Video content is exploding on social media with no sign of slowing down. Whether it’s YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok, most channels are flooded with videos and watched by millions of users worldwide.
According to research, Nike gets 4.6 million views per reel, and many other brands share the same success. Further, more than 1 billion TikTok videos get viewed each day in over 150 countries.
These numbers are huge and clearly states that Instagram reels and TikTok videos are becoming a massive part of brands’ video marketing strategy (and well, our day to day lives).
However, since both these video forms are short, delivering valuable and engaging content in a short time can be pretty tricky. While some videos tend to skyrocket and garner millions of views, others struggle to get even a hundred.
So, what does it take to go viral? In some cases, it might just be your luck. But, truth be told, there are some best practices to keep in mind that may increase your chances of going viral on both Instagram Reels and TikTok.
After studying thousands of short-form videos, here’s what we have found.
Create viral videos for Instagram Reels and TikTok
As you go through the following sections, remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to create viral videos for Instagram Reels and TikTok. These are some of the best practices that we have seen leading accounts stick to, consistently and they should be kept in mind while you run your own experiments and learn from them.
What exactly is a viral video on Instagram reels and TikTok?
A viral video is a video that gathers traction quickly and gets shared multiple times on social media, reaching audiences who wouldn’t see your content otherwise. Various content forms can become viral—be it YouTube shorts, a tweet, or an Instagram post. But, in this post, we’ll only focus on two platforms, i.e., Instagram reels and Tik Toks.
Viral videos usually fall in one of three content categories:
Educational: These videos educate and provide value to viewers—for example, food recipes, book recommendations, mobile reviews, SaaS marketing tips, and so on.
Inspirational: These videos include content that motivates viewers to take the desired action, such as an aspirational story, a transformational journey, etc.
Relatable: Such videos are closely linked to the specific interest of the audience. For example, videos about Indians living in Germany or millennials starting a business, or something that’s just funny and strikes a chord with your day to day life.
10 best practices to make a viral video for Instagram reels and TikTok (+BONUS)
Now let’s get to the hard part—creating polished, professional videos that hook your audience. We have put together ten strategies to make your first successful viral video.
Start with social listening
Analyzing different social media metrics is great to know the engagement rate, most viewed content, or click-through rates. But, when you can follow what people are saying about your brand on various platforms, it can help you create video content with a higher chance of going viral.
Brands use social listening to monitor and engage in conversations about their brand on various social platforms. When you know the positive things people say about your videos, you can produce more such content. On the other hand, negative comments can help you determine the customers’ pain points and deliver video content that showcases your products or services as a solution to their needs.
Additionally, social listening can give you insight into improving your content to strengthen each stage of your buyer’s journey. For instance, if someone is in the consideration stage, you can see what they’re saying about your videos that introduce your product or services to new buyers. Not only that, but you can also determine what your audience doesn’t look like by evaluating these conversations.
In a nutshell, without social listening, you’ll miss out on tons of valuable data and might never know what others are saying about you and your brand. And with social listening tools like Radarr, you get to tune into millions of online conversations happening on TikTok, bringing all the data onto one dashboard with easy-to-understand actionables.
Have you ever watched a video and wondered, “Wow, that seems like it was made just for me!” That’s exactly how you want your customers to feel about your video content. And you can achieve this only when you identify your target audience.
If you don’t know anything about the people you’re targeting, your video will never be able to address all the questions that popped up in their heads. In short, it will always come up short.
Hence, you must understand your target audience to find what will resonate with them and keep them glued to their screens.
Once you have this data, use it to create videos with a viral factor. It can also help you decide what you want your viral video to accomplish. Do you want to inform, educate, entertain, or persuade your customers to buy your products?
Additionally, you decide how long your videos should be, what channel you need to distribute them to, and more. For example, research suggests that millennials prefer videos no longer than 10 seconds.
One way to ensure this is to create an empathy map that will help provide your team with insights into what will pique your audience’s interest so you can tailor your content that fits perfectly with what they’re seeking online.
If you’re using a social listening tool like Radarr, you will be able to access audience insights with ease. Remember to identify patterns of different audience segments, categorise them well and work towards understanding them more.
Start with a brief
After you have a clear idea of what’s happening in your audience circles, the next step to creating any viral video is to plan everything and create a detailed brief to ensure everyone involved is working towards the main goal—from your content team to the video production staff. While you should leave some room for creative deviation, make sure it doesn’t turn into distractions driven by personal preferences.
Without a proper plan, chances are your videos might get bogged down with edits and re-shoots, resulting in a waste of time and effort. On the other hand, a creative strategy brief can help you clarify your goals, messages, audience, tone, duration, and so on. In short, it acts as a reminder of what the video project is about and makes sure all your content is consistent, with the same overall vision.
Here are five questions you can ask yourself when creating a video brief:
What goal(s) do you want to achieve with your video content?
Who is your target audience?
What do you want to communicate?
Does your video perfectly match the platform where you’ll distribute it?
A study reveals that human attention spans have shrunk by nearly a quarter in just 15 years. In fact, we have shorter attention spans than that of a goldfish.
People are always on the go, and they want content they can consume while commuting to work. Additionally, they are met with a variety of videos while checking their social media feeds.
That means your videos must break through the noise and grab the viewers’ attention almost instantly. And provide as much value as possible in the available time. After all, you don’t want to bore your viewers to sleep with a ten-minute-long video about your new product line.
Many people believe that short videos— about 30–45 seconds long—are more likely to go viral on Instagram and Tik Tok. That’s almost true. However, this number is not set in stone. Your video length depends on the type of video you’re creating and its purpose.
For example, if you’re posting an advertisement, a video longer than 30-60 seconds is not a good idea. But, if your topic is informative, such as a product review, then a video of 10-15 minutes can work great.
Imagine your friend told you a funny story. The chances are that you’d share that story with your other friends, and they’d tell their friends to make them laugh too. The same happens when it comes to viral videos. Hence, it’s crucial to incorporate emotions into your videos.
Video content that elicits emotions is a sure-fire way of gaining traction. If you make them feel humor, compassion, happiness, or positivity, they will share videos with their friends, family, and colleagues to get the same reaction.
However, happiness is not the only emotion that can make a video viral. Some viral videos spark negative emotions too. For instance, the Kendall Jenner video ad for Pepsi faced severe backlash for its content, but it was still viewed by millions worldwide.
Sure, such videos attract lots of eyeballs. But be careful that you don’t create controversial content that ends up being removed from your social media channel.
Since emotional content remains in our memories for longer, understand which emotions are most appealing to your audience. Strive to create content that evokes positive emotions and makes your brand come across as relatable. When including negative emotions in your videos, make sure your brand can resolve that negativity in some way.
Best way to do this is to invest time in sentiment analysis. Social listening tools like Radarr actually help you understand the intent and sentiment behind the content being shared online as well as the conversations happening around it. This is especially important if you’re targeting a very niche audience or are looking at a global market for your content.
Remember the “Turning your DMs into quotes” trend and how almost every creator hoped on it? This is what you need to do for viral content.
While producing original video content is great, there’s a chance that it might not be a hit among your audience if it isn’t what they’re searching for. Instead, leveraging current trends can not only help you reach a wider audience but also save you the time and effort that you would have put in thinking and creating an original video.
You can consider two types of trends. One is related to your niche with a very specific audience, resulting in limited views. On the other hand, broader trends reach more people and can be used by anyone as they aren’t targeted towards a specific group.
Now, the question is: How can you find and jump on a hot trend quickly? Here’s how:
Watch a lot of Instagram reels and TikTok videos to know which trends will resonate best with your target audience.
Screen through the discover page, where you will find trending music, challenges, dance moves, and hashtags.
Follow the top creators in your niche as they’re the first ones to hop on the latest trends.
Create your version of the trending video that relates to your content, brand, and image.
Or we’ll give you a smarter way out of spending hours scrolling through Instagram and TikTok – Social listening, again! It’s the best way to identify the ongoing trends faster and also predict what may become a trend in the coming time.
Engage with your audience
Creating branded video content is time-consuming. However, your job isn’t over once you hit the “post” button. You’ll want to keep an eye on how your audience interacts with your content and potentially engage with them if you start getting views and comments.
On the other hand, if your content flops, treat it as a lesson and analyze the audiences’ reactions to see where you went wrong and what you can improve in your future videos.
TikTok also launched its Q&A feature in March 2021, which allows users to post their questions regarding your content. You can use the Q&A feature on Instagram to ask your followers some questions related to your posted videos or the type of content they’d like to see in the future. However, it is currently available only to TikTok’s creator account.
Replying to audiences’ comments is another excellent way to understand their interest and create content accordingly. Furthermore, live stream features can help you connect directly with your followers and build meaningful relationships with them. Plus, it’s a great chance to boost audience engagement, content visibility, and brand credibility.
Caption your videos
Your customers might be viewing your video content in public, such as a park or library, or with their device on mute. So, make sure the audience can understand your message clearly without having to turn on the audio.
Captions can go a long way here.
Including captions and subtitles in your social media videos not only boosts video accessibility but also improves the user experience by allowing them to watch your videos without sound. And since some of your viewers are deaf or hard-of-hearing, captioning can help you reach out to them too.
Subtitling is also an excellent tactic, especially if your audience resides in different countries. Even though your video is in English, viewers can get the message in their language too.
Adding captions and subtitles in your videos might seem tricky. Here are a few tips:
Avoid low-quality captions as they are just as bad as not having captions at all. One way to avoid this is to use an automated caption generating service. Although this might be easy and inexpensive, they don’t always provide the best results.
Another option is to go for a caption provider, which uses human captioners to provide accurate results with less technological errors.
Make sure your captions are compatible with both your video and the social media platform. This is because every platform has its formatting requirements for captions.
Create a user-friendly experience with your captions. Make sure the text is short, i.e., no more than three lines on the screen at once. But more important, give the title a catchy twist!
Here are two examples of the kind of captions you can experiment with:
Use a compelling copy
Creating a video is just half the battle. If you want to make your content viral-worthy, it is crucial to write a high-quality, engaging video copy.
Without a great copy, not only will your reach and engagement rates suffer but also all your video marketing efforts might go in vain. So, whether it’s your video title, description, or captions, writing a powerful copy is the key. A strong copy can attract tons of eyeballs, drive more traffic, and boost your overall engagement.
Here are some tips for video copy success:
In addition to describing what your video is about, your copy should also pique viewers’ interest and help it rank higher in search results.
Hook the viewers with an engaging first line. Use a fun fact or a catchy phrase to get maximum views on your video. For example, if you’re uploading a video about a new product, tell your customers right away that you’re about to hit them up with an exciting announcement.
Emojis are eye-catching and can help viewers understand your tone universally. However, be careful not to overuse them.
Keep your video copy short, as there’s nothing more annoying than having to click ‘see more’ to read the lengthy caption. Besides, short captions are more likely to be read.
Promote your video
Many people have this misconception that videos get viral organically. However, this is not the case every time. You need to do some promotion of your own too.
Don’t simply post your content on social media and wait for it to be picked up. Instead, put together a promotion strategy with tactics to share your video on different platforms and further promote the platform(s) you’ve initially posted the video on.
Additionally, use platforms where your audience is most active, as this will increase the chances that they will watch your video and share it with their connections.
Focus on posting content at an optimal time
If you want your Instagram reels and TikTok videos to pick up, you also need to post them at an hour your audience is more likely to see them. If the video stays on the platform for too long, undiscovered, there is a high chance that it gets buried under all the other content that gets published through the day.
As a general practice, keep a close watch on your insights. Take a look at the day and time you see the most amount of engagement on your accounts. Then target to post 30 minutes before that time so that the social platforms index your video for the audio and hashtags you have used.
Pro tip: Also use the 30 minute buffer to engage with similar accounts and hashtags so that people are compelled to visit your account, increasing the chances of your video being viewed!
Conclusion – Creating a viral video is a long-term strategy
Everyone wants to go viral on social media these days as it can be a great way to increase reach, brand awareness, and conversions. But it’s a lot easier said than done.
As you produce your reels and TikTok videos, make sure you follow the latest trends, use social listening to evaluate conversations, and promote the content ruthlessly. Above all, make sure to create something that your audience wants to see and engage with.
The techniques we shared above aren’t a quick fix or a guarantee. Implementing these doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. Instead, these are just the foundation you can use to create your videos that stand a chance to go viral. But you need to consistently experiment, create, measure and optimize your approach.
Ready to take the first step towards creating viral content on TikTok and Instagram Reels?
The Ultimate List of Social Media Marketing Tools You Absolutely Need in 2022
The internet has changed the game of advertising, in a good way. Brands only had to advertise on the television and newspapers till a few years ago. And then social media happened.
Social media changed the way people perceived brands. We now have a generation that makes most of its purchasing decisions after consuming content on social media platforms, making it a mandate for brands to be present on them as well.
Now when the pandemic happened, businesses realised that social media was much more than just posting content occasionally. They now had to move from being a passive observer on these platforms to an active engaged member if they truly wanted to turn this new-consumer into a customer.
But imagine having to create a strategy and remain consistent on all the social media platforms out there, continually monitor ongoing conversations and engage with them – sounds overwhelming and impossible, right?
Wrong.
So this year, before the ‘Making it to the top in 2022’ begins, here is a list of social media marketing tools that you need to add to your arsenal to be able to do it all – without huffing and puffing your way through it!
Best social media marketing tools for 2022
1. Radarr
If you want to succeed in the social media game, you have got to listen to what your consumer is saying about you and the topics that concern you – 24×7.
Radarr is a social media monitoring and listening tool that uses cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence to help you keep track of the millions of conversations happening online. It helps you identify what your target audience is engaging with, why they are doing so, and highlight the opportunities for you to create campaigns or have conversations that convert.
A social media marketing tool you absolutely need to gauge audience insights, track campaign performance across multiple platforms, monitor for brand crises, offer customer support, predict trends and create social content that engages your audience.
Want to know how Radarr works? Book A Radarr Demo.
2. IFTTT
If This Then That! Sounds like programming lingo? Well, it mostly resembles one.
This social media marketing tool lets you create Applets, which are a set of rules that triggers certain actions when something happens. For instance, if you want to track your competition, all you have to do is create an Applet in IFTTT that alerts you every time your competitor puts out a tweet or any other social media post, for that matter.
IFTTT helps you cut through the social media noise so that you can focus on the more important task, engaging with your target audience and never losing an opportunity to create a counter-campaign.
3. Buffer
The buffer used to be The tool you use to schedule your social media posts, but today, you can do so much more with Buffer. Using this social media marketing tool, you can access advanced analytics to see how your social media posts are performing.
There is also an option of creating a posting schedule if you want your social media posts to go out at different points of time on the same day across various channels, and upload custom photos and videos seamlessly. We call this a must-have for being able to manage your social media presence across multiple platforms!
4. Meet Edgar
Have trouble recycling your older social media posts? Need a handy content manager who can handle your content re-sharing and also populate your social media with posts? Look no further, Meet Edgar.
This nifty little tool allows you to monitor your content re-sharing and also monitor the traffic to your website. There is an auto-refill queue feature that makes sure you don’t run out of regular posts to engage your audience and a category-based scheduling tool that makes sure there is a variety to your shared content.
5. Buzzsumo
Ask any content marketer what a good piece of content looks like, and they will say that it is backed by a lot of research. Lots and lots of it. And with tools like BuzzSumo, researching for your next blog post or social media post is child’s play.
You can see what kind of content is being shared on social media the most, track competitors and analyze how your content is performing, and even do research on influencers in your niche that you can bring in to collaborate with you on social media marketing campaigns.
6. Canva
Designers are hard to find and even harder to retain. But what happens when you need a well-designed social media post for your campaign that is going live tomorrow, and you don’t have a designer in your team? Canva to the rescue.
Canva lets you design professional-looking social media creatives in a matter of minutes, with the help of templates that are easy to use, and easy on the eye as well. You can come up with your own templates as well, combining the various in-built elements that the tool provides. You can also create videos in different formats for different social media platforms.
7. Feedly
Social media comes with a lot of noise, and information overload is a real thing, as any decent social media marketer will tell you. So how do you deal with this noise? There is a neat little tool called Feedly, that uses filters so that you are only presented with the relevant content for your niche.
Organize your feed, see only content that your brand needs to share, and also curate content that goes up on your social media at regular intervals, using Feedly. The tool also helps you keep up with the influencers who affect purchasing decisions in your niche so you can engage with their content.
8. Hashtagify
Managing hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, and other channels can be a huge issue, especially considering the sheer number of hashtags out there, and how they tend to phase out in less than a week based on different trends.
Hastagify will help you find the right hashtags for your social media marketing strategy. In addition to this, the tool also helps you identify the right influencers on social media platforms, explore the hashtags they are making use of to reach their audience.
Custom analytics and the ability to build your own reports come as an added bonus.
9. Biteable
Videos are a great way to boost social media engagement, there is no denying this fact. But when you are competing with companies who spend thousands of dollars on creating professional videos for their social media feeds, you need all the guns you have on your side.
This is where Biteable comes into the picture. Biteable has free templates, animated scenes, footage, and music, and was designed to be used with ease. Think of it as Canva for videos. As an added bonus, most of the features that make Biteable worthy are available in the free version itself.
10. Tweetdeck
Tweets, tweets and more tweets. That’s what a social media marketer’s day looks like, and Twitter is a platform that is growing noisier by the day. But like the light at the end of a long tunnel (that is filled with bird noises), there is Tweetdeck.
Tweetdeck helps you create and schedule your tweets, and then analyze these tweets to see how they are performing. Tweetdeck also lets you monitor Twitter lists, hashtags or user lists, and monitor and reply to multiple accounts simultaneously. Tweetdeck was acquired by Twitter a few years ago, so the support you get for this tool is also top notch.
11. ContentCal
Content Calendars can cause caustic cranial concussions. That’s quite a mouthful, but it explains a day in the life of your Content Marketer, whose job it is to analyze, collaborate and create content with fellow team members.
ContentCal takes care of all these smaller details, but also goes one step ahead and creates a visual content calendar for your strategy; something that all of your teammates can see to help them plan their days better.
Honorable mention also goes to Planoly, which helps you schedule your Instagram posts and stories, and also manage your hashtags.
12. Instasize
Wondered how all those celebrities on Instagram always get their photos to look just right? Well, they may have teams of content moderators on their side, but you have Instasize!
With Instasize, you can use a bunch of filters to make your photos stand out, make and share premium videos, and also easily resize them to the various dimensions on social media channels like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat.
You can also add photo borders, combine multiple photos to make a collage, or add text to the photos with 20+ unique fonts. The premium version gives you access to over 130 filters, making it one of our favorite social media marketing tools.
13. Remove.bg
Okay so you click great pictures, but what about that ugly-looking background that is taking all the attention away? With remove. bg, worry no more!
Removing backgrounds from your photos won’t need expert skills or professional software to do, and with remove. bg, you can accomplish it in a matter of seconds. Apply effects to your photo, change backgrounds, or just share it on social with a simple click. This is a neat little tool to have in your social media arsenal and we would definitely recommend it.
14. Tailwind
If you are catering to the millennials and your business uses Pinterest and Instagram a lot, then Tailwind is a powerful visual marketing tool to have in your arsenal. Use Tailwind to schedule posts, amplify your reach, and analyze the results of your social media campaigns.
All of your posts are visible in a single, filterable calendar and Tailwind even picks time to schedule your social media posts when your audience is the most active. For those who are keen on Pinterest, Tailwind lets you add pins to your account months in advance, check and board followers, among many other cool features.
15. Tweepi
Managing conversations on Twitter, growing your audience, and constantly engaging with your audience requires a lot of creativity and tact from a social media marketer. Thankfully, Tweepi, with it’s AI-powered interface, makes your life easier.
You can easily analyze and manage your Twitter followers, extract details about them, and even find interesting people whom you might want to follow in the future. You can also manage all your current Twitter followers and establish more valuable connections on Twitter with the help of this tool.
16. Audience
Understanding your audience can make or break your business, and, as a social media marketer, your understanding of the target audience will determine how effective you will be at your job. This is where the Audience comes into the picture.
The audience has a unique customer segmentation engine that helps you learn “who knows who” in your audience, along with “how” they know each other and their shared interests. Combine this with a powerful graphical analysis tool, and Audiense helps you create a more holistic content and PR strategy with powerful personalization.
You can also achieve many more audience insights with social listening and analytics tools like Radarr, killing two birds with one stone. Learn more about it here.
17. Crowdfire
Manage all your social accounts from one place! While there are a lot of tools that let you do this, some of them on this very list, Crowdfire is probably the most elegant solution to this problem. Crowdfire lets you analyze your social media accounts, letting you see which of your campaigns are performing well and where you can improve.
Crowdfire helps you also curate content for your social media posts so that your followers see only the most relevant content. It also acts as a Social CRM, where you can reply to all your social media mentions from a single dashboard. And, like any other decent social media scheduling tool out there, Crowdfire lets you schedule your posts automatically at the best possible time, or a time chosen by you.
18. Oktopost
A social media marketing tool designed specifically for B2B marketers, Oktopost helps teams increase their reach and amplify their voice on social media.
Oktopost integrates with all your major CRM platforms, including Hubspot, Salesforce, Marketo, Eloqua, and Microsoft Dynamics 365, so that you can gather precious customer social data that improves your customer’s experience. Oktopost also has a built-in employee advocacy board, which makes it easy for employees to share content, and enables you to track and measure the ROI with ease.
19. Quuu
One of the greatest challenges for any social media marketers who have grown a decent following on Linkedin is to keep their audience engaged with quality content. This is where Quuu comes in.
Using it’s proprietary AI, Quuu handpicks some of the best web content from around the web and helps keep your customers from scrolling away from your social media page. Let the content be in the form of blogs, videos, or podcasts, Quuu handles them all. You can also connect Quuu directly to all your social profiles, and then use a scheduling tool so that your followers only see the best content on their feeds when they scroll.
20. Bit.ly
If you have the habit of cross-posting blog links or lengthy URLs from different websites onto your social media platforms, chances are high that you have heard of bit.ly. This is a neat little link-shortening tool that lets you shorten links to as many as 14 characters. But like other tools on our list, Bit.ly too has evolved and is today much more than a link shortening tool.
Bit.ly allows you to track click information on your links, see the number of people who have clicked on your link and the time, how they landed on your link (email, social media etc.), and also track a link’s performance.
21. Social Flow
Are you a journalist who wants to harness the power of data and analytics to find out patterns in your customer’s social behavior? If the answer to this question is a big ‘yes’’, then Social Flow is the tool for you. Social flow helps you, as a social media marketer, to manage enormous volumes of data so that they can make the kind of decisions that drive engagement and traffic, using logic.
The social media marketing tool also helps you monetize your content, with the AttentionStream Tool that matches brands with trending content.
22. Manylinks.io
Social media marketers face a particular challenge when dealing with Instagram bios because they can share only one link to showcase their best work. With a few other websites also copying Instagram’s strategy to keep the user’s profile less cluttered, this emerged as a challenge that the tool Manylinks.io has set out to solve.
Manylinks.io lets you showcase a collection of links to your audience so that you are never out of your depth when trying to show the world your best work. You can also track your link traffic and generate business enquiry emails using Many links.
23. Facebook Ads Grader
During the pandemic, Facebook hit a record high of 2.6 billion active monthly users, and if that isn’t reason enough to upgrade your Facebook advertising skills, we don’t know what is. This is where tools like Facebook Ads Grader come into the picture.
Working purely on the basis of your target audience, your business goals, and your budget, the Facebook Ads grader will help you make better advertising decisions with the help of curated information.
Facebook Ads Grader also analyzes your campaign goals in detail and shows you which campaigns are performing well compared to others. The tool also analyzes audience performance in detail, showing you the best and worst-performing demographics, so that you can make informed decisions.
24. Missinglttr
Writing blog posts can be a daunting task, as any content creator will tell you. Add to this the responsibility of extracting content from the blog so that it can be repurposed on social media, and your plate is already overflowing with work. But what if we told you there is an easier way?
With Missingltttr, you can extract up to nine social posts from a single blog post, saving you countless hours of going back and forth. Missinglttr comes with templates for Content creation, content scheduling, and custom URL shortener.
25. Sumo
Using a share button on your button leads to a potential increase of 7 times more shares for your content, according to this report. But if you have ever built a WordPress blog, you know that a menial task such as adding a share button also requires you to install a different plugin.
This is where tools such as Sumo can help. Sumo helps you to create share buttons, opt-in forms, and follow buttons easily on your website. This helps generate leads and followers, which in turn helps generate traffic to your website.
26. AdEspresso
Social media is already crowded with visual content that people can consume, from distracting cat videos to cute baby photos to your cousin’s update about a new bike purchase. So how do you advertise effectively on social media? Say hello to Adespresso.
Adespresso allows you to analyze Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads in real-time. You can better estimate if your campaigns are resonating with the target audience, and also test different ad copies, images, headlines, etc. If you want to streamline your social media advertising efforts, you should definitely give Adespresso a try.
Just how many social media marketing tools do you need?
The thing is, that your social media marketing toolkit needs to be as thought-through as your strategy. You don’t want to be jumping from one tool to another, managing one platform at a time, or juggling to use data from one channel on another.
This tool list is just the tip of the iceberg, and there is a tonne of social media marketing tools out there, with new ones coming up in the market every other day. So the very first thing you need to do is identify what you want a tool for, what purpose you need it to solve, and who will be making use of the tool.
Thereafter, always look for social media marketing tools that can help you accomplish more than one thing.
This is why we built Radarr.
Radarr is not your regular social listening tool. It is a social media monitoring, listening and analytics tool all rolled into one, to help you create better marketing strategies and manage conversions online with ease.
Most people spend a large portion of their days on social media. Given that most of your consumers are here, as a brand, you cannot overlook this communication channel.
Consumers are now in charge of how your brand communicates with them.
This is a medium that lets you reach millions with just a few taps and clicks. Connect with your audience, increase your brand awareness and boost your leads and sales
However, social media is constantly and continually evolving. Especially in the last 2 years. Additionally, the competition to get noticed and grab the consumers’ attention is increasing by the day!
This means marketers need to roll up their sleeves and learn the new hacks to make social work for them – because in the end, it is where the audience is!
We’ll make it simpler for you though. Read on to know more about social media trends to look out for in 2022.
Social media marketing trends to look out for in 2022
The emergence of social commerce
Online shopping boomed during the pandemic. And social media became an increasingly popular outlet for the same during this time.
During this time, we also witnessed the emergence of a new mode of shopping – social commerce. Social commerce simply means selling products/services directly on social media platforms. At present, Facebook (Meta), Instagram, Whatsapp, Pinterest are some of the many platforms that are aggressively promoting social commerce on their platforms.
In 2019, 36% of female internet users in the US engaged in social commerce, compared to 22% of men.
60% of people discover new products on Instagram
78% of U.S. consumers say they’ve discovered products on Facebook
200 million+ Instagram users visit at least one Business Profile daily
83% of weekly Pinterest users have made a purchase based on content they saw from brands on Pinterest
Experts believe that very soon, social commerce will become the mainstream mode of purchasing.
Proliferation of short-form video content
Video content marketing is the new big thing today! Around 59% of people say they’d rather watch a video than read text. As a brand owner, you cannot and should not neglect that number.
Through videos, you can showcase your brand’s core beliefs and what you care about, among many others and create exceptional content that lets you stand out among your competitors.
According to a study by Cisco, 82% of all online content will be video content by 2022.
However, 68% of people will happily watch a business video only if it’s under a minute.
Tik Tok is the most popular short-form video content platform today. Users love this app. They spend an average of 52 minutes per day on it. Younger people ages four to fifteen spend an average of 80 minutes per day on the app!
With Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, and so many other platforms also integrating this in their application, short videos have taken the world by a storm. It is only expected to grow even more in 2022.
Shorter attention spans result in more bite-sized content
Yes, the numbers of social media users are just continuously increasing. Yes, these users are spending more time than ever on these platforms.
We consume content today at a rate that was unfathomable just a decade ago.
But, the engagement span with posts on social media is also increasingly decreasing. On an average, we only spend roughly 8 seconds per individual post.
You’ve got mere seconds to convey your message. This means you need to carefully and wittily plan your content.
Here are some ways to help you create social media content that gathers your user’s attention:
Ensure that one piece of content contains only one main idea
Use a captivating hook as titles to your posts
Include relatable content
Include eye-catching and visually appealing graphics that evoke emotion
Repurpose your content into multiple formats (video, infographics, GIFs, memes, etc.)
More augmented reality options
We bet you’ve seen and used a number of Instagram/Snapchat filters. From beauty filters to fun games to even movie-themed filters, the list is endless.
These filters are nothing but an application of augmented reality (AR) in social media.
Augmented reality enhances our reality with additions of digital elements to it. Social media platforms have been making a lot of progress in the integration of AR in their applications.
Facebook, for instance, is experimenting with other AR as well as Virtual Reality (VR) applications and will leverage more of these technologies in the near future.
Take Kylie Cosmetics. They recently came up with their own Instagram AR filter to let customers ‘try on’ their lipsticks before making a purchase. While this is a fun filter for users to play around with, it is also promotional in its own sense. So it works effortlessly!
Augmented reality can have a lot of potential social media applications for brands.
Live streaming is the new big thing
While traditional video marketing is something you should definitely leverage, you should also consider live-streaming which has taken this video-savvy generation by a storm!
As the global pandemic forced people to reduce physical interactions with people and stay at homes, live streaming emerged as a popular mode of online entertainment. In 2020, it witnessed a whole new rise of popularity. About 916 million hours of content were streamed last year alone – a 45.4 percent steep increase from the 629 million hours of content streamed the year before!
74% of businesses go live to engage with their consumers now. Unlike traditional videos, live videos let you start direct and instantaneous communication with your audience. It is an effective means to build trust by developing a connection of sorts.
A recent Instagram Trends Research Study says that 41% of surveyed Gen Zers attended an event or broadcast on Instagram Live in the past month.
From brand news and updates to live interviews to product promotion and releases to influencer live streams to even plain Q&A sessions, the scope of content that can be generated through this medium is large.
Influencer marketing will continue to soar
Social media is greatly dominated by influencers today. While influencer marketing is not a relatively new term, its popularity is growing by the minute!
Influencer marketing is a hybrid of celebrity endorsement and today’s content-driven marketing campaigns fueled by common people. Investing in influencers is so much cheaper than running other traditional paid campaigns. Yet, it delivers excellent results almost every time. However, you must be sure of picking influencers from your own niche and demographics to get the best results.
This marketing domain has become so widely accepted and is also continuously and steadily getting better than ever. Today, 17 percent of companies spend more than half their total marketing budget on influencers alone!
Another interesting buzzword you’ll see floating around is micro-influencer marketing.
Smaller, niche-focused influencers with typically a follower base of anywhere between 1,000-25,000 are called micro-influencers. Despite a smaller follower base, They are considered to have more active and loyal followers than the bigger celebrities with millions of followers.
An Experticity study on micro-influencers shows that:
Micro-influencers boast 22.2 times more conversations than average consumer recommendations
82 percent of consumers reported that they were highly likely to follow a recommendation made by a micro-influencer
A great example of a brand that made the most of influencer marketing has to be Daniel Wellington.
And the thing is, you don’t need to reach out to celebrity accounts for influencer marketing. With the help of social listening, you can identify accounts that actively talk about your brand in a positive way and influence their audience to engage with you.
Rise of social media communities
Social media communities are groups of like-minded folks who talk about shared interests or issues. Today, brands have started creating social groups to provide a networking platform for their customers.
Facebook Groups are an excellent example of increasing social media communities that leave an impact.
The 2020 Community Industry Trends Report shows that close to 88% of community professionals believe that community is critical to the company’s mission.
According to a 2016 CMX research, 85% of marketers and community builders believed that having a branded online community would improve the customer journey and increase trust.
But the trick here is going to be how to remain active in the social media communities. You’re going to have to keep a close watch on who’s talking about what to be able to keep the members engaged.
You’ll also have to focus on ensuring community conversations are headed in a positive direction only, as it may impact your overall reputation.
With a social media monitoring tool like Radarr, you can manage community conversations with ease, and regulate the track they pick up with timely sentiment analysis.
User-generated content will be important
We know producing great and engaging content can be exhausting. So sometimes, let your customers lend you a hand.
User generated content (UGC) is any type of content including pictures, videos, images, reviews created by your well, your users!
Did you know that 92% of consumers trust UGC more than any other type of marketing content? Thus, UCG has an 81% higher chance of conversion.
Additionally, user-generated content is cheaper to produce, more relatable, less time-consuming and helps your brand stand out among the others.
This type of content helps your brand:
Build trust
Persuade consumers to make purchasing decisions
Promote authenticity
Social media for customer service
While social media was initially just a medium for people to connect with their friends, family, and acquaintances, today social media is so much more than just that.
By accommodating businesses and brands in its ecosystem, social media gradually made room for product discovery, brand engagement, and now, even customer service.
Brands started noticing that many customers try to reach out to them on social media. This is mainly because social media stands out as a more direct mode of communication, thus meaning quicker responses.
But you don’t need to fret about being able to reply in a timely manner to your customers – only if you have a social media monitoring tool like Radarr.
Conclusion
Social media is continually evolving. But to catch up with what’s changing and how you need to be on social media and tune in . That’s exactly what we did while finding these social media trends – we leveraged social media listening and the insights have helped us evolve with time.
Ready to nail every trend in 2022?
Get started with social listening today to predict trends, patterns and more of your target audience.
Learn more about improving your TikTok marketing strategy with social listening and monitoring.
With over one billion daily users, TikTok has become an indispensable part of life for creators worldwide. Ask Gen Z’ers, and they’ll tell you how it is an entirely new world of creativity and authenticity.
TikTok users spend an average of 52 minutes per day on the platform, either for recording and sharing short videos of themselves or watching the existing content uploaded on the platform. Since they consume a lot of content and interact with other influencers, it also helps influence their purchase decisions.
Earlier, TikTok was used to share only the frivolous content and dancing videos – but it’s quickly becoming more than that. Many major brands worldwide have started to leverage this platform for creating micro-content for promoting their products and services and providing valuable content to their audience.
However, posting TikTok videos won’t do any good if you aren’t tracking what people are saying about you and what content they’re interacting with.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know about social listening on TikTok and how you can leverage it to increase brand awareness and drive more sales for your business.
Let’s dive into TikTok social listening!
What is social listening on TikTok?
Social listening on TikTok refers to tracking conversations, mentions, and trends across the platform related to your brand and industry, giving you insights into what your customers expect from your brand or how you can help make their buying journey effortless.
At the same time, it enables you to plan out better TikTok marketing campaigns on the platform based on the type of content your customers have shown interest in. because let’s admit it, not all trends were a hit – no matter how fun they seemed!
Many organizations prefer Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, when it comes to social listening. But that’s changing as new social media platforms are becoming popular and brands such as Nike and Pepsi are using TikTok to reach out to their customers.
Here are some reasons why brands should leverage social listening on TikTok:
TikTok is a popular social media platform that can prove to be an excellent source of business insights and customer feedback.
This app is exploding among millennials and the Gen Z population and has been downloaded over 2 billion times on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.
TikTok users are highly engaged and spend an average of 21 hours on the platform per month.
Various new trends have been introduced from TikTok, and they are showing no signs of slowing down.
These numbers are overwhelming and indicate the involvement of TikTok in people’s daily lives. Imagine the information you can get if you analyze the users’ activity and take a closer look at the insights it has to offer.
What should you be listening to on TikTok?
Now that you’re aware of what TikTok listening is and why you should leverage it, let’s look at what you should be listening to on TikTok. We’re not suggesting you to track all your videos on the platform. But, there are a few important metrics that you can consider when running TikTok monitoring and TikTok listening:
Brand mentions
When someone name-drops your brand online, that’s brand or social mentions. These can be positive or negative, but each mention is an excellent opportunity for you to engage with your customers and form your brand’s public perception. ‘
On TikTok, brand mentions mean when a user tags your business in their videos. Maybe they used your product or service and wanted to provide their honest reviews, or maybe they wanted to grab your attention—it could be any reason.
These mentions can give you insights into what your audience feels about your products or services and how they relate to your brand. If they’re spreading the positive word about your brand, this could generate more leads and revenue. On the other hand, negative feedback could result in a poor reputation among your customers.
Tracking your brand mentions on TikTok can help you address the negative reviews online and build brand trust and loyalty with your audience.
Track topics
Since trending topics change rapidly, it can be difficult to keep track of what’s working on social media. However, discovering a new trend at the right time can be a great way to understand your audience better and create relevant and engaging content. Plus, it can keep your brand ahead of the competition.
TikTok is the home of fast-moving, up-to-date content. Numerous trends have erupted from this platform and will continue to in the future also. Tracking these trends can help measure your brand’s social media reach. Plus, if you include a unique hashtag along with your trending content, you can easily spot the users who share your content and use your hashtag the most.
Consumer insights
Every brand needs to understand the needs, interests, and pain points of potential customers so they can deliver the type of content they like. While it’s possible to derive consumer insights from various places, you can use relevant hashtags on TikTok to find and observe your target audience and create strategies based on their preferences.
Influencer marketing
TikTok is one of the most effective platforms when it comes to influencer marketing. With a vast global presence, many businesses are looking to collaborate with the most prominent influencers. To find the TikTok creators you want to work with, follow these tips:
Use relevant hashtags in your industry to look for the most loved creators that can raise your brand awareness and promote your products or services.
Make sure you choose the influencer whose audience and content align with your brand values.
Your target audience must know and trust the influencer.
The creator must be the thought leader in your industry. For example, you can’t work with a gaming influencer if you have a clothing brand.
Competitor analysis
Every brand needs to keep an eye out for new players to remain ahead of the competition. By tracking mentions and hashtags on TikTok in the particular category, you can learn about what your competitors are up to.
You can further drill down to discover the kind of conversations they appear in. This way, you can compare your strengths and weaknesses and identify the marketing strategies working for them.
Social listening on TikTok also helps you identify the sentiment behind the content that people create and share. In other words, it tells what they were thinking and feeling when they made the video. This helps you gain an in-depth understanding of where your brand is doing great and where it needs improvement. You can learn more about sentiment analysis.
Creating a social listening on TikTok strategy
Before you get down to social listening on TikTok, you need to have a strategy in place so that your efforts remain aligned. While the steps may marginally vary depending on your goal or purpose of listening, here are some must-haves.
Identify the goals of your TikTok social listening strategy
To make the best of your social listening strategy, you need to identify the goals you want to achieve. Setting clear goals will guide all your plans and actions going forward. Some brands want to focus on increasing engagement with the target audiences, while others prioritize creating engaging content for their customers.
Here are some common uses of social listening around which you can build your strategy:
Conducting a thorough market research
Generating new leads
Improving your promotion strategy
Managing your brand’s reputation
Providing better customer service
Staying ahead of your competition
Spot existing and upcoming TikTok influencers in your industry
One of the ways to go about it is by talking to other departments to know about their challenges. Also, take a closer look at your different business processes, identify gaps, and determine what you can do to resolve them.
Once you understand what you’re listening for, it’s time to choose a TikTok listening tool. Since a plethora of social listening tools are available in the market, selecting the one that aligns with your needs can be pretty challenging.
You need to pick the tool which can help you track mentions and trendy topic ideas in one place, spot relevant influencers, provide actionable data, measure sentiments, and integrate effortlessly with your brand strategy. Plus, make sure it helps to stay updated with the current trends happening on TikTok.
This is where Radarr can help. Radarr is an effective social media listening tool that provides valuable insights for creating powerful strategies. It covers the following areas:
Campaign monitoring
Daily social media monitoring
Daily KPI monitoring
Competitor tracking and intelligence
Audience insights
Crisis management
Trendspotting and predictive AI
Real-time alerts and notifications
Sentiment analysis
Use actionables to achieve better results
Just listening to social conversations is not enough – it won’t do any good to your brand. Instead, make sure you put the insights, and actionable gathered to work to achieve the desired results.
Generate TikTok social listening reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis and share them with other team members so they can know what is to be done to bring the change. Further, create tasks based on the insights and set up the KPIs to measure the performance.
This way, you can keep track of what strategy is implemented and what is pending. Plus, you can monitor the impact it has on your business growth.
How to use insights from TikTok listening
Now let’s see how you can use insights from TikTok listening effectively.
Identifying influencers that are relevant to the brand’s audience and content can be valuable for many businesses. Social listening can help you find these influencers on TikTok.
For example, if you’re looking for creators in the food industry, just search for the relevant hashtags, and you’ll be presented with many influencers whose content aligns with your business goals.
TikTok can also help brands during qualitative market research. Most of the trending videos are either entertaining or meme-focused. If you want to better understand the customer journey for your products or services, you need to consider some untapped market research opportunities.
One such opportunity is to follow those people who spend their time sharing experiences and issues that are important to them. For example, you must have noticed many people talk about their mental health, diseases they live with, their fight for gender equality, getting over the loss of a loved one, experiences of living abroad, or struggles with their jobs.
Studying the content of such people can help you understand your target audience better – their pain points, needs, and preferences. Plus, you can plan out better social media campaigns based on what people actually want from your brand.
How Vita Coco used social listening to turn into TikTok success?
Vita Coco, a coconut water brand, has leveraged social listening as a crucial part to create a buzz about products on TikTok. Their goal was to engage more and more users on the platform. The brand collaborated with a technology company to identify relevant trends on TikTok.
They produced content on trending topics and didn’t shy away from experimenting with new content. Plus, they quickly participated in online conversations before they disappeared.
Vita Coco launched a campaign focused on sharing different recipes with berries, pomegranate seeds, ice cubes, and coconut water as the key ingredients. The campaign was so successful that it increased the brand’s following on TikTok by 100%. Here’s what they had to say as well, as covered on Marketing Dive:
“If you don’t have ears to these platforms, by the time you read about a trend in the press, it’s already peaked in popularity, and you’re too late.”
Brittany Harshbarger
Senior manager of growth, Vita Coco
Additional reads on TikTok marketing and TikTok social listening:
Various businesses feel that TikTok is not the right platform to promote their products or services or that brands cannot track their ROI from TikTok campaigns. In fact, it is just a lip-synching and dancing app that’s used only by Gen Z’ers.
However, this is definitely not the case.
TikTok is a popular social media platform used by millions of people every day across the world. Tons of content gets published and consumed on this platform, which means a lot of your audience is either participating in creating content or interacting with it in one way or another.
With so much potential, if you’re still confused about whether or not you should leverage TikTok listening for your brand, the answer is a big YES.
Done right, social listening can shape a positive perception of your brand among your audience and allow you to build meaningful relationships.
Ready to see how social listening on TikTok can help you reach your audience and engage them, way faster?
If you’re a brand, there’s a non-zero chance that you’ll be present on social media in some way. However, building a social media presence isn’t as simple as it used to be a few years ago. And it’s no longer just about creating social media content.
Social media is no longer about being present across different channels, having a page your audience can follow, or having tons of followers. Now, the main focus is on engagement —how engaged your target audience is with your social media content.
While keeping your customers engaged might sound like a small feat—you just have to reply to their messages and comments in a playful manner and provide them with valuable content. But, there’s so much more you need to consider while creating engaging content for social media platforms.
In this post, we’ll walk you through some challenges marketers face while producing valuable content and engaging with their audience on social media effectively. Plus, we’ll also look at the ways to overcome them.
Let’s dive in.
Everything you need to know about engaging social media content
Don’t forget to bookmark and save the sections that hold the most important to you. And get ready to take notes!
State of engagement rates on social media
Organic reach and engagement rates on social media platforms are declining significantly. In fact, the average reach of an organic post on a Facebook page is around 5.20%, which means only one in 19 users see the page’s non-promoted content.
Since the number of people who see and engage with posts on social media that aren’t backed by ads is pretty low, the cost of paid ads is increasing simultaneously.
Boosting your paid ads budget can surely help you boost brand awareness and direct sales. But for small businesses with a limited budget, this could mean near-zero post reach and engagement. Further, people still want to engage with what appeals to them and engagingly tells your brand’s story.
Not sure what the engagement rate on your social media content is, use this nifty formula:
However, despite this, many businesses are facing some challenges in creating engaging content on social media. Let’s find out why.
5 challenges in driving more engagement on social media content
Whether you’re an expert or a newbie in social media marketing, you have to face a lot of challenges while making your social strategy work. Let’s look into some of these challenges:
Social media platforms have become more crowded than ever before. Over 3.6 billion people use social media worldwide, and if you notice the above numbers, you will realize just how much content is being pushed out every day.
Attention spans of people are dropping, and creating mediocre content for social media platforms without a proper plan is just not enough to make your brand stand out among others.
Too many influences
Nowadays, every social media platform has users following a high number of influencers in different industries. They consider them as role models and want to make the same buying decisions popularly made by influencers.
However, with too many influencers promoting different brands and trends or benchmarks, it’s hard to understand what kind of content really drives the audience towards liking or disliking something.
Too quick change in trends
Social media trends are evolving so rapidly that it is hard for marketers to keep up with the constant changes and still have time to do their jobs. One trend on social media influences the others.
For example, when TikTok came out, brands and influencers used to create tons of Tik Tok videos to increase their reach. By the time they caught up with this trend, Instagram had introduced reels, resulting in many people making a shift from Tik Tok to Instagram.
Too many conversations
Social media platforms are not only packed with content but also conversations that happen between brands and customers via stories, comments, and so on. People talk to one another and various brands and even engage with their content on different platforms or sometimes within groups on those.
This kind of interaction says a lot about how your audience feels about your brand and what they expect from you. However, with such a huge amount of social media conversations across all channels, it’s pretty challenging to analyze and keep track of all of them.
Too difficult to derive actionable insights
Since there are tons of social media conversations to analyze on each platform, deriving actionable insights from them can be too overwhelming, especially when you don’t have the right resources or tools to help you out. And when you do it manually, there’s a high chance that you would always miss out on one or the other important piece of information.
And so, you end up doing a lot of guesswork or simply looking at others in the same industry for inspiration.
But there’s a way out of going round and round on this hamster wheel.
10 Ways to create engaging social media content
Now that you’re aware of the different challenges social media marketers face while creating engaging content, let’s look at some actionable solutions to overcome them.
Define your target audience
Let’s face it; your content does not appeal to “everyone”. The goal is to find people who might be interested in your content and convert them into loyal customers.
Developing a clear understanding of your target audience is a crucial step in crafting engaging social media content. The better you know your target market, the more you’ll be able to curate content (such as ads, messages, and campaigns) based on their needs and get better returns. Plus, it also saves time as you allocate your money and resources to a specific group only.
Defining your target audience can be an ongoing and challenging process. However, it isn’t as complicated as it sounds. Here are some tips:
Take a closer look at your existing customers who are already buying from you, following you, and engaging with your posts. Questions like this will help you gain a better understanding:
Who is your target audience?
What age groups do they belong to?
What kind of information are they looking for and why?
Where do they hang out the most?
What are they talking about?
What type of content do they prefer?
What’s their favorite social media channel?
Once you have the answers to the above questions, here’s what you need to do:
After gathering this information, narrow down your target audience to different groups of people with similar interests.
Look at your competitors to evaluate what’s working for them and what’s not, plus who they appeal to.
Once you know your target audience, find and connect with them on your social media networks.
Set your social media goals
Nearly half of the marketers struggle to align their social media campaigns with the company goals. The reason? Because they don’t know the “right” answer to what their objective should be.
However, no matter how daunting it may sound, you can’t afford to ignore the process of setting your social media goals. Creating content with an end-game in mind can help you know exactly what you should be doing regularly to meet the needs of your company, clients, and customers you’re working with. Furthermore, outlining your goals is crucial to figure out how much you need to spend and on what channels to get better results.
Here’s how you can set meaningful goals:
Identify what you want to achieve with your content. Do you want to improve your brand awareness with tons of impressions? Generate more leads for your business? Build a community around your content? Or increase your followers or traffic?
Make sure you assign metrics to each of your goals. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, you need to consider metrics like fan count, page and post impressions, post reach, link clicks, etc.
Set SMART goals backed up by data. Let’s use “increase brand awareness in 3 months for your clothing boutique” as an example. Specific: Increase brand awareness on your Instagram account within your city. Measurable: Increase fan count by 15%, post reach to 1000 people per post, and link clicks by 10%. Achievable: Yes. Realistic: Boost Instagram posts with advertising by $15 per post, targeting an audience within ten miles of your boutique. Time-sensitive: 3-month time limit.
Assign success metrics
Posting engaging content on social media is just half the battle. The other half, you ask? It’s tracking the right metrics that provide information about your user demographics, number of clicks, post reach, engagement, and more.
Since every social media platform is different, you need to assign a few metrics that you will measure on each platform. For example, on LinkedIn, you can measure the number of clicks on your website link, whereas on Instagram, you can set the number of accounts reached and followers as your success metrics.
Before assigning success metrics, you must define your goals of creating content on that particular platform. Let’s say your goal is to increase brand awareness on Instagram. In this case, you can consider the post reach and engagement metrics and create the content that is not only targeted towards your audience but also makes them interact with it.
Start leveraging social listening
Picture this: You own a cafe. One day while you’re making chocolate shake behind the counter, you overhear two customers talking about your food. One customer says, “I love the burgers here. Especially the non-vegetarian ones.”. The second one says, “Yeah, burgers are good. But, the noodles are way too salty.”.
You begin to wonder if everyone thinks the same about noodles. So you start asking other customers and based on what you hear, you begin to make changes based on people’s preferences and tastes. And it works!
Social listening is when you track the conversations and mentions related to your brand on various social media platforms and then analyze those insights to create a better content strategy and improve messaging. Not only you get to know what your customers want from your brand but also what people are saying about you.
In other words, social listening is an excellent tool that helps you understand how people feel about you and your competitors so that you can keep your social content creation efforts on track.
To monitor all your social media platforms in one place, you need a social listening tool, like Radarr, to make the process easier. Radarr can help you track ongoing conversations across all social channels and bring all the real-time data onto one dashboard, making it easy for you to see what people are engaging with and what is trending among your target audience. Plus, this AI-powered solution helps you understand your audience, identify brand sentiment, manage crises, and predict and keep up with the latest trends.
Understand the sentiment
Understanding the sentiments of your social media users’ posts and comments is crucial to crafting content tailored to your audience’s needs. Positive, negative and, even neutral sentiments can provide tons of insights for businesses who use social media as a part of their marketing strategy.
Social sentiments help you understand how your audience feels about your brand or marketing campaigns and ensure you are fully aware of what your customers expect from your brand. Further, if there’s any serious issue that needs to be taken care of, it alerts your customer service and support team so that they can prepare a proper strategy to deal with the same. And if there’s any social mention with negative sentiment, your team can reach out to people who may be having a bad experience with your brand.
As you monitor sentiments over time, you’ll start to understand how your content can make your audience feel about your brand. Plus, you know more about what they really want so that you can publish relevant posts on your social channels.
Radarr is an effective social media analysis tool that can automatically analyze social media conversations and posts so that you understand your customers’ views about your brand. Further, it can predict the sentiments of the post by assigning them a positive, negative, neutral tag, so you know which queries are important.
Identify and shortlist topic ideas
Once you gather all the relevant data via social listening and sentiment analysis, it’s time to identify and make a list of topic ideas that you can talk about on your social media platforms.
Now, this doesn’t mean you should post about every single thing your audience mentions. Instead, you need to identify which of those topics are relevant to your business, your offering, and your goals. Plus, also make sure these topics provide your audience with relevant information and provide some value to them.
Choose to post content that will bring in more positive reactions from people. And avoid posting on sensitive or controversial issues that are more likely to make your audience angry and leave bad comments about your brand.
Before shortlisting the topic ideas, ask yourself these questions:
Does the topic speak to your audience’s interest?
What problems is the topic trying to solve?
Is the topic trendy and relevant with the current industry trends?
Is the topic appropriate for its scheduled time of the year?
Take a look at your insights
Posting your content on social media isn’t enough. How will you know whether or not your content is working on social media?
Social media insights are the actionable takeaways that you get from analyzing your social media campaigns. It is an excellent tool that can help you see which of your social media content is performing well and which one is engaging less audience. Plus, these allow marketers to monitor and understand the people they interact with on various social channels.
With social media insights, you can analyze which social media platform and content format work best for you and why. It considers the traffic, engagement, and sales to help you make an informed decision. Further, you can even analyze your past post trends and take notes of topics that worked and the best time to share content with your audience.
In short, social media insights can help you understand what works for you so that you replicate the approach to achieve your current social media goals.
Create a social media content calendar
Let’s face it; it’s pretty daunting to manage multiple social media accounts, especially when there’s a constant flow of new content ideas and audience interactions.
Luckily, there’s a better way: A social media calendar.
A social media calendar is an excellent tool that allows you to plan, organize and streamline your social media content across all platforms. It includes crucial data like posting days and times, the goal of each post, details about the campaign, image, text, etc.
Creating a social media calendar will not only save you time but also allow you to track different content strategies to see what works best for your audience. Further, planning at least two weeks in advance and scheduling posts ahead of time can prevent you from researching trending topics and new stories every day. And don’t forget the consistency it will build in terms of brand voice and style—something which is impossible by posting content in an unplanned way.
Without a calendar, you end up posting inconsistently—when the mood strikes or when you find some free time. But, when everything is scheduled for your social channels, it is much easier to create content that’s engaging and based on specific, long-term goals.
So, whether you want to create a series of posts for a campaign or one-off posts for special occasions, a calendar will ensure you don’t miss anything.
Follow these tips to plan out a killer social media calendar:
Decide which type of social media content you’ll create—text, images, videos, or links.
Add popular events to your calendar to create more exciting content. Such events are holidays, local or national events, Black Friday or Cyber Monday sales, and product launches.
Conduct a social media audit to get a clear idea of what’s working and what’s not. It can help you know your most successful post, when and where your audience is most active, audience demographic across all channels, etc.
Make engagement your priority
Imagine you threw a party and many people came. But, they all sat silently without talking to each other. Was your party a success? Did people have fun?
Absolutely not! And this is exactly what happens when you don’t engage with your customers on social media.
Posting consistent, high-quality content on social media is not enough if you aren’t engaging with your followers and building meaningful relationships.
However, social media engagement isn’t just about how popular you are or how many followers you have. In fact, it’s about strengthening the relationships with your existing and future customers that can help you boost your brand awareness, both on and offline.
When a customer engages with your content or sends you a message on social media, it’s an excellent opportunity for you to get to know them and build a relationship. Answer their questions, resolve their queries, and go out of your way to offer excellent customer service.
If you’re active on social media and respond to customers’ comments or posts, they will feel confident doing business with you. Even responding to negative comments in a positive way can help you boost your sales.
Have an authentic voice on social platforms as it humanizes your brand and encourages people to talk about you positively. Also, engage with other brands and influencers in your niche to get them to notice you and engage with you. Last but not least, keep your responses fast as it leads to increased customer satisfaction and gives your team more time to focus on other support issues.
Measure and optimize
How will you determine whether or not your campaign is a success? What was the overall impact of your campaign on the brand? How did your social media efforts impact your company goals?
You need to ask yourself these questions while calculating the value of your social media efforts. And that means not just likes but also the comments and shares you received on a single post. Take note of the performance and if it’s less than expected, optimize the campaign by changing the audience targeting or the overall content strategy.
Knowing your social media performance thoroughly will help you create more engaging content and bring you closer to hitting your social media goals.
Summing up – Engagement on your social media content is important!
Gone are the days when just being present on social media was enough to gain a wide following. With fierce competition, social media marketing has reached a more mature phase and is constantly evolving in this direction.
What was once used to connect with friends and family is now used to share opinions and launch campaigns. So, it’s crucial to be up-to-date with the latest social media changes so you can adapt your content accordingly.
It might seem difficult to stand out, but the sense of community, meaningful customer relationships, and audience loyalty is like never before.
Ready to take the first step towards creating engaging social media content?
