO of SocialBro the start of SocialBro began with much evaluation and trials at their own end; he says Before launching SocialBro, we provided social media development consulting. At the time, we created seven apps that helped users find the right people to follow on Twitter. We also developed followfriday.com (now offline). In 2010 the @followfriday @followfridaycom Twitter accounts had attracted more than 40o,000 followers. Many of these followers were famous people like Miranda Kerr and well known football players. The only reason we knew this was because Twitter informed us via email. Although, with so many emails alerts, we couldn’t easily tell if these famous people were still following us or not. Thousands of emails were quite clearly SPAM and there wasn’t an easy way to understand who our followers were. We couldn’t answer a simple question like ‘who are my followers with the most followers?’ (I.e. our most influential Twitter followers). This was the start of SocialBro”.
Depending upon the business or individual requirements, SocialBro offers comprehensive plans and pricing, which includes Basic, Professional, Business and Enterprise formats including a 15 day free trial. With a lot going behind in providing the very best to our users, we reviewed the SocialBro trial account and indeed noticed that SocialBro is different from other Twitter management platforms in a number of ways. It is indeed a one-stop solution for everything Twitter.
SocialBro provides more powerful audience analysis; segmentation options and direct marketing tools that help you take advantage of your followers. The platform also offers users a better understanding of their followers with advanced filtering and search features.
SocialBro Analytics, Engagement and Targetting features
Tools for all occasions
Apart from the regular Twitter activities that include Follow, Unfollow, Reply, Block, send DM and add to lists, SocialBro offers advanced features that would assist you to simplify tasks as a community manager, especially when you are handling multiple accounts. The “Collaborator tool’ allows you to add 3-5 team members to your account, thus simplifying the overall task of account management for clients, without compromising on authority since much access lies with the account creator.
The “Discover Twitter Tool” assists in finding active twitter users. This tool can filter the basis of the required results their bio, location and name. Apart from these basics results the advanced search option can populate results basis time zones, language, users (Verified & Non-verified), URL’s, country, gender, entity type & avatar for the chosen keyword, which is more than impressive. As a community manager this tool would help you with finding new, potential and realistic customer base to engage with. Once the data is in place, the tool further assists in sending DM’s, edit tags, and create an individual best time to tweet report!
The smart application, helps you keep a track when you try to follow back an account, which in recent past was ‘unfollowed’ by you at some point. This is very useful especially when as a community manager you are using multiple Twitter tools. SocialBro pops an alert icon in such cases.
One of the best tools that we found was “The Rule-Builder Tool’. This tool would assist community manager to save a lot of valuable time, since the most mundane tasks are taken care by this tool itself. It helps you to set specific actions for pre-set conditions. As community mangers you can choose the task able actions under the following headers:
‘When’ Someone Follows, Mentions, Favourites and adds you to the list. Once the ‘When’ option is chosen the tool takes you to the ‘With’ option where in the users can input the details basis Bio, names and location (Again available with the basic and advanced features).Once the required criteria is set. The tool moves to the last segment where in the user can set the ‘Then’ status which could be a pre-set message used to send a DM, or mention the user in a tweet or simply add a tag to their profile.
SocialBro helps community manager to create a ‘White list’ consisting of influencers, followers, clients and also a ‘Blacklist’ consisting of spammers, unfollowed accounts from your end, and automated accounts. SocialBro also helps you to track ‘Mentions’ effectively. All these tasks are taken care by specialised sub-tools.
Stats to the Rescue
In addition, in comparison to many other tools in the market, SocialBro users get access to actionable stats. Community managers can effectively drill down one level further and see the Twitter users behind their stats. The unique functionality allows brands to engage with the right Twitter users. SocialBro also assists with various sub features to effectively analyse your community. The stats can be listed as per language, time zone, custom avatar, profile with users, private profiles, gender, entity type, country, ratio to mention a few.
This unique tool also helps in generating highly evaluated reports about your brand, which can be customized. It helps you evaluate users and generate best time to tweet reports, account comparison, bench mark comparison, real-time analytics and using Kred and Peerlndex score to find influential users. According to Javier “We are introducing more advanced reporting, monitoring and analytics tools to help optimize ROI and segmentation of Twitter campaigns.”
Get Linked
Apart from the plethora of sub-features that SocialBro offers, the web application has integrated itself with the best features in social media domain, to help community mangers indulge in nothing but the very best. This includes bit.ly to measure the click stats for shared links, Google Analytics for overall analytics, Salesforce to manage customer information and lead generation and nimble as a social CRM tool to manage contacts, communications, and other account activities, giving it a 360 degree twist!
SocialBro inbuilt link feature
Apart from the above listed features, SocialBro helps export Optimal Tweet Schedule (based on an algorithm) to HootSuite
If you have been following our articles, there is little chance that you would have missed the ‘content is key’ bit. SocialBro has a specialized sub-feature of Tweet Analytics based and helps gain insight on the best tweets (based on retweets, replies and favorites).
Engagement the Right Way
SocialBro provides an effective platform to run through its ‘Twitter DM campaigns tool’ and also yield specialised set of analytics for it. This can be used by marketers during huge events, information sharing with a select fraternity, promotions, PR and for sending out mass invitations.
SocialBro is becoming the most apt choice for marketers today with almost 250,000 registered users / 3,000 customers / 40,000 monthly active users to boast of. Much of the user base for this brilliant application comes from US, SPAIN, UK, MX, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.
SocialBro is exhaustive in what it offers, however a dedicated customer support team, user guide and tutorials would help you understand the tool way better. Not to forget the daily evaluation e-mails that the tool sends out to keep the users updated.
SocialBro E-mail updates
All in all, SocialBro came across as a comprehensive tool for targeting, engagement, analytics and management on Twitter. In Javier’s own words “We believe Twitter is going to be the glue of communication just like email is today. On that basis, we are creating a suite of tools that will help marketing professionals, community managers, sales and recruiters take advantage and extract real value from Twitter”
With that thought in our mind, we urge you to try this application and experience the wonderful world of SocialBro.
Analytics plays a major role and is the key to the success of any Social Media campaign. It not only helps brand access its campaign strategy better but also gives valuable inputs on interactions by its followers. If you have been handling Twitter for your clients, chances are that at some point of time you would have experienced a flat graph with little or no activity on the follower front. What could have been the reason? Was it low quality followers or fake followers or both?
Fake profiles and inactive users (bots, in technical language) are usually program run profiles and are usually paid followers, malware or accounts created to increase clicks on advertisements and hamper your organic follower growth. Most brands today face this challenge. Hence it is very important to have the right following so that your brand strategy is in line and your brand’s voice is heard by the right people.
Till very recently most of this study was done manually (We can understand the pain, though). This takes a tough route when marketers have to manage different accounts. Now in today’s time offering a basic tool is no mean task (there are dozens in the market) what is important here is the usefulness of this tool. In our quest of helping you with the best tools in the industry, we take the liberty to introduce you to – ManageFlitter. Manage Flitter is a web based Twitter application (an award-winning that too!) that offers quite an assortment of features to its users.
A firsthand experience at things is the best one and hence we decided to plunge in understanding this tool a tad better. ManageFlitter offers 3 plans to choose from depending upon your usability, which includes a ‘Free’ version as well.
Let’s see what impressed us and what did not.
What We Loved:
Clear that Clutter
We all are well aware of the number of followers and following on the account we manage, don’t we? ManageFlitter breaks this data further into the profile that is notfollowing you back, profiles that you are following with no images, and inactive profiles. Why is this data important? To begin with, unlike Facebook, relationships on Twitter are different. If your brand is following someone necessarily does not mean that the other person/brand would follow you back. This leads to different combinations of relationships. ‘Not following you back’ data would throw a mix of influencers and individuals at you, utilize this data to trim your following list and follow the ones which are relevant to your brand/business. It would also help you to de-clutter your timeline and keep abreast with relevant stories that matter to your brand the most.
Manage Flitter also provides data on profiles with no images and inactive profile (profiles which have not tweeted in the last 30 days or so) .Inactive accounts do not re -tweets, they also affect the twitter ratio and also hamper your brand’s influence. These accounts may have been followed while creating your brand’s Twitter profile, and may include close associates, business partners or clients. Though these individuals may be a good reason to be in touch as far as your business is concerned, they do not qualify for a good following and may adversely impact your Twitter health.
More Data
ManageFlitter further filters down the data to as per your brand’s following ratio and influencers. This data could be utilised the reach of influencers and start conversation with the most apt of the lot. The most important data that ManageFlitter provides is the Talkative and Quiet data. It would help your brand know exactly which influencers are talking loud and which are talking quiet. Needless to say it’s the talkative that would help your brand grow!
Relevance Meter
ManageFlitter helps search as high as 80 million twitter accounts in seconds based on the keyword search initiated, at least that’s what the website says. ManageFlitter helped us reach relevant audience based on the keyword search we did. This included keyword featuring in their Twitter bios, location and or as a part of any conversation. We entered ‘Fashion’ and this is what we saw
Apart from the relevant followers, a right click gave us more in depth information about the particular account!
Schedule Tweets with an Edge!
There are many tools that would help you to scheduled tweet, however how many of them would help you with the best time to tweet! ManageFlitter does this for you, through its PowerPost feature. This feature can help brands to tweet at the optimal times, depending upon your daily tweeting frequency, most likely when your followers would see the updates. The PowerPost Rotate feature helps to re-use a tweet earlier used as PowerPost.
If you are a global brand, you can tweet the best tweet at the given time and across any specified geo location or when people or brands you follow are on Twitter. The Pro version of ManageFlitter further enhances it by scheduling tweets when either all followers or top 100 are on Twitter.
Get In Sync with the legendary Google+
By far one of the most unique features that ManageFlitter offers is its ability to get synced with Google+. Brands can choose its “Public” posts on Google+ to automatically reflect on Twitter. We know that this may sound robotic and hence ManageFlitter gives an option to have a selective approach too. This is how they do it!
What We Disliked
Paid Analytics
We pursed our lips at the very thought of Paid Analytics. ManageFlitter offers Account analytics and Tweet analysis for your account; however, it is a paid service and is available as a part of its Pro account. The Account Analytics feature helps with graphs depicting, followers, following, tweets and influence. The Tweet analytics feature helps to gain better insights based on ‘keywords’ across the various options. Here’s how the Pro service works!
Final Verdict
Now in today’s time sticking to the old saying of “most things in life are free” could be debatable and the same may be partially true for ManageFlitter as well. ManageFlitter did impress us with what it has to offer, however, we would have loved it even more if the analytics very free too! It is an ideal tool for growing business and brand. For more details on the best-suited option click here. We suggest indulging in the Free version if you are just starting and upgrading to a Pro version with time!
The ever-evolving world of Social Media has witnessed quite a few trends, some closely and some from a distance, nonetheless it hasn’t missed a single beat!
Our Internet savvy generation today prefers to keep themselves updated about everything in real-time and Social Media is just the right platform for them. Apart from individual accounts on the Social Media platforms, it is the brands today that have revolutionized and magnetized this space quite effectively making Social Media Marketing a key aspect for business.
One of the most popular medium that enjoys quite a repute with brands today is undoubted, Twitter. Twitter has not only helped brands to connect and interact with its followers but has also helped as an effective marketing and branding tool as well, thus being able to make a favorable impact on its audience.
Earlier this month we shared with you our take on Twitter Resolutions for 2014. The article summarized the key points to adhere to while planning a Twitter campaign. We are in a constant endeavor to share with you the best and latest and while doing so we stumbled upon this research from Simply Measured that has got us hooked ever since.
Now we know that your company has been running successful Social Media campaigns around Twitter, but do you know what goes behind the success of the world’s Top 100 companies (the study includes Top 100 Interbrand Companies & Top 100 Forbes Companies on Twitter). This valuable data would help you shape your Social Media strategy on Twitter even better. As an online community manager or social media manager, there are a few questions that trouble us quite often and we thought a Q&A take on this would be awesome, and a great opportunity to do it right!
Q1) How often should we Tweet?
Answer: Research suggests that most brands tweet an average of ten per day. This accounts for around 42% of the lot, however, this also depends upon the level of engagement that you want as a brand with your followers. The conversation however should not be restricted to product-specific tweets; they should include Re-Tweets, Mentions, and Favourites involving your brand.
Q2) Some of our Tweets don’t seem to work, what may be changed?
Answer: Begin with a quick review of the kind of tweet that was shared with your audience in the last three months. Categorise the tweets basis maximum number of Retweets and number of favourites it garnered. Apart from excellent content (including hashtags and quotes), tweets with an image are highly engaging. The new feature of ‘Inline Images’ has added positively to this aspect. The inbuilt pic.twitter links work very efficiently, as per the research. Using these factors may benefit the share aspect of the tweet.
Q3) Should we use links in Tweets? Answer: As a brand, sharing links is an ideal process. It would help you to intensify your brand’s user engagement. The link can direct your users to the concerned website and can act as ‘call for action’. As a brand this step also translates to more sales. According to research, Tweets with one or more links work in best interest of a brand, and have shown to increase brand’s average engagement.
Q4) Our Twitter followers don’t seem to respond. What can be fixed here? Answer: As a brand, the most important motive should be to gain followers. The higher the number of followers, the higher is the brand being talked about. This happens with quality engagement. Being a brand itself would make few to follow you, however, what’s important here is, how many of these followers are actually interested in your brand or are just reflecting as plain ‘egg heads’ in your follower list! The same holds true for brands as well. Quality ‘Following’ is as important as gaining ‘Followers’. Most brands make mistake of following too many or too less and a large part of this number of them are following unnecessary individuals or competing brands. If you are a fashion brand it makes more sense to follow a fashion blogger rather than following an individual just because of his/her celebrity status. Initiate a conversation and involve your followers, you would be surprised how this gains momentum and helps built favorable followers for you. We were not surprised when Simply Measured report stated that most Interbrands today have more than 100k followers!
Q5) How early can I expect my brand to gain momentum on Twitter? Answer: This one is a tad difficult to answer. Each brand is unique in its composition hence the road map would be very different for each one of them. This graph would help understand this better.
The most important thing to notice here would be that the entire Top 10 brands listed have a different modus-operandi even if they are within the same category. While Starbucks had 1,179 tweets in last three months, Mc Donald’s had around 2,087 tweets. However Starbucks has a higher engagement level than Mc Donald’s! Hence keeping a check on content, conversation and an overall engagement would help you savor success soon.
Here are the key take away from this study
Lesser the followers, lower the engagement, look forward to build this space. Average brand followers increase by 20% per quarter. Keep track of this number.
7-10 tweets per day are the best to begin with. The best Interbrand companies tweet an average of 12 tweets a day. Choose the right approach for your brand and let analytics determine the further course of things.
Include visuals and link as a part of the tweets, this has shown to increase engagement by 150%
Comparitive Analysis of top Auto brands by Konnect Social
SocialBro inbuilt link feature
SocialBro E-mail updates
