Social media is
becoming increasingly important for marketing research. Aside from using such
venues for recruiting research participants, content analysis of the social
conversation can provide valuable insights into consumer behavior. With over
1.28 billion users on Facebook, 500 million tweets sent every day, 200 million
monthly active users on Instagram and over 400 million Snapchat snaps shared
per day (Digital Insights, 2014); social media allows vast and immediate access
to the groundswell of public and, often, private opinion.
Monitoring the social conversation in
marketing research will reveal consumer insight in to their thoughts on your
business, industry and individual products. According to Blakeman (2010),
monitoring “discussions of you and your services or products is essential if
you are to nip bad press in the bud. Respond appropriately and you can turn
negative feedback into a positive story.” It may also be possible to uncover
valuable insight in to product improvements and consumer engagement tactics. According
to Byrne (2014), media monitoring allows you to:
§ Tap into conversations about your brand,
even when people are not talking directly to you
§ Identify other terms related to your brand
and how they’re being used
§ Identify trending topics and hashtags —
conversations you should be taking part in
§ Where they’re happening — both in terms of
platforms and channels and geo-location
§ What languages these conversations are
happening in
§ Who’s leading and influencing these
conversations
Mention, a social
media and web-monitoring tool, allows you to set alerts based on keywords and
view content related to those keywords directly within the tool’s application.
According to Cleary (2013), “when you monitor and track keywords, you can find
potential business, build relationships with new people and respond quickly to
situations that could damage your brand.”
Mention alerts are
easy to setup. You can add any keywords or filters you’d like to narrow your
search. For example, if you are looking for the social conversation surrounding
“craft beer” you would filter your list with the advanced setting of ALL.
Mention users can also filter what sources you are actually looking to monitor.
I’ve found it works best to turn off notifications from the web (i.e. articles)
and filter only social networks for a true look at the social conversation.
Let’s take a look at an example:
Iowa Beverage Systems, a beer distribution
company here in central Iowa, can use Mention to monitor changes in their brand
recognition, beer consumption and alcoholic beverage industry, as well as to gather
audience insight and content related to each of the brands they distribute.
(Source:
“Iowa
Beverage Systems: Beer”
Mention, 2014)
Iowa Beverage Systems could set up alerts to
monitor the terms “beer”, “craft beer” and “drinking” in order to gather
audience insight. As in the photos above, Iowa Beverage Systems can conclude
the terms are used often across social media channels with over 3,000 mentions
in under 12 hours. It is also obvious that Twitter is a primary source for the
social conversations on “beer”. From these insights, Iowa Beverage Systems
should consider monitoring Twitter more closely and activating users through
the social network more often than other networks like Facebook.
The Mention dashboard is an easy to
use interface sorting mentions by priority, favorites, relevance and more.
According to Karl (2014), “you have the option to mark mentions as favorites,
send them to trash or flag them as irrelevant. Anytime you mark a mention as
irrelevant, you’ll stop receiving mentions from that source – it’s a good way
to further filter results and cut down on the noise.” Can you think of a thread
in your business’ social conversation that you’d want to filter in order to cut
through the noise?
Mention should be used in tandem with Google
Analytics to get a full picture of consumer interaction with your business
through social media. Where Mention provides insight and response in to the
social conversation within all social networks, Google Analytics
provides insight in to which social channels are sending the most qualified
visitors to your website and further insight in to only some “partnered”
networks.
(Source: Google Analytics, 2014)
According to Melissa
Baker, author of Social Media Marketing: A Strategic Approach, “Having a
comparison of the user drop-off rates across all channels is helpful in gaining
a deeper understanding of what is working and what is not. Knowing the number
of visits each channel sent along is not enough to gauge the true success of
your messaging” (Peyton, 2012). This social visitors flow also outlines a
visitor’s journey through your conversion funnel, providing a quick analysis
and check that channels are indeed leading consumers toward a conversion.
Activity stream within
Google Analytics is the most direct comparable feature to what you’ll receive
in using Mention. Unfortunately, it only works within lesser known social
channels such as Digg, Echo, Delicious and Google+. According to Peyton (2012),
“Activity Stream allows you to view individual post/page analytics, the content
on Google Ripples, the actual content and the social activity. With one click,
you can jump to the interaction and respond, follow the user and monitor
conversations about your content.” With the real-time insights and
capabilities, it is too bad that Google falls short in playing nice with the
two largest social networks, Facebook and Twitter. Mention covers them all and
in 42 languages (Karl, 2014).
As a business you are
looking to increase conversions. Where Mention allows you to track successes
and challenges within the social conversation, Google Analytics will track the
lead to conversion once a user visits your website. By setting up GOALS within
your account, you’ll be able to begin tracking each conversion. According to
Peyton (2012), “With only a few clicks, you can quickly start tracking how social
traffic helps drive website conversions or events. This can include
obvious conversions such as an online purchase or lead form completion, but it
can also include micro-conversions such as video views or blog visits.”
(Source: Peyton, Lisa. (2012) Social
Media Examiner.)
Between Mention and
Google Analytics, social marketing efforts can be tracked from beginning to
end, inside and out. This gives you as a marketer both the broadest and deepest
insights for analysis and interpretation. It all starts with a measurable
objective. Once an objective is set, track your strategy using both tools to
draw the strongest conclusions for optimization.
