Monitoring + Engagement

It has been a long time since we have been watching the fast movement within the Social Media world and throughout we have seen many ups and many downs.

Here in the DGC we take many aspects into consideration when conducting a detailed analysis, sometimes you may simply want to find out who is saying negative things about you and where they are saying it. Others, you may simply want to see who loves your brand and is saying wonders about it.

No matter which you pick them both will have to be conducted the same way. The results however, will be very different and what you choose to do with them is what will count in the end.

We look at the negative results as opportunities to improve a service and sometimes as a way to learn something new about how to deal with customers and how to resolve issues that most of the times are rather simple to resolve.

As a brand, how would you use Social Media to resolve customer complaints, engage with your community and track any possible opportunities? Would  you carry out the normal day-to-day activity or would you continuously monitor for specific mentions?

Why Fridays are great in Social Media

Hello everyone, we hope you are all doing well and ready for the weekend.

Yesterday we spoke about why patience is important while devising and carrying out social media plans to increase business productivity (Advertising / Marketing).

Today we will speak about how great Fridays are when it comes to reaching your audience. We will start by asking all of you how you usually attempt to reach a number of people, do you use Facebook for this, Twitter, or any other social network?

Of course, not all social networks offer the same opportunities, whereas on Twitter you can simply tweet #FF and add a couple of Twitter handles to reach more people, on Facebook the same rule does not apply. Unfortunately there is no such thing as follow Friday on Facebook which makes us wonder, does Facebook experience less traffic on Friday than all the other days due to Twitter’s follow Friday?

On Twitter on the other hand, Friday is the only day where it is acceptable to tag people in your tweet for no apparent reason without sounding like a stalker, this on its own has its advantages when used by businesses as it allows them to reach a huge number of people without people thinking they are being sold something, of course with some people this will not be the case.

Overall, Fridays are great for Social Media users and taking full advantage of it should be priority to anyone wanting to grow their reach and increase awareness about their products or services.

What do you think of the above? Do you have any suggestions to the questions asked? Let us know below with a comment or go onto Twitter and answer with the hashtag #FFArticle.

The Advancements of Social Media

A couple of weeks ago we spoke about Facebook’s Graph Search engine that will be integrated into their platform this year.

Now, since they have finally given out more information about it we can create a more solid idea of its benefits and it’s less beneficial sides.

Is being able to find what people like on Facebook going to help smaller businesses to succeed at attracting more clients or is it just going to be another one of Facebook’s strike against protecting user’s privacy?

In a sense, it can be a little bit of both. At this point in time it is only what pages people have liked that will become available as suggestions to other users searching for a particular service and that alone will indeed increase the popularity of certain businesses but it will also impact on others. Will there be a balance?

What do you think of Facebook’s new search engine? Do you think it will be a great help for businesses to get more coverage or will it be an undercover assassin?

Why businesses need Social Media

Yesterday we saw how businesses are advertising using Social Media in conjunction with their old ways of advertising that have been done for years.

Today we will look at why a business needs to engage in Social Media and what the benefits are at the end of the day.

First of all, do you think any business (no matter how big) can survive for a very long time without being able to respond to their customers via Twitter / Facebook rather than email or phone call?

Sure, there should be all mediums of communication available but phone calls and emails are a lot more time consuming and sometimes give way to even worse situations with customers already unhappy about the service and then having to either be on hold for an eternity or receiving bad customer service.

Do you agree that companies need to incorporate Social Media into their communication strategies and keep a consistent line of communication with their customers and potential new customers?

Here is a little example of how much the general public hates to be on the phone to brands they get products from, let us know what you think of the statements above.

From the green to the red:

Virgin is where it is simply because it has a twitter account that can be used to resolve this, however, the mention about the insurance company is not so positive, considering the person did not mention which company straight away is a risk itself. They will surely mention it to their community both online and offline which makes it hard to resolve for the company in question.

Apple is in the red, this is because they do not carry out any sort of customer service on Twitter and this may be working for them now but it will soon prove to be a challenge as the loss of customers could be contained if all the complaints were resolved like this one.

Advertising using Social Media

Hello everyone, we hope you are all doing well and ready for another day in this busy week!

Yesterday we looked at how some brands take advantage of what is a bad moment for some in order to take over the spotlight. We used Oreo Cookies as an example, they did this wonderfully and reaped the rewards in the end.

Today we will talk about using Social Media to advertise your brand and products and how effective it really is.

The great side to using Social Media to advertise is that in most platforms, this is not limited to brands alone, look at Facebook and Twitter, they allow any user to promote specific content in order for it to reach a bigger audience maximising their ROI.

Today we will talk about using Twitter as a platform to advertise products and services. This extremely large community offers the opportunity to increase awareness and tempt potential customers to engage with the material being promoted, this can be done for free and it is not time consuming at all but how does this compare to paid advertising?

Paid advertising immediately makes you think that you will have to spend huge amounts to reach the desired audience, but this type of advertising is actually achievable without spending too much.

Twitter allows users to control how much is spent by only charging per click (when someone follows or RTs) and this is what makes it so accessible.

However, this will only work if the right material is made available to the audience, if you are a business selling computer components don’t go in talking about how ice cream is nice on a Friday evening, it confuses your audience and it decreases your chances of getting something back from the effort you have put in already.

How a tweet can change it all.

Another week is here, did you all have a good weekend?

Today we will speak about how a single tweet can put a brand on everyone’s eyes and mouths, it is very easy to tweet, in fact, 55 million tweets are sent out every day by over 500 million twitter users.

These numbers make it harder to think how one tweet will gain more coverage when there are millions of other tweets coming in and out of every user’s timeline.

The Superbowl in the US has been a massive event as usual, alone generating incredible amounts of buzz on the Social World and it is a great example of how a brand can gain massive amounts of exposure if putting a strategy in place to make the most of this event.

In this occasion we looked at Oreo Cookies, on twitter they have roughly 70K followers which is rather small for a brand, usually this small number will also make it harder to reach the desired amount of audiences but they’ve recently proved everyone wrong.

Oreo took advantage of a unique moment, a power cut. During this power cut they intelligently tweeted this:

This tweet alone generated over 10K RTs, thousands of favourites and great reaction from the public. This was an incredible feat by a brand that is small in Social Media, this is what we call a great Social Media Achievement!

What do you think of this action? Is there anything that you would have done differently?

 

Business without Social Media

After discussing Facebook’s Graph Search yesterday we now ask, would a business be able to carry on without ever using Social Media at all?

Taking all aspects that Social Media can offer to a business our answer is no, no business will be able to carry on without adopting Social Media at some point. While some will survive for a couple more years without engaging with customers on Twitter or Facebook, others will succumb to the ever growing risk of being in the middle of a crisis and not knowing where it started or how to end it.

But let’s speak about the most important sides of Social Media. The Tracking, Monitoring and
Engagement side are a must if a business wants to succeed in the social world.

Twitter being one of the most popular platforms people use to express their opinions, how does a business keep itself updated without tracking these all important mentions? But most importantly, without any monitoring, how does a business even know there are current customers discussing or even complaining about their services in the social web?

These are all important actions that need to be carried out in order to be successful at Social Media and there are prime examples of how businesses fail to respond to their customers, many times.

See below the mentions we have tracked by a specific business, unfortunately these have not been responded to which leads us to believe if a crisis breaks loose this business won’t even know until its already too late.

Having a bad comment about you on the social web happens, but when there are several across different platforms then there is definitely something to worry about.

We used a random brand to conduct this analysis and as shown, there is reason for this brand to dive straight into Social Media and begin the long process of mending what is broken. These are simply some of the comments we came across for there are many more.

What do you think the easiest steps to resolve these issues are? Do you think there is still time?

Keeping It Online

The online world has been growing and growing in the last couple of years, mostly in the last 2 years and now it is starting to take a toll on many businesses.

Yesterday we spoke of how Comet failed to adapt to the ever turning wheel of change and how Currys/PCWorld is following the same path, did you agree with our article?

HMV has been the latest victim of the ever growing competition for customers in the online space, with the giant Amazon leading this space. So where has HMV gone wrong?

Being around for roughly 90 years, it has faced a lot of change along its journey. This varied from introduction of computers into business and laws, but one change that could have made a big difference was to create and deploy a Social Media strategy and increase their online presence.

With the Ebays and Amazons being so diverse, a business can’t afford to delay their movement online as catching up with some of the long-time online occupants will always prove to be a great challenge and the sooner it is taken on, the sooner it can be overcome.

We have analysed all mentions on the Social Web in the whole of last year regarding HMV and have found it to be minimal when you compare it to the likes of Amazon. Negative comments were not being resolved or responded to which allowed these to remain in the public space causing further damage behind the scenes.

We have learned that unresolved negative comments made by the public usually result in loss of current customers and it presents an obstacle when it comes to acquiring new customers.

As you can see below, activity isn’t extreme and like we said yesterday, presence sometimes isn’t enough. When you don’t use your online presence to please and help your customers then your presence is worth the same as no presence at all.