Social Media 101 Tips:
Business isn’t as usual; consumers have become empowered, and stronger than ever. Customers are on multiple social media platforms, increasingly vocal and being heard. If you proactively listen to what is being said about your brand, you will stay ahead of the curve, increase revenue, and make important connections with your target audiences.
Sometimes listening to your consumers can even get you out of trouble. Remember the GAP fiasco? Last October, Gap tried to change their classic logo; the problem is they changed it suddenly without any forewarning to their fans which resulted in complaints from fans across Facebook, Twitter and tech blogs. Gap quickly learned from the feedback and changed back to their old logo.
We are seeing brands listening to their fans increasingly more, even letting fans help or fully make decisions, for example PepsiCo Inc.’s Doritos brand had challenged their fans to create and vote on Super Bowl commercials.
At MetroStar Digital we listen to what is being said about our customers’ brands with our social media display and moderation systems, Zoomph. The analytics provided from Zoomph allows our New Media Producers to actively listen to Twitter and Facebook for key terms and hashtags that might benefit our clients like Saint Germain Catering, ASPR or AAFMAA. By monitoring what conversations are being had around these brands, we are able to better create digital marketing campaigns that appeal to their target audiences.
An example of proactively listening is when The U.S. Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) launched a challenge to the community to leverage open source data from Twitter to find trending diseases and illnesses in geographic areas. They asked us to assist them in promoting their Now Trending Challenge. We used Zoomph to listen to conversations regarding the challenge and find contestants and communities to target with customized messaging. We boosted engagement by contestants, answered questions from the community, and received promotional support from social media influencers in the medical field. Also, we targeted individuals with high Klout scores, with large amounts of followers, and asked them for assistance in promoting the challenge.
Simply put, if you don’t listen to your fans, it will come back to haunt you. Zoomph allows you to easily do this so you don’t end up with your own United Breaks Guitars YouTube video.
Thoughts, questions, or want to debate why paper should beat rock? Tweet me at @Zonozi
image credit: highersights via flickr