Actionly: Social Media Monitoring

We thought we’d put some together some of the best practices together as a simple framework for the 3 things you should have in your Social Media Monitoring Plan.

The Social Media Monitoring Feedback Loop

Monitor

The first piece of your monitoring plan, should be to monitor (duh) and listen to your customer. Track keywords like your brand, hashtags, industry terms and competitors insocial media monitoring tools like Actionly. You will be able to see what users are saying about you across networks like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc. You want to make sure to get actionable insight from what you monitor like are there any negative comments and if yes, how many negative comments, what is the feedback that users have and what are the things they love talking about.

Mingle

Once you are armed with data about what your customers are saying, you can start to mingle. Engage with you community with confidence. Start talking about your brand and topics your audience is passionate about. Publish blogs, social media posts, interact on relevant forums and videos. Interact with your audience, ask them questions and listen to them.

Measure

The last piece of your social plan is to measure every engagement. You can track all your posts to see how much engagement they generate. Tools like Actionly give you rich insights on things like the best times to engage with your audience based on responses. You should also measure how the performance of each post, seeing which ones generate the most engagement and Social Media ROI through integration with your analytics platform. This will tell you what types of posts work and what you should do more of.

We have just launched an insightful and quite beautiful dashboard (we think so).The new dashboard brings all your key social media metrics together in one – place and provides more actionable insights to drive your Social Media program.

Social Media Monitoring Dashboard: See post activity for your brand, competitor and industry terms across social networks and blogs.

Social Media Insights: Get deep insights for each search your are monitoring like Sentiments, Top Influencers and Top Links

Twitter Insights: View metrics for all your Twitter accounts like Followers, Retweets and Mentions. Get detailed insights into your reach and the best times of the day to post to Twitter

We posted last week on how to measure and increase your Social Media Engagement. We thought we would follow it up this week with some specific examples from the top brands that drive strong engagement with their posts on Facebook. Here are a few tips and examples:

Know your Audience

An important part of engaging with your audience is knowing your brand and your audience and crafting posts relevant to that audience. This is a great example from Converse that shows they know their younger audience and connect with them.

Be Topical

Being topical is a great way to engage your audience and be relevant and in the moment. This is a great example from Nutella that leverages a topical subject – in this case Mother’s Day.

Be Funny / Creative

Being funny and creative certainly resonates well with the Social audience. People are visual and are looking for something creative to connect with and share with their friends. Here’s a great example from Starbucks.

If your company or client is online, they might get some negative press, mentions or Facebook comments at some point of time.

Even though Social Media is here to stay and as more and more companies jump on the bandwagon. Hopefully most companies have at least got their Google alerts setup even if they are not committed to using a social media monitoring tool. Whether using a social media monitoring system or not; many companies do not have their social media policies in place. Below are a few steps to help you in such tough situation.

TIP 1 – Don’t panic. Get advice from senior team members and devise the best plan of action.

TIP 2 – Never delete a Facebook comment or try and remove or alter the comment or tweet. If the facts are wrong and it’s been posted on a blog, contact the blogger and ask him to edit or correct the information. Sometimes the blogger could even invite you to respond by writing a follow-up blog.

TIP 3 – If you need to respond to the blog as a comment or respond on Twitter or Facebook . Craft you message very carefully and always be respectful.

TIP 4 – After one response, if you get hit with a barge of more angry messages then just drop it.  Some folks need to vent and nothing good could come out of the venting game. You will get unwanted attention and it does not help your case.

TIP 5 – Sometimes offering a free trial or sending them a free case of product etc might help remedy the situation.

Always remember that whatever the situation, don’t get emotionally caught up. You are representing your brand or company at all times. Maintain your grace and treat your clients, followers even angry ones with the utmost respect always.

Facebook’s new timeline rolls out for all pages on March 30 and you must be busy updating your pages for upcoming changes or already have.

Here are some of the key take-aways for companies to optimize your Facebook pages as you prepare for these updates:

1. Design for Increased Engagement: The current Facebook pages allowed brands to create static graphics, like-gates or drive users to other tabs as a default . With the new timeline, Facebook is trying to increase engagement for users with the pages they are following. So now when someone goes to your page on Facebook organically, they immediately see the timeline of all the posts. They see the most recent posts in a more graphically pleasing way and can browse through the timeline for the brand. The key is that this forces brands to post interesting updates often to keep their pages interesting.
2. Let users Direct Message your Page: With the new pages users can not only post to your page but can also directly message the page which should help with more customer support on Facebook.
3. Increase your Reach through Premium Ads: The new pages also come with updates to premium ads. New posts by the page can now be amplified through sponsored stories that appear in user feeds across devices. Premium sponsored stories now come with the ability to ensure that at least 75% of your users see the post in their feed. Earlier only a subset of users would see your posts based on the Edge Rank. The new ads with “Reach Generator” now let brands reach a broader set of their fans which should be a great way to engage with your fans. (read more)
4. Curate your Timeline: Facebook also lets your pin a favorite post to the top of the page, but only for 7 days. This gives you flexibility but forces you to continue to update your posts often. You can also highlight posts, hide posts and add milestones to your timeline

Please continue to share the success stories from the pages you manage, and we will keep you updated as the pages roll out.

Conversations with Abbi Whitaker of The Abbi Agency. Abbi’s advise is to slow down and just listen and then devise a strategy based on competitors strategy and overall marketing programs.

Tell us a little bit of the product and the history of your company/ team.  We are an integrated marketing company that focuses on PR, Social Media and Expert Positioning through content creation.  We work with tech start ups, food & beverage, franchises and B2B companies.

In general what are your marketing strategies? We try to create strategies for clients that feed off each other.  Their social media campaign needs to dove tail into their traditional PR campaign and their expert positioning strategy should complement their traditional media outreach.  We create campaigns where all the moving parts are working together and all the content coincides.

How is social media helping you?  What is your social media strategy? What social media channels do you use and why? Any other social channels that you want to start using and why? We believe social media works best when it’s part of an overall campaign. A good example would be the “Desert of the Day” campaign we did for Donsuemor.  We sent 41 top tier desert bloggers cookies to create recipes with during National Desert Month.  Each one took pictures, created a recipe and posted it to their social networks.  They spread the message for us. We also posted the recipes and pictures to our network and got relish.com, the largest food site in the US, to feature all the recipes. The bloggers got national exposure, we got amazing content and our social networks grew. We are really focusing on how Pinterest can help retail brands grow and engage consumers as well as using YouTube to create custom content for bloggers.

What social strategies / tactics have worked and what hasn’t. Any Social Media challenges you have experienced?   Listening is the best tactic out there.  Slow down, listen to what others are saying about your brand and your competitors and develop a plan based around that.  Take the time to ask your audience what they want and pay attention to the insights so that your time is spent crafting messages that resonate with the target audience.

Any Social Media learning’s or success you want to share?   We recently launched CAMPO, a restaurant in Reno/Tahoe that has taken the community by storm.  We work closely with the chef and owner Mark Estee to ensure that all Facebook, Twitter, Yelp and Open Table comments, concerns and kudos are responded to in under a few hours.  We have a weekly posting schedule that includes things like “Caught at CAMPO” and the “Monday Minute.”  We tag, we engage, we talk and we listen.  We have also utilized platforms such as ShortStack, a free custom tab building tool, to host contests.  This has proven to be very successful.  Actionly helps us monitor that conversation and respond quickly.

Share any industry innovations where you are leading or have an edge over your competitors or your industry. We have recently started doing a lot of infographics to accompany our PR and social media pitches.  We are finding that media outlets love this quick and easy form of communication and it’s helping us get more coverage for our clients.

If using Actionly, what are some of the features that rock your boat? I love the top influencer feature, top tweet feature and the stream.  I would LOVE to see more prettier graphs.  Clients love graphs and it would make reporting easier for us.

We are pleased to announce that Actionly has added LinkedIn Groups to its entourage of Social Media Channels that it tracks. The Actionly team is really excited about this feature release as this pushes Actionly in to the enterprise realm of things.

Actionly covers quite an extensive list of sources such as Twitter searches, Twitter accounts, Facebook searches, Facebook pages, LinkedIn groups, Blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Google Plus, News Sites and now LinkedIn Groups.

From Actionly’s social media dashboard, you can track your LinkedIn Stream, View and filter to specific LinkedIn groups and compose to your LinkedIn Wall as well. With Actionly’sintegration into Google Analytics we can track your post-click activity.

How do I access My LinkedIn Groups on Actionly?

Once you are logged into Actionly, click on Settings>My Accounts and setup your LinkedIn group.

Email support@actionly for a demo and a free trial!

Conversation with Tobias Kahn, Community Manager for 995 Dreams, the company that has created four Apple Hall of Fame apps and keeps coming up with more gorgeous engaging apps!

Tell us a little bit of the product and the history of your company/ team.                      Our mission here at 955 Dreams is making inspiring mobile experiences. The company started a bit over a year ago, and since then we’ve worked to bring music to life with the three products we’ve completed so far: The History of Jazz (iPad), On The Way To Woodstock(iPad) and Band of the Day (iPhone and iPad).  All have our apps have been featured as an Apple app of the week, four are Apple Hall of Fame apps, and Band of the Day was the runner-up to Apple’s iPhone app of the year. Band of the Day was featured as iPad app of the week when it debuted on iPad.

In general what are your marketing strategies?                                                                Most of our marketing in 2011 happened organically based on the strength of our products. Features in high profile publications like the Guardian and the New York Times as well a many blogs and other publications, features in the App store, and good old fashioned word of mouth. We also began to use social media, which we are currently putting more time and energy into.

What is your social media strategy?                                                                                                    We’re only just getting started with our social media tactics but have been seeing steady increases in followers/engagement over the last few months! We focus on Facebook and Twitter primarily. We start conversations with nearly all Twitter users who talk about us (their sentiments are pretty much always positive) or retweet them. Much of our strategy is also based around interacting with the bands we feature, many of whom have large a large social media presence and help expose us to their fans!

What social strategies / tactics have worked and what hasn’t.Reaching out to bands/labels has probably been the best way to expose us to new users. Our biggest challenge so far has been Facebook, it’s harder to reach out to people on Facebook than Twitter as it’s much more of a closed system, and we’ve gotten less engagement on Facebook on than on Twitter. In 2012, we’re planning on executing contests and other tactics to combat this.

 If using Actionly, what are some of the features that rock your boat?                                        We like the graphs incorporate into Actionly. It allows to quickly glimpse how keywords are doing. Besides they have great customer service.