This is the third and final part in a series of posts detailing how to maximize your listening efforts by following the social media search cycle. This post will cover how to act based on your search results and reporting. Previous posts have covered defining and refining search terms, and how to organize and report on your data.
After you have tracked social media mentions for your brand and generated some useful reporting information, the next step is to take action. This action can take many forms, but generally falls into two categories: the macroscopic, social media campaign, and the finer grained process of community and brand building. Often the two can overlap, but for many smaller organizations putting effort towards community and brand building is key, while larger brands should use both methods.
Community and Brand Building
Community and brand building can take many forms: broadcast, conversation, damage control, etc. Each of these methods depends on your approach to social media monitoring and what you plan to get out of your tracking.
Broadcasting is often the key to community building. Community building is the process of getting people to follow you that respect your voice on a particular social media platform. Making social media posts (on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) that are useful or interesting to your followers is the key to successful broadcasting. In this respect, the reporting that you have collected using a social media listening tool can help you to refine the topics and categories to focus on. The key to successful broadcasting is not blind self-promotion. Posts about something other than your brand or posts that offer some sort of benefit to the reader can be the most useful in community building. Make sure that (like television) you balance the promotional mentions with a liberal amount of content.
You can also use your collected data as a conversation and damage control tool. Even if only one percent of your mentions are negative, the bad mentions still stand out from the crowd. Responding to mentions tagged as negative can appease some of your toughest critics. Comcast’s social media CRM is a great case study.
This same approach can also be applied to conversations around your product or organization. Inserting yourself into a conversation, even though it isn’t negative, can let people know that you are listening and accessible. Also remember that it is often good form to thank people for mentioning or re-tweeting you or your product.
The Social Media Campaign
Social media campaigns are intentional attempts at increasing followers and expanding reach with the ultimate goal of promoting brand recognition. They are often paid campaigns run by advertising/digital agencies and have a life-cycle which involves a fixed cost and a response rate. Because of the life-span and cost of these campaigns, businesses often want to see a return on investment (see the previously mentioned slide deck by Olivier Blanchard detailing how the social media search cycle is actually a precursor to gauging return on investment). Business level benchmarks need to be set and measured against the life of social media campaigns to properly determine what is working. These campaigns can take many forms, but often involve some of the same tactics detailed in the community and brand section.
What else can I do with my data?
Social media data and analytics reports don’t necessarily have to be used for brand building or social media campaigns. You can take the data and use it as a secondary method to gauge traditional advertising success. You can also mine the data for useful information, building lists of competitors, categories, or potential clients. In fact if you are just starting out in social media, you should just “listen” to the data for a while to determine which approach or information is meaningful for your business’s goals.
The Cycle Continues
While the two methods above differ in approach and scale, both can be costly in time and money. You should refine your approach at each step of the social media cycle, especially after taking action. After making a first attempt at either campaigning or conversing, you will begin to see some sort of response, be it positive, negative, or just silence. As was mentioned before, thinking of social media tracking as a cycle can help keep your efforts on track.