Marketing your business well in the digital world that dons different trends every other day can be really tough. Not being able to match up might make you lose a few points in the eyes of your customers but not keeping a tab on what your competition is up to is certainly going to make you lose more than just points – your sales.
In this age where social media has become the most important part of a business strategy, it is important for you to be aware of what strategies your competitors are executing on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter because you share the same target audience and the statistics count when determining who is better. another good tool to do competior benchmarking is 20/Twenty from Radarr.
Competition set aside, it is eventually about learning from their actions on social media – including their success strategies in yours and learning from their mistakes. And so, we decided to take three companies that are obviously in competition with one another and compare what each is doing to promote themselves on social platforms.
A Case Study: Ikea, Walmart And Kirkland
To make things interesting, we chose three brands that you must be using or have at least come across on a regular basis: Ikea, Walmart and Kirkland.
Analyzing the above, we conclude that by far, Walmart is the only brand that puts in maximum time and effort to engage with its customers. For these companies, the demographics make them more active on Facebook, while the other platforms are frequently updated for those few who aren’t on Facebook. Kirkland’s is the only business amongst the three that may be a household name, but is certainly missing out on socializing.
6 Things To Learn From Your Competition
Here are six things that every business should be learning from its’ competitors visibility and engagement across social media platforms:
1. Love Thy Enemy
Not really, just keep a tab on what your competition is up to every now and then such as what social media strategies are they executing – which ones did well and which ones didn’t. This is most important in cases where you share the same target audience.
2. Know Thy People
Before you jump on to the bandwagon on businesses present on the various social platforms, know who you are targeting. Every post must be intended for a specific audience. Identify the age group, the kind of language and conversations they engage themselves in and create your strategy around that. Your demographics play an important role in the success of your social profiles.
3. Show Thy Consistency
To be successful on social platforms, you must interact with your audience consistently. Businesses that engage their audience better tend to get better results in terms of leads from their social profiles.
4. Service Thy People
The one thing that your audience looks for on your social profiles is customer service. There are times when they feel your website isn’t helping them resolve their issues. So, make sure you enable posts from audience on your page so that they can address their concerns/ issues to you directly. The only catch here being, promptness! Be prompt at resolving issues, else it might just turn into a PR disaster.
5. Integrate Thy Platforms
The most common mistakes businesses make is not offering links to their other profiles across the social scape. Integrate all your social profiles and also, offer links to each one of them on your main website. Integration of social profiles ensures that once you have posted on one of them, your followers on the others are notified about the update.
6. Use Thy Money Wisely
If you are planning to go for paid advertisements across your social profiles; Facebook ads for instance, make sure you know how they function and that you target them towards the right audience. Observe the paid ad campaigns your competitors run – what they are promoting, on which platform, for how long, who they are targeting and how much of a success the campaign is. Learn from the mistakes they make, add a unique touch to your campaign before launching it.
Tools To Monitor Your Competitor’s Success (Or Failure)
Now keeping a tab on your competition by visiting their profiles can be really tiring, considering that they are going to be trying out new campaigns every now and then! So, here are a few tools that you can use to create a successful social media strategy by spying on them:
1. Fanpage Karma: This is an online tool for social media analytics and monitoring. It provides valuable insights on posting strategies and performance on social media profiles like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Community managers can compare two pages and the strategies they are following as well.
2. Twitonomy This web based tool offers both free and premium accounts for Twitter analytics. Check out our review for it here.
3. <strong?Tailwind The tool is primarily used for Pinterest analytics, management and marketing. It helps you monitor yours or your competitors Pinterest activity, discover great content and engage your audience better.
4. CircleCount This a free tool that lets you understand the Google+ strategy of your competitors better by offering extensive statistics on your performance and influence. Since, circles are the key features of Google+, this tool can also be used to find the most active, most followed and most influential people on Google+ in pre-defined categories.
5. Twitter Counter: This tool allows you to take a look at your competitor’s growth on Twitter in terms of the number of followers. It also allows you to compare two competitors and analyze their growth.
6. Rival IQ: This competitor research and monitoring tool allows you to enter infinite number of competitors and compare their social progress with your own. It gives you a quick glance at your competition’s Twitter followers, Facebook likes and Google+ followers.
Competitor research can really help you determine which direction you need to move your social media campaign in and how much of an effort and money you need to pump into the same.
If you’ve recently executed a competitor research campaign, feel free to share with us what you learnt from them!
Social media is not just a fad amongst teenagers anymore, businesses are using it for marketing purposes and a lot more the world over. It is increasingly being recognized as a platform where customers can raise their concerns (good or bad) related to that business’s products/ services. “A lot of people think that Twitter is a fad and you can’t really use it effectively to talk to customers,” said Bianca Buckridee, Vice President of Social Media Operations for JP Morgan Chase clearly indicating that there are many businesses out there who haven’t explored the full potential of even the most popular social media platforms – Twitter and Facebook.
Marketing and customer service are poles apart and shouldn’t be confused. Even though one platform might serve as a great marketing avenue, it might not really up your customer services. Considering that both Twitter and Facebook have millions of users the world over, which platform serves as the best for businesses to up their customer services?
Facebook vs Twitter
Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg reaffirms that the company is all about “connecting everyone and improving the world through sharing”. While on the other hand, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo calls Twitter the “global town square” of social media. The company states its aim as “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”
Even though the visions seem to overlap in terms of delivering a platform for connecting and sharing to everyone, both have distinctive features making Facebook known more for “connecting” and Twitter popularising for “sharing ideas and information.” If the ongoing competition between the two confuses you too and you can’t decide which platform you can use to deliver promising customer services, here is a comprehensive breakdown of each.
Twitter As A Customer Service Platform
Chirag Shah, the Senior Manager (Digital Marketing), Group Marketing at Singapore Post Ltd says, “In my experience so far, I have found that Twitter is great for one on one conversations – most complaints/ feedback are conversation starters – consumers gravitate towards Twitter to have those conversations – and hence, Twitter is a great platform to immediately address service/ product issues customers are facing.”
Though he also believes that depending on the demographics of the organization, each platform can turn out to be great customer platform. “Facebook on the other hand is great for creating a community like environment that shares knowledge/ experience about a company’s product/ service – and hence, a good place to bring your customers to for education and for FAQ,” says Shah.
Facebook As A Customer Service Platform
Alex Stojkovic, Marketing and Communications Manager at Blue-Pencil Information Security Inc. says, “Personally, I believe Facebook is the better customer service platform for many reasons. Without an understanding of your audience or market place and speaking in generalities, Facebook offers a more robust platform for customers with problems or concerns to reach out.”
Many businesses out there are already using this platform actively for customer services and Stojkovic breaks down the primary reasons for them to do so:
As a customer with a question or concern, it would be extremely difficult to explain to customer service representative your problem within 140 characters. Facebook definitely has the advantage over Twitter in this regard.
Given its sheer popularity, Facebook is far more advantageous over Twitter. Twitter’s audience of users tend to be younger and stark contrast to Facebook which has a wider demographic user-base.
But being in the business for long, he too has one tip to share:
“The determination of which platform to use for customer service should ultimately rely on reaching out to existing customers in the form of an online or email survey and see what they say. If 90% of your customer base is on Twitter and you decide to go to Facebook, such a decision is going to have catastrophic business consequences.”
So Which Is The Better Platform For Customer Care?
As seen from the infographics above, both platforms are far from perfect in terms of features. Ultimately the decision you make while choosing the social platform(s) for customer service depends on where the majority of your audience is active on. Should there be an a 50/50 or 60/40 spread of your audience across both platforms, the platform that you choose should be determined by the demographics of your audience and the the products and services of your business. We would suggest going on board both platforms to better connect with your audience, but if you have to choose between Twitter or Facebook, we’ll conclude with:
Twitter is great to track conversations around your business, promoting your products and resolving your customer\’s issues in a swift manner. You can join in conversations with your followers as well as others outside of your community, creating more effective social customer care.
Facebook is better platform for creating communities to share in-depth information of your products or services. The posts and replies published on your page can also be seen by everyone in your community, increasing the effectiveness of broadcasting announcements.
With so many other social platforms springing up alongside them, businesses might feel the need to be visible on all but that\’s not true. It\’s the audience that determines where you need to be present to reap the maximum benefits from social media.
Did you know that irrespective of the platform you chose for your customer service, you can get real time social data from that platform augmented with AI only on social listening platform provided by Circus Social.
About: SocialFlow uses real time data to understand the changing trends amongst your audience and map your content on those platforms where it will get maximum attention.
Usage: This social media tool is best suited for businesses that rely a lot on their content marketing strategy. It couples technology with industrial insights to give social media managers an overview on how well their content is reaching out to their audience.
Highlight: The tool automates the publishing and buying across social networks based on conversational trends instead of demographic and behavioral filters; which can be applied after there is a predisposition for someone to engage with your messages, be it paid or earned.
Is There A ‘Right Time’ To Post On Social Media?
With content marketing’s importance rising by the day, social media managers are doing everything they can for it to reach out to their maximum audience – be it using the right hashtags or using paid mediums to promote their posts. But looks like it’s the time that you post at that determines the success of your content (well, mostly!). We managed to get a few quotes off Frank Speiser, the Co-Founder of SocialFlow Inc to explain this software better by highlighting key features and benefits.
With more and more social media tools coming up with features that aim at helping you with your content strategy, SocialFlow seems to be the only one in the industry to bring your attention back to ‘time’.
What Type Of Content Should Your Business Share?
Well there are many ways to execute a content strategy that will keep your posts trending amongst your audience but each topic has a shelf life and a business should be able to determine that before having spent too much time and money on a lost cause.
Why Should You Use SocialFlow?
With even the most popular social platforms like Facebook offering features to give businesses a heads up on when their audience is interacting the most, one might think why a tool like SocialFlow would be required.
3 Products By SocialFlow
The company is known for its three products:
1. Cadence
It is used to analyze real time conversations around your business and deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time.
How it works: The feature uses predictive analysis to determine the value of your business content on the Social Graph by processing over 1 terabyte of data every day. It determines when a particular segment of your target audience is online and what topics they are most likely to engage in. The feature automatically publishes your content in the right circles, at the right time – when the audience is most receptive.
Key benefits:
Better understanding of what your audience is more likely to engage in.
Publishing your current content in the right circles helps you become a part of the active conversations around your business.
The published content helps create business value by driving in more traffic to your website (more the clicks, more the conversions).
It helps you send across the message to those who matter with an intelligent, always-on publishing platform.
2. Forte
It gives a boost to the signals earned from your content to drive more success to those in a paid campaign.
How it works: This feature can be used alone or in combination with any social media management solution you are using to execute your social media strategy. By analyzing your audience and its interests, it gives you an understanding of the potential appetite of a Tweet. Forte alerts the user as and when there is a real time opportunity to promote a tweet via paid campaigns by constantly tracking the conversations happening in your circles.
Key benefits:
The features helps you segment your target audience as per their interests.
It helps you allocate a budget for your paid campaigns on social platforms.
3. Crescendo
It grows, engages and converts your target audience by intelligently publishing and purchasing for maximum attention. The feature incorporates language tracking, campaign tracking and dynamic campaign generation.
How it works: The feature uses a proprietary algorithm to analyze the linguistic patterns to predict how much relevance and attention a topic will receive. The feature suggests you the ideal keywords that could bring in the maximum amount of revenue. By constantly analyzing, tracking and suggesting ad campaigns around your business, the feature helps maximize your returns by using real time social trending data. The feature not just aims at your target audience, but also at your best convertible audience.
Key benefits:
Instead of offering one dimensional demographic analysis, the tool lets you target real time conversations around your business, across the web.
It lets you keep your paid and earned activities in sync by offering an integrated social platform to amplify the reach of your messages.
The feature helps you track conversations right from the beginning till the action it makes those engaging in it, take.
It makes your strategy more result oriented without having to invest in expensive keywords.
Thinking Of Having A Try?
If you are keen on gaining in depth information about the tool, its analysis techniques and so on, you can ask for their Latest Whitepaper that gives out social media tips as well or their Forrester Report by sending in some basic information of yours to the team.
Also, ask for a Demo to try out the features of SocialFlow for free! All you need to do is fill up this simple form:
Those of you waiting to hear more from SocialFlow, here’s what Speiser has to share: “We’re launching LinkedIn and a B2B solution as well as a complete brand offering for content pairing with top publishers. I think we’ll move to advise media spending based on the leading-edge indicator that you get with social data, and maybe even show people the attention delta between types of media (for instance, Facebook vs. TV, or AdWords vs. Facebook).”
Explore Alternatives
Even though we feel the tool is really nifty, you can take a look at some of the other social media tools that could serve your purpose along the same lines like Buffer, TweetDeck and SproutSocial.
Have you used SocialFlow? Feel free to share your experience with us.
After talks of canning the hashtags, @-replies and music app, Twitter has announced the roll out of a few new features for its users. These features include the ability to select up to four photos at a time to upload while composing a tweet and its display as a collage on the tweet’s detail screen. Danny Sullivan does a test run for all his followers in his tweet.
This is a little test using some @AgentsofSHIELD pictures of the new Twiiter collage feature Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 26, 2014
And if the multi-photo support wasn’t surprising enough, Twitter now allows you to tag other people in your photos. While composing a tweet, a “who’s in these photos?” allows you to add the username of the people in the photo without taking up any characters in the body of the tweet; leaving the full character count for composing the tweet message. And this significantly expands the reach of the tweets.
Similar Features To Instagram And Facebook
With iPhone and Android device users to be the first ones to get introduced to these features, it seems that Twitter now does believe that mobiles are the ‘platforms of the future’. Twitter experts report that the company is striving to make the platform more engaging and social with its new additions that have already spurred social media users to compare it with its longtime rival, Facebook and its new competitor, Instagram. Layout wise, we think it\’s way too similar to Facebook with its’ cover photo and feed in the center.
Instagram recently hit 200 million followers and is estimated to have more mobile users than Twitter in the US, which automatically explains Twitter’s move to have introduced the image features with an update on its app. So, is Twitter trying to create a mash up of Instagram and Facebook? Well, that is something that is still debatable.
Why Did You Make These Changes Twitter?
Even though Twitter fans are all charged up about its new features, there are a few changes that haven’t gone down too well with them. The company has revamped its ‘ReTweet’ button and changed it to ‘share’. The button offers the same functionality, but takes away the charm of tweeting.
‘ReTweeting’ is now considered as much a verb as ‘Googling’ and Twitter having coined the term that went in sync with their brand image, is now not just facing the negative remarks from its users but also losing out on its branding. With even Facebook getting an ugly overhaul, people don’t seem too pleased with the biggest social media platforms. Platforms as big as them are expected to maintain their brand reputation and not follow the herd.
Twitter is known to have listened to its community when they restored their block feature, but are the new changes going to be accepted or will the platform return to its good old un-Facebook/ Instagram ways? The masses have spoken and clearly put forward their dislike towards the new ‘Share’ button.
#ItTotallyPissesMeOff when I read the news that Twitter Retweet button was suppose to get replaced with Share button. #wtf
But is this what Twitter should turn into? A place where you can upload pictures, tag friends and share them in their circles, turning into a Facebook/ Instagram look alike? Or should a platform as big as Twitter look at doing something entirely different but in sync with their brand image?
What Marketers Want To See
You have read what people expect from Twitter, but here are 5 things we\’d like to see on it:
1. Update ‘Trends’ For Chronological Content Curation
With content marketing becoming more than just a small element in a business\’s social media strategy, content curation is a necessary evil. A feature that lets us choose what we\’d like to see is surely going to help us frame our content strategies better.
Even though the company boasts about its \’Trends\’ tool, it’s not user friendly at all. The tool does let you search and view trending topics from different locations, but you have to manually apply the filter – one by one. It’d be so much better to be able to apply all the filters at one go so that we don’t have to move back and forth all the time. This would not just save time but also help us avoid the spammy ‘top posts’ that Twitter offers by default.
2. Removal Of The @-Mentions (Please!)
Agreed that @-mentions help you converse with those in your circles but honestly, how irritating it must be for your followers to keep seeing your old tweets at the top of their feed just because you decided to reply to a tweet you were mentioned in months ago.
Tweets promoting business products/ services by marketers are increasingly being missed because of all the clutter, automatically having a drastic effect on their business\’s sales graph; the scale tipping more towards the negative. A feature that could help remove such conversations could really help the marketers in reaching out to their audience.
3. Let The Images Be!
Some images attached to tweets can be viewed while scrolling through the News Feed, while the others need to be expanded. Honestly, it is very irritating when the dimensions of your image are well adjusted for it. If you haven\’t noticed this, try comparing your News Feed and your profile page!
A lot of marketers use Twitter for promoting their products/ services and images play a key role in their strategy. It\’d be great if the company shifted its focus on optimizing the images to offer uniform viewing experience on all platforms.
4. Fix The Tweet Fonts
As we\’ve always maintained, images are the most shared type of posts on social platforms. People prefer tweets for news as they are light on text; but those that come with images, are a sure shot hit! If Twitter could just fix their posted tweet fonts, the images will gain more attention. The current huge font visually competes with the larger images attached to the tweets, decreasing the interest of the viewers in both – text and image.
And the most latest of them all..
5. Bring Back The Old Timeline!
The latest update on Twitter is their overhaul of their timeline. Twitter has now moved more to the likes of Facebook and the ugly overhaul hasn\’t been accepted by all. The original look seemed more in sync with the company\’s image.
The new flashy huge look is definitely giving marketers a hard time as both their content and images are being mishmash-ed. So until another overhaul gets rolled out, ReTweet or rather Share like mad and of course, try keeping your text and image content separate from each other!
Not gonna update my twitter profile. It looks like facebook. I hate facebook. — •Kalel• (@5janosos) April 15, 2014
Wow just realized I accidentally followed three people, hate this twitter update. — VEE (@venuuhmarie) April 13, 2014
The new Twitter update is perfect for stalkers. Favourite you and then get notifications for every tweet you make.
Got any more suggestions for Twitter? Feel free to add to our list of what’s expected from the social media platform and how you re going to be using the new look for your business promotion.
A lot of social media tools have been invented and a significant amount of them faded away quickly; be it due to their limited functionalities or their similarity to another in the market, there wasn’t possibly any way they could have survived in this ever changing world of social. But there was one tool that stood out then and continues to pioneer the field of social media tools – Sprout Social. We love Sprout Social. Here’s why.
Sprout Social is to date, the biggest name when it comes to social media tools and it doesn’t come across as a surprise when Andrew Caravella, VP of Marketing, Sprout Social, told us about the thought process behind it – “The thought process behind Sprout was really about filling an emerging gap in the market. There is a huge need to provide tools that better connect and manage the social media relationships between brands and consumers. Especially in the B2B market, as businesses take to the social networks for marketing, customer service, communications and more – they need tools built for professional use.”
With social media becoming synonymous with the establishment of a brand’s presence, digital marketers are forever doing the social dance to please their audience. “Social media is synonymous with a brand’s complete presence – online, offline or otherwise. There is not a successful brand in the world that does not engage and care for their audiences using social media in some capacity. It’s not a nicety, it’s a necessity”, says Caravella.
The agenda behind giving a ‘voice’ to a brand\’s online presence is to provide an insight into the company philosophy, offer direct feedback platforms to consumers and engage them in such a way that it results in sales and keeps them hooked on to for more.
Smaller brands are forever having a tough time establishing themselves in the digital marketing world and aimlessly signing up for ad campaigns does no good. But with the ever changing marketing trends, how does one flex their strategy to be able to keep it in sync with their business marketing strategy offline?
“Focus on social engagement rather than audience recruitment. When companies initially set up social profiles, a gut instinct may be to recruit as many fans and followers as possible. It’s a classic quantity versus quality game and, while having a robust base of followers is important, it is imperative to provide those users with engaging content to keep them interested and coming back for more. Small businesses are better suited to nurture quality relationships with, say, one thousand fans than to recruit one million and never talk to them again. Develop a content and engagement strategy that includes information about your brand, upcoming promotions, relevant links and interactive questions to naturally build an engaged audience”, advises Caravella, who has been in the business long enough to know exactly what it takes to be a good marketer.
“Simply put, Sprout makes marketers’ lives easier. We offer key tools to successfully manage social engagement, publishing and analytics. Whether you’re a singular marketer working alone or handling social with a team of hundreds across your organization, our extensive collaboration and workflow features make social media easy to manage”, states Caravella, addressing all those intrigued by the popularity of Sprout Social and what it has to offer.
The tool incurs huge amount of traction from the world over as it serves as a one stop shop for the marketers. Its availability on all mobile devices, makes it a popular choice amongst those businesses managing social media on the go.
As per Caravella, “People are flocking to Sprout for a variety of reasons, because at its core, Sprout facilitates the dialogue between brands and their customers. We’re building superior software that goes out of the way and allows brands to easily engage with their customers on social media.”
With the changing digital marketing trends, CRM has become a vital part of every business’s strategy. “We think so too! From the beginning, Sprout was built on the idea that brands should engage on social – not just broadcast promotional messages. Therefore, our platform is built around the concept of social customer care and makes it easy for brands to discover, respond to and interact with the social conversations and customers that matter most. Plus, our beautiful design makes the experience seamless and enjoyable – no matter where you are”, says Caravella.
CRM is one of the highlight features of Sprout Social that makes focusing on catering to your customer needs a cakewalk, making it the top most choice amongst smart marketers.
To top it all, Sprout seems to be constantly working on bettering its interface and adding features to make marketing simpler – no matter what’s trending in the digital marketing world. “Our product teams are always focused on enhancing current capabilities, finding new ways to please our customer and, really, make their social management easier. Quite a few things in the works – but nothing we can share publicly yet!” confirms Caravella; not letting out what’s in store for future yet putting across its plan to stay on top in its field clearly.
If the alluring news has nudged you to give Sprout Social a ‘try’, the free trial with each of their plans is something you shouldn’t be missing.
Sprout Social’s impressive cliental is a proof of its awesome-ness in terms of the functionalities it offers and why it is still the top most social media tool.
Sprout’s Impressive Clientele.
Here is a quick walkthrough the tool to help you set up your business on this platform.
Creating an Account:
Signing up on this tool is extremely hassle free and takes just about a few minutes. It suffices with just a few details and saves you from having to fill in your bio data.
Connecting with Twitter:
After you sign up with the tool, the next step is to connect your Twitter account to Sprout to be able to obtain analytics in terms of engagement, conversation, etc. After you sign in with your Twitter account, the tool asks you for an authorization to access all your information.
Starting on Sprout:
Once you have logged in with your Twitter account, Sprout asks you to enter a “business name” – the name which will represent your identity in the social media community using Sprout. After the base is set up, the tool offers a few tips on how you could use it better to enhance your business on social media. The more profiles you integrate with your account, the better analytics you obtain.
The Dashboard.
Sprout’s dashboard serves navigation functionalities around seven tabs: Home, Messages, Tasks, Feeds, Publishing, Discovery and Reports.
The Home tab navigates you to your profile’s home page where you can view a quick summary of all your social accounts – trends, statistics, audience demographics, tasks, messages, etc.
The Messages tab allows you to use your business’s keywords to keep a tab on the number of comments, mentions, discussions and other worthwhile activities happening around your business on your social profiles. It brings all the notifications in one place. All you need to do is toggle accounts to view them separately.
Smart Inbox – Messages Tab.
The Tasks tab lets you keep track of all the tasks lined up to execute your business strategy on social platforms. The highlight of this feature is the fact that you can also keep a tab on the tasks assigned to your team mates to ensure they are executed efficiently.
The Feeds tab lets you view all your social profile news feed and keeps updating on a real time basis to help you keep abreast with the conversations taking place in your circles.
The Publishing tab allows you to send out updates on your social profiles. The highlight of this feature is that like on any social platform today, it allows you to schedule them according to your strategy.
The Discovery tab shows you who is added to your circles or wants to be a part of your circle; so that you can encourage further interactions. This feature also offers a ‘smart search’ option that lets you track people you feel are relevant to your business on all social media platforms.
The Discovery Tab.
The Reports tab is a pleasure for all those who firmly believe statistics and analytics can give away the success or failure of a social media strategy. Sprout gives you exact number for all the social profiles you integrate it with. Be it Facebook, Twitter or Google+, Sprout lets you know exactly how much of an impact your social media strategy has resulted in.
The Reports Tab.
Sprout Social comes with highlight features that are unmatched in the industry till date. Covering all aspects of social media marketing, it sure is going to power up your business’s social profiles! Have you used Sprout for your social media marketing strategies? Share your experience with us.
