Measure What Matters: The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Analytics

Measure What Matters: The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Analytics

Aug 19, 2021 | Social Media Analytics

If I asked you to guess about how many people around the world are active on social media channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, and the likes? What would be your closest guess?

Given the ways of the world, you can be sure that you could not have guessed that more than 4 billion humans currently make use of social media platforms for leisure, networking, work, and beyond.

So, it really is not hard to say that given the scale of how vast the number is, brands would want to be active on social media as well, just to not miss an opportunity to make their business benefit off of it. 

Savvy businesses like so many out there (yours could be the next one, congrats on being here) use social media marketing and analytics to market, sell, upsell, cross sell, provide support, and more to their target audiences, as well as their customers. Moreover, it is also used to build and nurture these relationships with not just their customers, but also their prospects.

However, the most important aspect of this is to understand really well what kind of social media content does the best, and on what platforms is one supposed to have the maximum impact and results, and so on. Doing this will allow you to consistently up your social media marketing game and create a positive impact to your bottom line in a sustainable, yet fast paced manner.

So, how do you actually go about achieving this? Well, among other things, the most critical aspect is social media analytics and reporting. Let’s dive deep into the art, science and everything else on the top in the next few sections. 

What is social media analytics and tracking?

When it comes to your brand, do you happen to have a straightforward way to identify social media trends that are relevant to your industry or vertical? 

Do you have a way to clearly attribute and quantify the kind of return on investment that your brand is getting in with each campaign or post you do across your various social media channels?

Do you know what people who are followers of your brand expect and want from your social media channels? How is the content that you create perceived in comparison of your competition?

These are only some of the many questions one could ask to understand the most important question about your social media marketing and analytics, and that is: is it even working? What social media analytics actually does is help you answer all of the questions above, and more! 

Social media analytics and tracking refers to the process of analyzing the various metrics associated with your brand’s social media, in order to understand how you have been performing, what you could do better, what needs immediate fixing, what you should double down on, and so on.

And for the longest time, if there is one truth that all marketers have heralded and sweared by, it is that without measuring and analyzing your social media content and its performance over time, you would not be able to improve the results, or worse, even put in your results in the proper context requisite to understand how good or bad they are. 

What social media marketers really need is an insight-led path to know where to go from one place to another, and what to do from there, and so on. According to a study commissioned by the tech giant Google through research firm Forrester, no more than 40% of all firms surveyed had unified cross-platform analytics for their social media efforts, so they really don’t have a full view of what is happening there, along with its significance on various aspects such as their app and web properties.

That’s more than half of all marketers in the world that now lack the context essential to reach their core goal. In the rest of this guide, we are going to deep dive into everything about social media marketing and tracking with an assumption that as a reader, you are onboard with it being fundamental to your content marketing success. Let’s get started, then, shall we?

Why should I use social media analytics?

Although there are a plethora of reasons why you should deploy social media analytics for your business, there are some that are more essential than others. Below, we have tried to list down the major use cases that you will be able to take home for your business if you do invest in a social media analytics tool. 

You can consider the following four parameters as the top benefits that social media analytics provides to your business. But keep in mind, even if they are not super relevant to your business, there might be some others that would have a better impact for you. So, the goal is not to get disheartened or disinterested in the potential of social media analytics, rather, to embrace its potential.

1. Measure and prove marketing return on investment and overall impact

The toughest part of any marketer’s job is to be able to calculate and justify the return on investment that her efforts are producing. And, in a nutshell, the bottom line to social media marketing analytics is that they give marketers rich, and transparent feedback about how their campaigns are performing across the social media channels and properties that they own, helping them to revise the strategy on the go. It goes without saying that keeping a close look on the performance KPIs is crucial to the success of your social media marketing efforts.

What’s more? Social media analytics will be able to tell you if one aspect of your strategy is not working as you had hoped it would, or even if the entire thing needs to be relooked at, so you can make the changes necessary before all hell breaks loose and the CMO is calling you at 9 am on a Monday morning.

Doing this also allows the C-suite, or about anyone in your org, to keep a tab on the most crucial data points and evaluate the marketing performance in a jiffy, so that everyone is on the same page and working from the same source of truth when it comes to data.

It’s only logical to try to get deep into understanding if the time, money, and efforts you are investing in your social media marketing plan (for example, let us consider paid promotion for a gated led-gen asset) and bringing in the moolah to justify its cost, in any way whatsoever.

In a 2021 Hootsuite social trends survey, 85 percent of the organizations that integrated data from their social media into other systems expected to be able to justify their returns on investments. And you can too!

2. Make stronger strategic and business decisions for your company

When you have better insights from the better social media analytics you have been tracking for your business, the product, marketing, sales, and all other functions in your business and their teams will be able to figure out what is working and what is not working, especially when it comes to social media and your content marketing campaigns.

However, it does not end just there as insights from your social media analytics will help you take crucial strategic and business decisions outside of just the social media aspect of it. 

And every passing year, this becomes more and more true with the increase in the amount of data that is being collected and analyzed all across the world. Here are some of the ways in which social media can help you take strategic, crucial, and other business decisions:

  • Catch up with and respond to trends and other things in a time-bound way – by accessing data in real time, you can predict what might go viral and what might end up being just a dud.
  • Let your performance KPIs lead you into the light and show you the path to take decisions that might affect your business performance in the long run by keeping a tab on what is happening across the globe.

You do not need us to tell you that when it comes to your business, data should always be your guiding light, not intuition, and definitely not emotions. So social media analytics help you take the guesswork out of the ordinary and help you focus on what really matters, in the process, also enabling you to save time, effort, and everything else. 

3. Compare your business’s social media performance against your peers

Let’s just say, if your competitor did better than you, and you did better than you had expected, is there any logic to celebrating this? Would you really consider this a win for your brand? Most definitely not. 

So, if you have no idea how your competitors are performing, whether their performance is better than you, or worse, and if so, then by how much, then you really are just shooting in the dark and hoping that something sticks. In this pure vanity metrics fashion of how things have become, there is no bearing of any of this on real success. 

However, with social media analytics and tracking, you can not only compare your business’s social media performance against your peers, but also gain the context required to understand the reasoning behind the occurrence of things such as good or bad performance. It gives you the oh so ever essential relevance and context that you require to really measure your company’s success on social media across the web.

You can call this way of leading the path with data as benchmarking your social media performance, and its importance can not be stressed enough. We are quite sure you would agree with that too.

4. Track your marketing teams’ productivity and efficiency

Another not so apparent but quite valuable benefit of social media analytics is that it helps you streamline the workflows in your marketing team, and there is no surprise how important those are for you to run your crew effectively.

With social media analytics and tracking, you can keep a tab on your team’s efficiency, productivity, and velocity, which is in turn quite essential for you to take them in the right direction. If you keep working in the wrong direction, it does not matter how fast you are going because you will not go far.

Some areas where it becomes all the more essential are nascent things like community management, customer service where a good tool will allow you to actualize the key performance indicators such as response time and audience’s pulse.

Key areas to use social media analytics

Many a marketing teams have got no clue about the possible avenues of their social media marketing strategy that can benefit from making use of social media analytics and tracking, which is why we wanted to bring you the top use cases which social media analytics will help you solve for your business:

Audience analytics

For a marketer, everything begins with the audience and its behavior. It is crucial for you as a brand to know exactly who your target audience is, and everything you can possibly collect on them. What it does is, help you build a useful, human-centric social media marketing strategy that helps you cultivate relationships with your community down the funnel-like a hot knife to butter. 

According to a Gartner survey, in 2021, more than 60% of all customer experience transformation projects will involve some or the other form of techn. Hence, having the right tools to conduct the right analysis becomes all the more important for your business (but more on all that later, in detail, in the corresponding section).

Over the past couple of years, thanks to advancements in the marketing technology software as a service space and the uproar of artificial intelligence has enabled marketers to easily understand in-depth, a lot of context and insight into their audience, their behavior, likes and dislikes, demographic, psychometric, and other forms of data points. 

It’s only safe to say that it will become even better as more and more innovation continues to disrupt the marketing domain, but till then, what we have already is laden with so much potential that the world is a marketer’s oyster when it comes to doing great audience analysis for their social media marketing strategy.

Performance analytics

Another area that social media analytics can help you with is measuring how your strategy has been performing. Doing so is key to bringing in good return on investment, and identify what parts of your strategy needs fixing.

Over the past year or so, businesses have significantly increased their social media marketing budget (all thanks to Covid forcing the pivot to an online first world), and according to some reports, there has been a 56% year over year increase in spending on FB and Instagram combined.

It is only natural for you to expect the return on investment from your social media marketing efforts, especially if you have invested heavily in it. But, you do not actually need to get granular at a very early stage, you do not need to know the number of people who retweeted, reacted, or commented on your social media posts. Only looking at a high level, bigger trends would do for you, and here are some of those that you need to be able to track:

Here are the key performance metrics to track for your social media marketing strategy:

  • Month on month trend of engagement across your campaigns and posts to figure out if the content you have been publishing is actually working or not
  • Number of interactions for every 1000 followers you have to gauge how active your community is
  • Click through rate on your posts to learn how effectively you’re able to drive footfall from social to web and other digital media properties
  • Follower growth over time on your social media channels

It is super critical to track and monitor all these data points over a period of time to spot any bigger trends that are emerging, understand your brand’s social media strategy, and identify the return on investment you are acquiring from yours.

Competitive analytics

As we discussed earlier if your business had a fantabulous year and the best results ever, but if your peers in the industry had an even better one, would you be celebrating? Or wanting to reassess your win and what you could have done better? It’s obvious to assume that anyone would be doing the latter. 

In order to get a clearer comprehension of your performance and all other metrics, you definitely would like to look at them from a competitive lens, and that’s where competitive analytics through social media comes to your rescue.

Almost each and every c-level marketing or other executive is curious to make their organizations better in two key areas: effectiveness (producing the desired results against their goals) and efficiency (reducing the wasted efforts and resources through their execution), but more often than not, they have no clue by how much they do need to improve. For them, the best way to analyze their business’s performance and to understand the actionable requirements is to do benchmarking.

In its simplest terms, benchmarking refers to the comparison of your brand’s social media marketing performance against your competitors to assess your team’s work and strategy effectiveness. What it does is enable your team to learn if your performance and return on marketing investment are successful in relation to that of the bigger market.

It’s easy for businesses to ignore doing this, but there’s one thing they should know, even if they are not doing competitive analysis for whatever reasons, some or all of their competitors probably are, and reaping the results as well. 

Paid social analytics

Although the last year of last decade, the first of the Coronavirus pandemic, 2020, was certainly an uncertain time for humanity and marketing budgets, research shows that digital spending increased a lot by the end of the year all thanks to businesses adopting a digital-first approach. A Gartner survey found that 60% of marketers expected customer experience and related budgets to increase in 2020, and so they did.

On paid social media marketing, a hell of lot of money is being spent, so it becomes absolutely imperative that brands know the worth of putting in the effort and spending money on running ads for their brand, demand gen, and other purposes. They need to know that every dollar or rupee they are spending is going to bring in the best possible results, and it can not be done without having a solid view of how their paid social media has been doing.

Enter paid social media analytics, which makes it all too easy for you to know what content is going to perform the best with your audience, so you can promote the same and cut your costs. 

Customer service and community management analytics

Forrester, the market research company, reports that digital customer support and service interactions are going to increase by a whopping 40% in the year 2021. So in terms of the increased footfall and overall tractions, a business simply can’t turn a blind eye to the potential of a well-oiled social media customer service crew.

This is why as a social media manager or an executive, you need to make sure that your people-facing teams are doing a great job taking care of all the requests that come their way from your prospects and customers. But if you are wondering, how in the world would that be possible without taking too much of your efforts and resources, this is exactly where customer support, service, and community management analytics step into your rescue.

Consumers today expect to be catered to in a timely, fast, relevant, and contextual manner, with one survey pointing that most of them expect for a business they reached out to on a social media platform such as Facebook to reply to them within 30 minutes. 30! That’s how quick and agile your teams need to be. But guess what was the average time a business took to reply to a customer on Facebook? A whopping one hour and fifty-six minutes!

Thus, by monitoring your people-facing crews’ performance and relevant metrics and data points, you can make sure that your brand communication is valuable and agile. This, in turn, translates to an enhanced brand image and stronger, lasting, and deeper relationships with your customers and prospects.

Influencer analytics

Influencer marketing is a big part of social media today, and it is only going to get bigger and bigger as people turn to organic reviews and needs for most of their consumerism, if not all. And it is in no way a cheap affair, prices can go as far as anything when it comes to influencers showing their influence and bringing you business, so it becomes imperative to partner with the ones that can give you great return on investment. 

However, when it comes to measuring it, are you well equipped with your existing social media analytics tool? Or would you require one which supports measurement across platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat, and the likes?

Your social media analytics platform should be able to support you in this venture and ace your influencer marketing game. Tracking your influencers’ key performance indicators (KPIs) will help you make the right decision and make the most of your influencer marketing efforts.

What social media metrics should I track for my business?

When it comes to social media marketing and analytics, almost each and every social media platform out there provide their in-built, native analytics for marketers and executives to deep-dive into. For example, Facebook will give you an insights tab on your business profile. Twitter, on the other hand will provide you Twitter Analytics if you navigate to the respective tab. On Instagram and Pinterest, you will need business accounts to be able to see your channels’ performance and data. 

Once you have figured out how to view the analytics in each of your platforms, or are using a tool for the same (again, more on that in the next section in depth), you will need to set goals for your social media marketing’s efforts. But narrowing this down in a sea of options can be quite an intimidating task, which is why the rest of this section is all about the different metrics you need to be looking at and tracking for your brand’s social media marketing efforts.

In social media marketing, and otherwise in business as well, all metrics have meaning. It is only about the context which matters when you are looking at them. While we have listed all the possible metrics you could be monitoring for your social media marketing efforts, it makes better sense to make a mental note of the ones you would be zeroing in on before you kickstart your new strategy or make modifications or alterations to the existing one. Anyway, without any further ado, let us look at the first set of these metrics:

Engagement metrics: Likes, comments, shares, clicks, and more

Engagement for your social media analytics and tracking is a huge category to track. Why? It includes a ton of data points to consider, from likes, comments, shares, reactions, clicks, to whatnot.

At its basic, the engagement rate for any social media channel you use tells you how actively your audience is interacting with or getting involved with the content, posts, and campaigns that you initiate on your properties. Audiences that are well engaged usually like, or comment on your social media posts.

And engagement is not just how much your audience is getting to respond to your content, but also how often they do that matters even more, or equally, at the very least. Every social media network out there, even the newer ones for that matter, will have some sort of engagement metric that is a sum total of the smaller engagement activities such as likes, comments, and shares. Many platforms, such as Twitter and Reddit, have more than one type of metric, or different naming conventions, such as Retweets vs. Shares for Twitter and Facebook respectively.

If you have a high engagement rate on your social media channels, it means you have a healthy relationship with your audience and have real followers that would be readily available to do business with you, while also interacting with the media or content you share with them. But on a much more granular level, there are other such metrics that would not hurt if looked at, here are those:

  • Likes, Comments, Retweets, and more: Individual engagement metrics like a Share or a Retweet add up. In a Twitter report, you’ll see a total number of engagements per post or profile.
  • Post engagement rate for every channel: This is defined as the number of engagements divided by impressions or reach for each channel. A high rate means the people who see the post find it interesting enough to engage with.
  • Account mentions on your social media: Organic mentions, like @mentions that aren’t part of a reply, or tagging a brand in an Instagram story or even on Twitter without prompting, indicate good brand awareness and results in higher customer lifetime value for your business.

Like any other set of data points, looking at just engagement alone will not give you all the context required to be able to make strong decisions for your social media marketing strategy. What you would need is a combination of metrics that give you a great way to learn what levers you need to pull in order to reach or achieve the goals you have set out for your brand.

Awareness metrics for your social media: Impressions, reach, and more

Now, these are one set of metrics that are used very, very often, but often end up confusing the user as to what is referring to what. Although very useful, they mostly come in hand if your goals for your social media marketing are focused around brand awareness, perception, and the sorts. This is why it is important to understand the difference between the two:

At the level of a post on a social media channel, say Twitter, impression would refer to how many times the said post appears in someone’s timeline or newsfeed. However, reach refers to the potential number of unique visitors the same post could have (roughly calculated by adding your follower count and following of accounts that shared the post)

Return on investment (ROI) metrics for social media: Referrals, conversions, clickthroughs, and more

Now these set of metrics are most relevant for companies that have a shop set up, either on their Instagram accounts, their website, Facebook, or elsewhere. Social referral traffic and conversions from your social media are both tied to your marketing and revenue goals, and ultimately impact your topline. So these could be the most important set of metrics for some businesses (although, come to think of it, it would be the most important set of metrics for most e-Comm businesses)

To track these set of metrics, what you will essentially need is a publishing strategy that incorporates urchin tracking module, or UTM and a website traffic analytics program such as Google Analytics, Kiss metrics or a native one if you’re on an e-Comm platform such as Shopify.

  • Referrals are how a user lands on your site. In web analytics, you’ll see them broken down into traffic sources. “Social” is usually the source/medium you’ll be monitoring, and then it’s broken down by each network.
  • Conversions is when someone purchases something from your site. A social conversion means they visited via a social media channel and then purchased something in that same session or visit.

Hand in hand with referrals and conversions is the clickthrough rate (CTR) in your social media ads and posts. CTRs compare the number of times someone clicks on your content, to the number of impressions you get (that is, how many times the ad was viewed by the user). Higher the CTR, better the ad, and vice versa, obviously.

Customer care social media marketing metrics: Response rate & time

In the above sections, we have talked a lot about performance of your social media marketing efforts and strategy, and not so much about the customers’ experience that is associated with it. That is indeed very highly tied to your brand, right? 

Moreover, what about your own personal and your team’s performance? Who is going to look over your social media marketing manager to make sure they are taking care of their responsibilities well and delivering the return on investment from their compensation?

This is where metrics associated with customer care, such as response rate, response time, resolution time, and the likes come in to help you figure out exactly what it is. They help you figure out the stuff that’s happening behind the scenes at your customer service and support crews. 

How does social media analytics work?

As we have been discussing in the sections above, most of all social media platforms come with their own integrated analytics that you can access from the native platforms respectively. However, initially in your social media marketing journey, this might even be doable, but as you scale, you would want a solution to help you do all of it at once. 

How social media analytics work is, you pick and choose a social media analytics and tracking platform that works for your business (to decide which one to choose, simply skip to the next section). And then, you basically just route in all your social media channels’ content management and scheduling through it. Rest, the platform and its advanced tech is responsible for doing so. 

Now, at the cost of sounding salesy, we would like to pitch how Radarr could be your  social media analytics platform of choice, so let’s get talking about it.

How to put your social media analytics to use?

Now that you have understood about the types of tool you could use for your social media analytics, here is what you need to do: get to the most important bit. In this section, we will make a deep dive into how you can put your social media analytics tool and strategy to use, to be able to generate great results for your business. Think of the following five steps as a part of your social media analytics strategy or roadmap, and follow them to the T. 

1. Set SMART (acronym) social media analytics goals, right off the bat

Have you heard of the acronym S M A R T? It refers to Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time Bound, in the context of your business goals. The first step that you need to follow is to create and set these SMART goals to help you achieve the social media analytics targets you wanted for your brand. By doing thus, you will be able to focus on your social media marketing strategy in a much better way and reach or even exceed your expectations in an efficient manner.

In order to get started with this process, you need to ask yourself the following question: “What do I really want to learn from my social media analytics that are at my disposal?” Then, and only then, will you be able to get to the next step into each part of the S M A R T goal we discussed above. Let us look at an example which will help you tremendously:

  • Specific goal: I would like to use my social media analytics to identify specific data points related to my marketing tactics, in order to determine which posts and campaigns are working best in reaching and engaging our audience.
  • Measurable: I want to be able to point out some specific and relevant data points to achieve this goal.
  • Attainable: I will work to identify three specific data points from my list of data points to help accomplish this goal.
  • Relevant: These data points will help my team and I measure our success in reaching and engaging our audience across our social media properties, as well as help us identify any gaps or areas of improvement in our overarching social media strategy.
  • Time-bound: I want to identify these specific data points over the course of the next 30 days — this way, in a matter of just four week’s time, we can begin using them to measure our success in reaching and engaging audience across social channels and identify the loopholes and gaps and areas for improvement that exist in our social media strategy.

2. Choose the metrics you are going to zero in on to track

Once you are done with step 1 discussed above, it is time for you to decide which of all the plethora of social media metrics that you have are you going to track for your business. You can also consider tracking the most popular or commonly tracked social media metrics by brands and businesses around the globe, but that would not take you very far.

Some metrics may vary by the social media platform you are looking at due to the simple reason of relevance and context. But for your utmost convenience, we have put together a list of some of the most popular metrics applicable to virtually every social channel and analytics tool you would be making use of to get started.

  • Reach is the total number of people who have seen your content on a social media channel
  • Engagement refers to all interactions including shares, likes, and comments, and more, on other platforms, depending on the platform
  • Impressions are the number of times or content is displayed on someone’s feed or timeline
  • Mentions are the times your business and brand are referenced on social media by your audience, prospects, or customers, or even another business
  • Social ROI provides insight into whether the investment you’ve put into your social media marketing is resulting in an increase or decrease in customers, sales, brand awareness, customer loyalty, and other key performance indicators (KPIs)
  • Likes are when an audience member taps (or double taps) on your social content to show they appreciated or liked it
  • Retweets/shares/reposts are when your audience members post the content your business published on their profiles as a repeat posting

3. Determine and try (or buy) the social media analytics tools you’ll use for your brand

Once the above two steps are thoroughly done with, you have to make the hard choice of picking up the social media analytics tool most suited for your business. But thanks to your good fortune of having read the previous section, you are fully equipped with the know how of what different features are being offered by different tools out there. In case you are confused between two or more tools, it would be a good idea to either ask for a customized demo from the vendor, or better, take them out for a spin through a free trial.

Before making a decision regarding which tool or tools you’ll use, here are some questions you would want to think about:

  1. Do you want a tool or software to help you manage your social media analytics across multiple channels and platforms (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc) or just one (e.g. Twitter)?
  2. Which metrics did you decide you’re going to track and monitor (as we touched on in the above step)?
  3. What is the maximum budget you can shell dough out for when buying the tool? Do you need a tool with flexible pricing options and features that you can add to or remove from over time, or not? (To find this information, review the pricing pages like this page on Radarr’s website.)
  4. Which tools and software options are suited to help you achieve the S M A R T goals you set up?
  5. Do you want your tool to integrate with the tech stack and other bunch of software your team uses to run your business (such as Salesforce’s CRM, for example)? Did you know that Radarr is the best alternative to Salesforce Social Studio?

4. Measure the success of your social media analytics strategy through the above steps

Once you have your social media analytics software set up, you will be able to measure the success of your efforts and hard work, with ease, and with accuracy. To be able to do this, you may use the analytics software you executed — although depending on your software, you might have the ability to create a customized report and other relevant dashboards or pull the specific details about data points you and your team care the most about.

In addition to applying your tools to help measure your success, you may also consider your answers to the following questions:

  • Did you achieve your S M A R T goals?
  • Did the metrics you chose to focus on tell a story that’s helpful for your brand?
  • Did the software or tool you implemented support your business needs in the best way possible?

With answers to these, you may be able to easily complete this step and get to the final one, check below.

5. Make necessary social media analytics adjustments

Upon completing all the previous steps, you shall be able to gauge what parts of your strategy are working, and which ones are not working, at all. Your mandate now is to only make the improvements, and help your brand evolve their social media marketing strategy into a stronger one.

Social media analytics tools: Which one should I get?

Okay, there is, quite literally, and we are really not exaggerating, a plethora of social media marketing and analytics software’s out there. 

From enterprise grade to easy to use, you have an entire set of categories defined and ruled by several of them, so choosing the one which is the most appropriate for a business is nothing less than a task. 

You should ideally answer the following questions before getting yourself a social media analytics tool: 

  • What are your objectives of using the tool? 
  • What is your current budget for the social media analytics tool?
  • Which teams are dependent on the tool? 
  • Does the social media analytics tool allow team collaboration?
  • Does the tool offer set up and customer support? 
  • Is the user interface and visualisation understandable? (IMP!) 
  • What are the integrations it covers? 
  • What is the level of agility and scalability it offers? 
  • What are other businesses like yours saying about it? 
  • What other goals will it help you accomplish? 

For example, Radarr is an award winning AI-Powered social and digital data analytics and big data platform company that specializes in social listening, research and digital monitoring. 

We work with businesses to help them make decisions from relevant social media conversations in real time. This includes conversations about brands, products, campaigns and competitors. Several mid to large sized businesses including Fortune 500 clients across Asia Pacific use our social media analytics platform to keep track of their performance and growth across all channels. 

Apart from social media analytics, Radarr also has the capability to cater to the following functions for you: 

Kickstart your social media analytics journey today with Radarr 

Now that we have reached the end of this guide, it’s safe to say that social media marketing analytics are both an art and a science. All you need to be able to succeed with yours is a well defined roadmap, clarity on what your business needs are, and the patience to see all this through as you make adjustments to your growth strategy. 

Data can get overwhelming for most; especially when you’re getting started. 

That’s why we built Radarr. 

Radarr not just brings all your data on to one dashboard, but makes analytics consumable with smart visualization to get clear actionable. Take charge of your campaigns, performance and budgets with data on your side! 

It’s time to sign up on Radarr. 

If you’re new to social media analytics, read this article. we also have a course designed to help you master numbers.

Here is the complete guide of Marketing analytics and Why it is important?

The Advanced Guide To Social Media Monitoring

The Advanced Guide To Social Media Monitoring

Aug 19, 2021 | Social Media Monitoring

When it comes to social media, the number of platforms and the daily active users on each of these platforms seem to be growing exponentially with each passing day. That’s exactly why there is now a need for social media monitoring, more than ever.

There are more platforms and options that people can engage on on any given day, and there is something for everyone depending on their demographics and preferences. 

With newer platforms such as Clubhouse and Houseparty taking the world by storm, there’s so much diverse content waiting to be created by brands who want to engage meaningfully with their audiences. 

However, all social media platforms have one thing in common – endless conversations. 

Now, if you monitor closely, these could be about your brand, your competitors, your audiences’ challenges and aspirations, and so much more. 

Not knowing what conversations your potential customers are engaging in about your brand could be extremely risky. 

For instance, some of these conversations could be bad for the brand. You need to identify them quickly so you can take corrective measures to create more positivity about your brand on social media. 

This is where social media monitoring comes in. 

Social media monitoring allows you to keep tabs on how your audience is engaging with your brand on these platforms so you can respond to all mentions. Stay up to date with all conversations regarding you or the industry you’re in. 

What is social media monitoring? 

Simply put, social media monitoring is nothing but the process of keeping a tab on what is being spoken about a particular brand or product on various social (or digital) platforms. 

It involves keeping a track of every online comment, response, and mention so brands can appropriately react to the same in a manner that is best for their online reputation. 

Social media monitoring entails keeping a close eye on reviews, complaints, queries, questions, or mentions about the brand that don’t just happen directly on official posts – and so they can’t be tracked via notifications. These could be on any online platform or community that may or may not tag your official handle. 

Simply put, social media monitoring helps marketers keep a track of all conversations about their brand, industry, or vertical by tracking certain keywords, terms, or phrases – in the earned and organic ecosystem. 

Let’s tell you a bit more about it to explain how this works. 

How does social media monitoring work? 

Social media monitoring tools like Radarr crawl and index sites to search for the relevant terms, strings, hashtags, taglines, words, or phrases on specific pages of social platforms that you want to be notified of. 

These mentions are then stored into the tool’s interface and can later be analyzed and even sliced and diced to get granular details. Here’s what it looks like: 

social media monitoring tools l Radarr

What is the difference between social listening and social media monitoring? 

While social media monitoring and social listening are often used interchangeably, the two are quite different in their approach. 

Social media monitoring involves tracking and responding to mentions about your brand on social media or any other online channels to gather insights into your audiences’ perceptions of your brand. 

Social listening is done more from a future-proofing perspective. Data on brand mentions is collected and conversations are tracked and analyzed to better inform future business and marketing decisions. Learn more about social listening in our comprehensive guide. 

Social media monitoring is all about instantly dealing with pressing issues and incoming queries on social channels to maintain a positive brand image and keep followers constructively engaged. Therefore, monitoring focuses on the micro. On the flip side, social listening is a macro concept that helps a brand strategize better for the overall brand image in the long run. Therefore, social monitoring is a short-term concept, while social listening is a long-term one. 

Also, social listening is proactive as it helps brands position themselves better based on what their audiences want and expect. It helps them study social interactions and unlock growth opportunities that they didn’t know existed. 

Social media monitoring, on the other hand, is more reactive as it entails addressing customer concerns, questions, hesitations, or comments with agility to maintain a consistent brand image and deploy quick fixes to stop the spread of negativity that could harm your brand. 

Difference between social media monitoring and social media listening

Why is social media monitoring important? 

There are plenty of reasons why you shouldn’t underestimate social media monitoring, but here’s why the technique is crucial in today’s day and age: 

To make your customers feel heard and valued

Social media monitoring allows you to engage with your audience on various social channels by responding to their queries, clearing their doubts and hesitations, thanking them for their praises, and addressing their concerns. Therefore, your followers and customers who take the time to post or comment feel heard and valued if you, as a brand, are considerate enough to respond swiftly and suitably. 

Your consumers want to be a part of conversations and be heard when they have something to say. They don’t become advocates for your brand by just swiping through your posts silently. Social media monitoring, thus, empowers you to build dialogue, encourage communication, and drive better and constructive engagement. 

Here’s an excellent example from Netflix: 

Social Media Monitoring Benefits
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Netflix going out of their way to explain the real reason behind their customer’s complaints is a testament to how incredibly their teams monitor social media so that no customer, follower, or audience member goes unheard. 

To encourage brand loyalty and advocacy

Not all social mentions you receive would be negative or concerning. Some might actually be encouraging and positive. To illustrate, your customers often take to social platforms to share praises about your products, services, or principles. This is obviously more common in cases when they are incentivized to do so. 

Make sure that all positive comments are encouraged, appreciated, suitably rewarded, and if possible, even featured on your official handles so you can proudly showcase your brand loyalists and advocates. 

Take a look at Lush Cosmetics nailing it:

Social Media Monitoring Benefits

Such replies keep your social media community engaged and ensure that customers who genuinely love your products are thanked and rewarded for doing so. The bottom line remains that only if you value your current customers can you attract more of them. 

To provide enhanced customer support

In many cases, the comments and mentions you receive on social channels would be complaints, queries, or concerns regarding a purchase. You want to address them as fast as humanly possible since these are nothing but public customer support tickets. You can’t afford to delay or offer unsatisfactory resolutions. Since all your followers and your customer’s followers are witnessing the exchange of dialogue in real-time, social monitoring actually allows you to be on top of such scenarios and ensure they are taken care of as soon as possible. 

Thus, social monitoring enables you to enhance your customer support game by constantly tracking incoming complaints or queries on social channels and responding to them in real-time. 

Take a look at how Sephora does it perfectly: 

Social Media Monitoring Benefits

Notice how Sephora made sure customer complaints were addressed then and there so that the matter was closed and didn’t attract more attention than required. 

To get in depth insights on what your customers want 

No matter how many surveys you run or the number of times you ask for customer feedback, you might never understand the full story regarding what your customers want or how they feel about your products or service. Think of social monitoring as a complementary dataset to getting those insights your customers never directly tell you. These comments aren’t fabricated or crafted as they could be while filling out a survey form but are completely raw and organic, and hence would yield some actionable insights. 

Social monitoring helps you keep an eye on all such public conversations wherein your existing and potential customers discuss what they feel about your brand, what they wish was improved, or about their challenges in general. This is a goldmine of insights you can use to inform your future decisions and align your brand with your customers’ expectations. 

Take a look at a really impressive example of the same from Delta Hotels: 

Social Media Monitoring Benefits
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To learn what your competitors are up to

Social media is filled with your competitors trying to steal your share of voice, followers, and ultimately, customers. You cannot stay ahead of the curve when you don’t know what your competitors are up to. 

Social media monitoring allows you to stay updated with how your competitors are engaging with their followers and the tactics they are employing to interact better. 

By monitoring keywords and phrases relevant to your competitors and the industry, you can analyze what does well on social media and how you can implement it. Not just that, you also get a sneak peek into what the audience has to say about both – your competitors’ product/  service vs yours. 

To help stop the spread of negative comments 

By constantly monitoring social conversations regarding your brand, you can stay on top of any negative comment you receive that could tarnish your brand image. Not only can you respond to it in real-time, but you can also prevent negativity from spreading. Social media monitoring, thus, gives you the power to tackle negative comments appropriately before they become a problem. 

Here’s an example from Wendy’s: 

Wendy's Social Media Monitoring
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Wendy’s has always been at the top of their social media game, but this example just goes on to show how closely they monitor every comment on their posts and the effort they take into crafting brilliantly witty yet satisfactory replies. 

To crowdsource product or feature ideas and enhancements 

Social media is filled with your audience telling you what they wished your product had. Well, social media monitoring enables you to cherry-pick all the great ideas and incorporate them into your products or services. 

It’s your opportunity to hear straight from the horses’ mouth (i.e. your target audience) and give your customers exactly what they need. These insights needn’t necessarily be features or enhancements that your customers wish for, but could also be full-fledged product or campaign ideas that you get to crowdsource at no additional cost or effort. 

Believe it or not, many great consumer products were built the way they are today just by closely monitoring audience feedback and incorporating user-generated ideas. The next million-dollar idea could be hidden within those noisy social conversations and if you are smart enough to find it, the future belongs to you. 

Here’s an excellent example from Dunzo: 

Dunzo Social Media Monitoring
Image Source

To identify relevant influencers

There are already plenty of influencers or celebrities talking positively about your brand on social media, but you might not have discovered them yet. They might genuinely enjoy your products and might want to support your brand’s principles and core values. They could be the face of your brand or the influencer for your next big bang campaign. 

Social media monitoring allows you to discover all famous personalities mentioning your brand or products so you can reach out to them and get them on board as advocates or influencers. This is a great influencer marketing opportunity just lurking in plain sight, waiting to be uncovered. 

Trends on social media change on a daily basis. The reel going viral today might not be relevant tomorrow and the filter being used in every story today might lose its significance tomorrow. No matter the size of your social media marketing team, it is virtually impossible to stay ahead of each and every trend that pops up in the middle of the day. With social media monitoring, your job is half done. 

By monitoring closely, you can discover the most popular trends being followed by consumers in your industry, which you can quickly incorporate into your product offering, use the relevant hashtag, post it on your official channel, and voila! You get to jump on the bandwagon and stay at par with any and every trend relevant for your target audience. 

All of this, in real-time. 

Take a look at how brands leveraged the Friends Reunion episode trend for their campaigns: 

Trend with Social Media Monitoring

Imagine if you weren’t aware of this trend well in advance, such posts or campaigns can still be created and posted within a few hours, provided you get notified about the ongoing trend. And social media monitoring ensures those notifications come to you in real-time. 

How to create a social media monitoring strategy? 

Just like any other marketing activity, social media monitoring cannot be done effectively unless you devise a step-by-step strategy. In this case, creating a strategy from the ground up isn’t as complicated as it sounds. So, let’s get right into it!

Zero in on your social media monitoring goals 

The first obvious step would be to decide on what you are going to monitor. What search queries, phrases, hashtags, slogans, taglines, catchphrases, or keywords are you looking for? Are you going to search for brand mentions, specific campaign keywords, top-of-the-funnel keywords, industry-specific hashtags, or even names of your employees? 

You could start with one or all of these, but the important thing is to make a note of it beforehand. You might not hit the bull’s eye in one go, so will have to experiment rigorously to get to the phrases and terms that actually yield insightful results. What this means is that you might know which keywords to crawl right from the beginning. 

While some might be of little or no help, others might just unlock a goldmine of insights. Be consistent with your efforts and you will surely nail down those terms that you need to be monitoring to get the most detailed insights. 

Shortlist the tool you will use for social media monitoring 

Again, you have more choices here than you can possibly evaluate. However, this step is critical because you need to pick a tool that best meets your requirements. Radarr is a social and digital data analytics platform that can make the job a breeze for you. 

Radarr enables you to granularly monitor every customer issue, question, and query, track campaigns, ongoing social conversations revolving around your brand, and offer real-time resolutions to your followers. 

You not only get to stay updated with every industry trend in the social ecosystem, but also monitor your daily KPIs, assess your brand health, and track your share of voice with real-time alerts so you can react accordingly. Book a demo for Radarr to evaluate its magic for yourself. 

Dig deeper to uncover insights from your results 

You will need to spend some time making sense of the results of social media monitoring or the alerts or notifications you receive, or else they wouldn’t be of much help. For example, you will need to segregate and bucket mentions, conversations, and comments into feedback, questions, pain points, user-generated content, praises, influencer comments, negative comments, trends, and so on. 

By bucketing the results you receive, you will be able to decide the next steps accordingly. Do you need to respond immediately, raise a support ticket, nurture advocates, escalate the matter to another team, promote press mentions, share the post or story, or something completely different? 

Add a layer of sentiments on top of your insights 

Don’t just stop at being reactive. 

The next step needs to also be understanding the sentiments behind conversations. This will help you gauge what triggers positive and negative emotions in your audience, and use that data to tailor marketing messages in your campaigns or efforts to improve the customer experience. 

You can do this by using social media listening and you don’t need a separate tool for it. 

If you use Radarr, you get to leverage both social media monitoring and social listening on one platform. Take a look at it here. 

Act on the insights discovered 

Create a roadmap as to how you plan to respond to the alerts and notifications. You need to be ready with replies for positive comments and praises, tokens of appreciation for advocates, apologies for customers who share negative experiences, shareworthy content that you can reply with to answer questions, links to your self-help and FAQ pages, link to your customer support, how-to videos with detailed and descriptive answers, and so on. 

You need to have everything in place if you wish to take action immediately or else you will miss out. Therefore, having a detailed roadmap that each of your teammates can refer to would be of great help here. 

Social media monitoring in various industries

While social media monitoring has more or less the same use cases for every industry, there are a few specific scenarios in each that are worth mentioning. 

Travel and hospitality

Social media has become a popular destination among travelers to share their complaints and negative experiences. These could be around flight delays, complicated hotel check-ins, extra charges, lost baggage, and so much more. 

As a travel partner, social media can be one of the biggest sources of complaints and queries for your business. If not addressed in time, such complaints and feedback can spread like wildfire and sway your followers’ opinions about your brand. 

Social media monitoring helps travel and hospitality service providers to stay on top of any such negative mentions or complaints so they can resolve them in real time or at least route them to one of your support specialists, and prevent them from spreading. 

Education Technology

Even though the pandemic has generated unparalleled growth opportunities for EdTech businesses, the industry is relatively new. And with every new industry, comes the challenge of hesitant or ill-informed customers. Therefore, EdTech businesses will more often than not find an endless number of questions and confusions surfacing their social channels in the form of comments. 

Social media monitoring allows such businesses to answer them in real-time and avoid missing out on any conversion opportunity due to hesitant customers. It also helps them stay updated with ongoing conversations among parents around the challenges they are currently facing with their children being educated remotely. All such conversions are great fodder for making improvements and enhancing the overall EdTech experience for students. 

Retail, Online Commerce, FMCG 

The retail space is massively influenced by trends and pop culture, making it extremely hard for brands to be constantly aligned with their target audiences’ worldview, needs, aspirations, motivations, or wants. Social media monitoring can help bridge that gap by keeping brands in touch with the latest trends and happenings on social media. By receiving constant alerts for the online buzzwords, phrases, and hashtags doing the rounds on social, marketers can plan on leveraging them for their campaigns or even day to day posts. 

B2B

In the B2B space, reviews have enormous credibility, especially when they are shared on social media. As B2B marketers, it is important for you to be notified of all such reviews and feedback being shared for your brand or product so you can accordingly respond to them. Negative ones are going to require some quick crisis management, while the positive ones would need to be amplified, rewarded, and thanked. Either way, if you aren’t regularly updated with the ongoing conversations and mentions regarding your B2B brand on social media, you will be missing out. 

Health and wellness 

The health and wellness industry is constantly popularizing sharing updates and achievements on social media, especially in the form of stories. These achievement posts and stories make for increasingly shareworthy user-generated content that brands can leverage, only if they are updated about them in real time. Social media monitoring allows brands to get alerts when any such stories are shared mentioning the brand name or hashtag, and immediately repost on their channel. This is some really credible and inspiring content that brands would otherwise completely miss out on. 

Do you need social media monitoring? 

If you want to build a brand that people remember, YES. 

If you want to build a brand that evokes positive emotions in the market, the answer is YES again. 

If you want to build a fool-proof growth trajectory without risking negativity around your brand, well, you know the answer – YES. 

So if you haven’t been keeping track of what your audience has to say on social media? It’s time to start now. 

Start social media monitoring with Radarr. 

Book a demo!

Rebranding Announcement: Circus Social is now Radarr

Rebranding Announcement: Circus Social is now Radarr

Aug 2, 2021 | Announcements

As Circus Social steps into the next phase of growth, we’re excited to announce our rebranding. Our refreshed identity isn’t just a new logo, but a name that is truly representative of what we do, live and breathe every day. 

Your chosen social media intelligence tool, Circus Social is now Radarr. 

After launching with the name Circus Social, in 2012, we thought it was time to step up and this is our first step towards our bigger goals. Here’s a glimpse of what we have been working on all these months to make Circus Social bigger, better and more powerful. 

But this time, with a name that’s all set to speak of our solution’s true meaning. 

Why did we choose to move from Circus Social?  

Circus Social is a name that has defined what we do as a business and what we’re known for, for almost a decade. But we knew it was time to give it a fresh look as we grew our team and our target market. 

It was a playful name at the time we started out and was well positioned to leverage on our agency work. But as we grew and pivoted to build a cutting-edge SaaS platform company, the name felt a little out of place. 

And as our platform started to get recognized, we realized that Circus Social as a name did not do justice to what the product offered. 

Radarr is more than our identity 

The world is changing and digital has become the center of our universe. From following trends, how we interact with one another and engage with businesses, a lot of our activities have moved online. 

There are billions of conversations, posts, reviews, social media content, news stories being generated every minute. 

This massive burst of data coupled with the emergence of new platforms and mediums to communicate and connect on – requires brands, marketers, analysts, customer service and security teams to track, monitor and predict trends, derive insights, and maintain foresight into their digital ecosystem. 

“Our international clients now view Asia as the epicenter of social media development and innovation. In order to build a strong global strategy, we’re seeing more and more brands focus their attention on understanding what is happening here in the region and then building out, as opposed to the old way of executing North American or European strategies in Asia. Being able to preempt developments and predict trends in the social media world is becoming critical for businesses, and Asia is at the forefront of where that change is happening fastest.’’

Prerna Pant, Co-Founder & COO of Radarr

To be able to do this they need a system for detecting the presence, direction and other aspects of conversions. Similar to the radar used on aircrafts and ships, we’re equipping brands with something as powerful when it comes to picking up signals. 

Meet Radarr. 

What is Radarr

“We are moving beyond real-time analytics.  Clients are much more sophisticated and want partners with tech-stacks to match. Our clients no longer want to know about what is currently happening in the digital space, or rudimentary metrics, they want a Radarr to see what is about to happen so that they can anticipate the opportunities and challenges that could make or break their businesses.’’

Prerna Pant, Co-Founder & COO of Radarr

To match our new name and what we do, we obviously had to also change our logo. 

After going through endless iterations over the last few months (we have lost count), here’s what our new identity will look like across all platforms. 

Radarr logo

So when you see the Radarr logo, know that it is your old friend at Circus Social who just had a massive makeover! 

But those of you who haven’t met us before, let’s tell you a little about what Radarr is. 

So, what is Radarr? 

Formerly known as Circus Social, Radarr is a social and digital intelligence company powered by AI and data analytics.  

Specializing in Asia Pacific and linguistic algorithmic permutations in social media, Radarr provides actionable insights, through monitoring and predictive analysis to businesses who need to make high-stakes business decisions in real-time. 

Leading brands and Fortune 500 companies partner with Radarr, utilizing their proprietary tools like 20/Twenty and the Radarr Command Center, to navigate Asia Pacific’s complex languages and fast moving digital landscape. 

Radarr is a SaaS platform that offers businesses of all sizes, from large enterprises to SMB’s, a powerful digital and social media recommendation engine for: 

Our system is built to scan the digital universe of billions of conversations every day. It uses AI, machine learning and predictive algorithms to uncover insights that cannot be seen and provides actionable recommendations to allow our clients to make better business decisions. 

“At the core of Radarr’s new offer is an intelligence platform that delves deep into the billions of conversations happening online to deliver digital monitoring and predictive analytics. Bespoke dashboards provide targeted intelligence on select areas such as crisis monitoring or influencer management, whilst industry-centric dashboards on topics like Crypto and Gaming provide a bird’s eye view of trends emerging across specific sectors. This intelligence informs actionable, data-driven recommendations for brands, enabling them to anticipate the future effectively and act rapidly.”

Ram Bhamidi, Co- Founder and CEO 

Ready to take a step into the digital ecosystem with a strong partner for your brand? 

Explore our new brand collaterals

We’ve added a lot of new content to our website and social media pages to highlight everything that is new about us. 

Visit any of the links below to get to know Radarr better. 

PS. If we have been connected on Circus Social email addresses, don’t fret. Our team will continue to receive your messages and will be getting back to you as promptly as ever! 

But if you want to get to know why leading brands have been raving about Circus Social and our move to the new name Radarr.

7 Social Media Trends and What The Hell To Do With Them

7 Social Media Trends and What The Hell To Do With Them

Jun 26, 2014 | Case Studies, Featured

Social media marketers are forever on the lookout for trends that will not just work the best for their brand, but also make them stand out amongst their competitors.

Considering 42% adults online are present on multiple social networking sites for personal and business purposes; staying out dated is totally out of question.  So we decided to give you a comprehensive look at the top social media trends this year and that’s not all! We came up with a few dos and don’ts for each to help you create an effective strategy.

1. Content Repurposing

Content Repurposing is all about using existing content to create another piece of content so that it looks different from the original, but conveys the same message. With content marketing still ruling the digital world, content repurposing is a growing trend this year because it saves on a lot of time that marketers will have to invest in creating unique content.

Facts You Should Know

  • Businesses that blog attract 67% more leads than those who don’t.
  • 58% of B2B companies are increasing their content marketing budget this year to avoid being hit by Google updates like Penguin and Panda. (Source)

We spoke to Alex Stojkovic, Marketing and Communications Manager of Blue Pencil Information Security Inc., who shared his thoughts on content repurposing: “In my opinion, especially in this day and age, quality content will always surpass quantity content. I’m sure many will argue my opinion, however, the bottom line is, the more people who enjoy, discuss, like, retweet, and share your quality content, the greater the chance it will get picked up. Imagine for a second, you generate a home-run article, photo, infographic or document that gets picked up by a substantially larger website? With your content being picked up, you gain more exposure, more backlinks, and consequently more viewership.

2. Customer Service

Brands are increasingly using platforms like Facebook and Twitter to offer customer services to their audience instead of the conventional helplines. People these days don\’t really prefer being put on hold by customer service helplines and think social profiles are the best places to raise their opinions and issues for them to be resolved.

Facts You Should Know

  • 42% of audience use social media for raising issues related to brand products and services, and expect a 60 minute response time.
  • Out of the 42%, 24% of the audience above 12 years of age expect a 30 minute response time irrespective of their time of contact. (Source)

3. Video Marketing

Video marketing is a trend that involves incorporating videos in your marketing strategy to promote your products/ services instead of using conventional advertisements and textual content.

Studies show that videos are received 50x more by the audience than textual content. It has a proven record of being an effective way to market itself for non-profit organizations.

Facts You Should Know

  • About 100 hours of videos are uploaded every minute on YouTube.
  • Online video audience is nearly 84.5% in the US.
  • By 2017, videos will account for 69% of consumer internet traffic.
  • Branded Vines have 4 times the impact YouTube videos do. (source: comScore and Cisco)

4. Storytelling

Storytelling is a popular trend amongst marketers since 2013. Here they promote their brand’s products services in a series of events through a narrative. Who doesn’t like a good story?

Facts You Should Know     

  • About 50% of internet users look for interesting stories on social media during their work break hours.
  • A relatable story line on why the audience needs your products/ services is 50x more effective in increasing your sales than directly nudging them to make a purchase.

5. Social Advertising

The use of advertisements on various social media platforms to promote the brand’s products and services amongst a larger audience. It’s a great way to reach out to millions of people at a relatively low cost. 

Facts You Should Know

  • According to Analytic Partners, 83% of Facebook users find advertisements intrusive in their News Feed as they are usually not of any use to them.
  • Twitter ads are received well by many according to Forbes, as they take up very less space on the Home Page.
  • Instagram advertising is being increasingly used for creating brand awareness.

Lior Degani, Co-Founder of Swayy shared with us the important factors of social advertising: Advertising on social media must include ROI measurement, so it’s important to A/B test your campaigns figure out where you should invest more. You need to always use UTM parameters in the inbound links you add to your social media posts. For example, create a separate link to each variation of your promoted post using Google URL Builder, or use a different link to the same post you share on Facebook and Twitter to see the conversion differences among the networks for this specific post.

6. Instagram Marketing

Marketers are increasingly using Instagram to promote their existing products services and offer teasers to their upcoming ones. Incorporating this trend in your strategy is a guaranteed way to connect with your audience better and encourage more interaction.

Because if you haven’t been keeping a tab on social media news, Instagram recently hit 200 million active users, and that accounts for a major chunk of almost every brand’s target audience.

Facts You Should Know

  • Instagram has more than 200 million active users, including all age groups.
  • It is by far the best source of user-generated content (UGC).
  • A majority of customers engage with brands indirectly through tags on Instagram.

7. Pinterest Marketing

One of the latest social platforms to be used increasingly by marketers is Pinterest. They use their accounts to curate pins relevant to their brands, also to promote their existing and upcoming lines of product and services amongst a large target audience. Pinterest is a great platform to not only curating stories and content around your brand but also the number of active users is significantly high.

Facts You Should Know

  • Pinterest is not a sales platform, it’s a platform to drive in sales by sharing brand values, products, etc with the audience.
  • Pins that include a customized description along with the relevant hashtags, have a better reach than those which don’t.
  • Verified accounts show up better on search results than a regular account.

Here is the complete guide of Social Media Marketing Trends 2022.

Book your Radarr demo today!

Samsung’s Boring Facebook Content Strategy Is A Big Hit!

Samsung’s Boring Facebook Content Strategy Is A Big Hit!

Jun 24, 2014 | Case Studies, Facebook

Always on the lookout for the best content strategies being executed by brands the world over, we happened to stumble upon Samsung Mobile USA‘s Facebook page. As much as most of us really like their products and after services, we found their page to be nothing short of boring in an interesting way! Interesting, because their page gives a new meaning to the personal touch. And the result is what every marketer looks forward to for their brand – engagement. Lots and lots of engagement.

Boring, because it’s far too human. Here’s a comprehensive look at their content strategy to get our point across.

The ‘Human’ Touch  

The marketers running this page firmly believe in tying back the roots of all their posts to being ‘relatable’ rather than sounding too pushy for sales.

Images are the most shared content type across all social platforms and Samsung seems to be leveraging from the same.  Although these are mostly product shoots and don’t feature real consumers, their images always gain a lot of likes, shares, and comments because of the vibe they create. Something you’ve been aiming at too?

Let’s take a look at how Samsung leverages the most from images.

1. Indirect Promotion

Most of their images posted on Facebook contains their products, although done in an indirect way, it is still an obvious form of promotion that’s done in a smart way. Isn’t this an interesting way to tell their community how good Samsung’s camera is?

Need another example of promotion? Have you seen Samsung’s cool wrist gear?

2. Keeping Up With Events

Samsung sure doesn’t skip a beat and with FIFA going on, there was just no chance they\’d lose out on a good conversation with their people.

Even though the share rate of links is just about 9%, it’s always a good idea to direct your customers in the direction of the action you want them to take rather than having to fend for themselves. An interactive promotional post along with a link could work magic.

Apart from their regular posts, we found the following things incorporated on their page, very engaging:

  • Guide To Galaxy: Now they have a huge range of gadgets under the name Galaxy and many might get confused about how they could make the most out of the one they use. This guide lets you choose the device and gives you a step by step accordingly.
  • Owner’s Hub By Samsung: This for all those who own a Samsung product. Just like memberships, the hub offers its members discounts, invites to events, etc.  
  • Samsung Upgrade: Looking for a software upgrade for your device? You\’ll find them all here. Not just find, but also be notified of an upcoming upgrade.
  • Samsung Events: Love attending promotional events? Be notified of the events that interest you using this.
  • Customer Service:  Difficult to get through their help lines? Here\’s another way of availing customer services. All you need to do is fill up a short inbuilt form and submit.

The Big Question  

If you’ve read the post thoroughly, we\’re sure you noticed a pattern here. The company that rolls out most of its products with a ‘Designed for Humans’ or ‘Designed for Life’ slogan, seems to be taking it too seriously with the human-dominated posts. Not that we’re complaining; these posts are driving in a lot of engagement for Samsung, and that’s the end goal of every strategy a marketer works on.

But what comes off from this post is the big question that if a boring content strategy like this could work wonders, why the hell have we been spending hours trying to create different posts every time?

Do people tend to connect more with content that reflects them? Is this a strategy that all brands could adopt? We’d love to know your take on the same.

Complete guide to Instagram social listening, Tik Tok social listening, and Twitter social listening.

Book your Radarr demo today!