There are usually many key areas you need to consider when you are in the process of creating your social media marketing strategy. Did you know that you can utilize most of the information you will be able to gather in your social media campaign and that you can uncover a couple of extra business opportunities with it?
Before you start with your campaign, it is very important to establish an understanding of the overall social media landscape to see exactly what information you will be utilizing and what will be the most influential to your business future’s direction with social media. Here’s a couple of tips you can use to uncover new business opportunities with your social media initiative.
Competitor analysis
By constantly monitoring your competition as well as your own company can create a fair evaluation of where your business falls within the industry. What the public say about your organization can reveal many areas of improvement that you can focus on within your company. By monitoring both the information shared by your competitors and clients can help you gain a broader understanding of their products and services disadvantages and advantages.
By using the knowledge gathered in your competitor analysis can help you strengthen your own business strategy and also provide you insight into your customer’s needs.
Industry leaders
By monitoring your overall industry landscape can accomplish two important goals: to see what important trends are emerging and how the industry is shifting. With industry experts establishing an online presence, thanks to social media, you now have the opportunity to communicate with them directly to gain a better understanding of new trends. With this you will be able to spot new changes and trends as they happen.
Message reach
Back in the day, news coverage was usually monitored to see exactly the number of impressions and clips for companies. In today’s digital lifestyle, it is not about the clips themselves, but the message that spreads. Online publications and social media allows key messages to reach further within the industry. Monitoring these messages about your company can allow you to evaluate each message perception, and how far your reach goes with each message.
Relationships
By actively monitoring your social media marketing campaign, you can leverage your strategy direct connection to potential prospects and the public. While addressing and monitoring the concerns of your prospects is very important, opportunities to secure new customers can also be achieved with the monitoring process. By tracking your competitors, the industry, and other key terms, you can identify new people looking for information on your services or products. Approaching these people can lead to new business opportunities for your company as well as raise public perception about your company.
Good post Anton and like they say there is a wealth of social data out there, however, if you don’t extract the gold it is just like any other hill. One of the team wrote a post on “turning data into insight” that dovetails into your comments above – http://igo2group.com.au/blog/social-media-and-intelligent-insight-so-what-and-who-cares/
Thanks Michael. I’ll check it out.
Anton,
Social media monitoring has its use case scenarios in a business environment, especially in the topics you mentioned; competitive analysis, reach, relationships, and finding industry leaders. It also helps with reputation management and several other things. However, there is something it lacks.
Social media monitoring doesn’t give you the ability to bring in third party data / analysis (whether manually or automatically) or even manually import non-social data. This disables the ability to correlate the data one finds back to their core business metrics. Tying everything back to the business is arguably the most important thing you can glean from data mining; social media monitoring simply falls short in this aspect of connecting the dots. Social media business intelligence is the next step above social media monitoring. Not only does one get all the functionality of a high quality social media monitor, but one can also glean significant trends from the social data and correlate it with key business performance indicators. For the c-suite executive, this relationship between social data and core business metrics is the arguably most important takeaway from social conversations online. We took stock price data from Bank of America and overlayed it with volume, sentiment, and cumulative sentiment of social mentions maintaining a common time variable. This is just one example of what I mentioned above, there are dozens of key business metrics and social metrics. Take a look:http://go.evoapp.com/rs/evoapp/images/EvoApp-Bank-of-America-infographic.jpgThanks for the post!
Best,
– Sergei