The Key Elements for Providing Social Media Customer Care

Social media has grown into a powerhouse for businesses all around the world. Social media around the world and its reach is at an all-time high. This is all thanks to technology advancements that have happened within the past decade. Brands now use social media as their main source for customer service, digital marketing, boosting brand awareness, and engagement. Satisfying customer needs is an essential part in maintaining a brand’s image, which is why social media customer care is so important.

Customer service now is a lot different than it used to be. Although the same goal exists, which is to satisfy customer needs, it is now much more approachable and efficient due to the advancements in social technology. In fact, 67% of consumers have engaged a brand’s social media for customer needs, which is obviously a lot of exposure for a brand. Ultimately, the main objective is to develop an inclusive community via social media. One of the key elements to achieve excellent social media customer care is making sure to reply to followers as quickly as possible.

Traditional forms of customer service, such as telephone and email, and even more outdated, by mail, are not always available 24/7. However, social media is not only a lot more efficient, but in certain way it is a lot more user friendly for customers to get their questions answered. As a result, 42% of customers expect a response on social media within 60 minutes. Of course, for a growing brand this seems like an impossible task. At Bright Age, our team of marketing specialists see this task as an opportunity to help maintain your brand image. Word-of-mouth is one of the simplest ways of marketing online. As a result of good customer service, the community will feel more obliged to give positive feedback online, which others see and often make a decision to go with your brand over a competitor. For example, GoodRx, a client of Bright Age, showcased a positive review on their Instagram, which thousands of other potential customers can see.

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This is an excellent way of promoting social media customer care in a way that is refreshing for the community to see. It also forms a sense of reliability for the brand in a subtle way.

Another key element in providing social media customer care is making sure each and every person in the community is being heard. All forms of feedback, questions, and comments need acknowledgement. Just as no business would leave a customer unattended to in a store, it should be the same on social media. When responding to customers online, it should sound personable, not like a robot. If you can, always greet them with their name. This is an easy, personable way to reassure customers that they are talking to an actual person. If they are simply asking for more information or asking where they can find your other social media pages, providing links is a great way to help direct customers in the direction they are trying to go.

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As with everything, there is a line to draw when it comes to customer care online. Knowing what to post is crucial, considering people may interpret things differently. Of course, the hope for any business is that every review, comment, and remark is a positive one. However, some negativity is inevitable. The key is knowing how to combat negativity with positivity. For example, when a negative comment is posted, many businesses may feel inclined to defend themselves. However, this may not come off well to the community. The saying “the customer is always right” is certainly applicable for social media customer care. If someone posts a negative comment or review, it is possible that hundreds, even thousands of other customers will see this. An example of a positive response to a negative comment would start with a sincere apology, and end with a phone number to assist the customer better. Going back to the line to draw when knowing what to respond with, it is always better to leave the ball in the customer’s court, which is why giving a reachable phone number is a good idea when resolving a conflict.

When consumers need to ask a question or solve a problem, they turn to the digital world to get help, which is why social media in customer service plays a huge role in the success of a brand’s advocacy. Monitoring customer service can be tricky and hard to manage with a growing business. That is why digital marketing agencies such as Bright Age exist to help you manage every aspect of your business. Our specialists use social media management tools to assure the customer care needs are organized and settled efficiently.

How to Form a Social Media Monitoring Strategy

Within our digital world today, social media has become a critical tool for effective marketing strategies. Social media is a big platform for brands to be able to market their products, as well as interact with followers. Social listening recently has created a big impact within marketing strategies, due to brands focusing on monitoring their digital conversations with consumers, to have the opportunity to understand their feedback online. Having a social media monitoring strategy is important for brands to be able to maximize the amount of engagements between the brand and consumers and expand to reach new customers.

At Bright Age, we have established an impactful social media monitoring strategy for one of our clients, Galaxy Theatres. From fifteen different accounts to manage on each social channel, the strategy we have created allows us to maximize as much content as possible, while being able to reach new target audiences.

On Instagram, our strategy requires different steps in order to be efficient:

Look at Tagged Photos: Looking at photos that visitors have tagged your account in makes it easy to engage with their content and comment back to their post. A benefit of going through tagged photos is being able to repost quality customer content onto your account. Followers typically like to see user-generated content as it encourages them to be interactive with your business as well!

social media monitoring strategy - galaxy mg

For Galaxy Theaters Riverbank, looking at tagged photos enables us to see content that moviegoers have taken in the theater and are able to share with the community!

Look at Hashtags: Hashtags are quite effective, as people are constantly utilizing this tool to further elevate their posts. Hashtags allow your brand to be further emphasized through this tactic. By using hashtags, it gives users a chance to further engage with content they might have missed, due to a lack of location or photo tags. Hashtags are a good way to reach different target audiences as well, as you are able to explore the communities behind the other hashtags that were within the same post as your branded hashtag.

Looking at the branded hashtag, #galaxymissiongrove,we are exposed to a variety of posts that guests have shared to highlight their theatre experiences. Using a branded hashtag allows the opportunity for content to be displayed within the hashtag community.

Look at Location Tags: On Instagram, location tags are becoming important since followers want to see where their friends are and want to have the same experience as them. This is also a good way to have your brand be mentioned, as location tagging is becoming critical in gaining exposure to your specific brand.

social media monitoring strategy - galaxy location

By looking at the location tag for Galaxy Theaters Riverbank, there is content from customers sharing their experience within the theater, as well as additional photos from people within the surrounding area of the tagged theater. These additional posts are excellent to interact with, if they could be potential customers!

Reach Outer Communities: Looking beyond the tagged content can help elevate your target audience. By looking at content within your targeted cities, such as popular restaurants and hangouts, etc. you are able to expand your target audience, and engage with their content, hoping they will engage with yours back. Researching surrounding cities is a great tactic to be able to engage with local content as well as creating a connection with potential customers.

social media monitoring strategy - galaxy hashtag

Looking at posts with the tagged location allows a new community to be reached. This feed gives the most recent posts with the tagged city, allowing the opportunity to engage with new accounts and expand our following.

Creating a social media monitoring strategy will help benefit your brand’s social media presence. By engaging with tagged content, as well as outside content allows you to build a bigger following and reach new target audiences you have not interacted with previously. At Bright Age, we will develop a unique social media monitoring strategy for your brand and help increase engagement through your accounts!

The Importance of Social Media Community Management During a Crisis

The importance of social media community management during a crisis is extremely essential. Your community is your audience, and through social media, we have the immense opportunity to deliver content that is beneficial to your audience. However, if you find your brand lacking managerial attributes in a time of need, you may want to consider contacting a community management agency, such as Bright Age to get the support your brand needs during a crisis.

Social media community management is all about how your brand engages with the community in an online space. In other words, it is how your brand seizes the day. Your community may be specialized to one location, but it is essential to reach new users through Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and any other social media networks your company may use.

community management agency social media crisis - crowd

Whether it is a PR problem, a catastrophe in advertising that needs to be fixed, or even a natural disaster causing your company to take things remote, one of the most important things to consider in a crisis is making sure your social media is alive online. Many people tune into social media as their main source of news. It may be through a Tweet, or an Instagram or Snapchat story, getting your words of wisdom out there for your community to see is essential in maintaining your brand’s online personality. It is also important to prioritize what and who you are engaging with. Since 2014, customer complaints on social media have increased eight times, so make sure you are especially supportive to those who have a problem that your brand can help solve.

Monitoring what is relevant to your brand is one of the key aspects of community management. Keeping relevant discussions alive will ensure to the community that you care about them and how they feel about your brand. This will help you analyze how the public perceives your brand, and how you can enhance it. During a crisis, you want to be the brand that the public turns to for reliable, convenient information. While this may be overwhelming, especially in a time of a predicament, a community management agency will take care of social listening for your brand, which in return will eliminate stress.

It is true, that every comment you post on social media leaves a digital footprint. The more positivity you and the community create for your brand through networks, the stronger your brand will be. Handling community management during a crisis is extremely hard to do when you really must be careful what type of content you are engaging with through social media. Of course, it may seem like the easier option to have an automated bot system run your likes and comments system, but this will only do harm in the long run. That is why Bright Age is fully equipped with social media marketing specialists who only use their creativity to engage with the community online, no bots necessary.

A tip to help you when dealing with a hardship in an online space is to directly encourage happy customers. It is easy to engage with people who are happy about your brand. Inspire them to share your photo or post. This is a way you can use a branded hashtag.

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Lastly, it is important to set goals for your company if similar problems reoccur. Set roles for each person involved in your company and create a space where your community feels secure in knowing their questions will be answered, and their voice will be heard. Communicating internally is essential in crisis management, so making sure the team that holds your brand together is heard as well.

Crises can happen at any growing company, but what you learn from them is what is going to improve your brand. A reliable social media community management strategy is essential to have during these times of distress. Let Bright Age, a thriving community management agency, help in creating an engaging space for the public. Our specialized team of marketing professionals will be sure to help relieve the stress of any disaster you may encounter.

The Benefit of Using Twitter to Promote Your Brand

Twitter is an essential social media platform that has been continuously growing with over 326 million monthly active users. Adding Twitter to your social media management strategy could be the next step in enhancing your brand’s presence. Take this as an opportunity to work with a marketing agency like Bright Age to ensure your brand is reaching new audiences!

Twitter app on iPhone for social media management

The Benefits of Using Twitter

Having a Twitter presence allows brands to create a stronger connection with their followers through content creation and community engagement. Creating content that gives followers a chance to interact with Tweets is very beneficial. Some successful methods include asking questions or creating a poll, which give followers a chance to share their feedback. Twitter creates a seamless way to see followers’ comments, simply by going through the replies to the brand’s original Tweet and managing how the public is reacting. This is beneficial as you are able to see followers sharing their opinion of what was just released in real time, giving brands the opportunity to self-reflect and elevate their appearance.

 

By using Twitter, you are able to locate people who have similar interests to your brand, which leads to finding potential customers that you don’t already reach. Using hashtags has become the norm, since Tweets with hashtags get almost double the engagement than Tweets without hashtags. By utilizing hashtags, it creates a way for your brand to be exposed to new followers and reach a completely different audience. Creating a hashtag to promote a specific campaign allows your audience to Tweet using that same hashtag as well, creating a sense of inclusiveness within the campaign for followers to interact. When there is high-traffic conversation about a topic, the hashtag associated with the material becomes “trending”. Trending hashtags allow more visibility for your page, which creates a bigger audience. Different hashtags are trending each day, but the ones that get the most engagements are related to holidays like #InternationalWomensDay or contests being promoted by using #Giveaway. Using a hashtag that is simple yet relates to your brand encourages viewers to engage with the hashtag as well.

Twitter hashtag for International Womens Day showing social media management

Twitter Ads

Brands can pay for a promoted ad that shows up on users’ timelines as they are scrolling through their most recent or filtered content. By utilizing Twitter ads, it reaches your audience in a more direct way, as it could show up on any user’s feed, not just your target audience. Twitter ads increase traffic to your profile and website as new users are coming across your brand and are intrigued to learn more. Users are also able to interact with promoted Tweets as well, just like they do with organic content. For example, an airline may create an ad that promotes their brand, as well as include a hyperlink to their website and hashtags to ensure maximum exposure. This ad can be featured on anyone’s timeline, increasing their target audience.

social media management screenshot of British Airways to show example of twitter ad
How to Use Twitter Ads

In order to utilize Twitter ads, there are a few steps to go through in order to reach maximum exposure. First, choose your target audience. An ideal target audience should be based on interests, geography, gender, etc. that are somewhat similar to your normal following, but also differs to reach a new market. This will help maximize your Tweet’s range as it will appear on users’ timelines that wouldn’t come across your brand naturally. Next, draft a catchy caption to grab the attention of your audience so your account can receive more exposure. Lastly, set a budget and only pay when users follow your account, as well as retweet, like, or click on your promoted Tweet. Using Twitter ads puts you in complete control. There’s no minimum amount you have to spend, meaning you can start and stop it any time you would like. Total cost are measured in  cost per engagement or cost per 1,000 impression.

 

Twitter is a beneficial tool to utilize within your social media management strategy. Contact Bright Age today for assistance with enhancing your brand’s presence on Twitter!

 

 

The Importance of Having Branding Style Guides

Let’s say you have a killer business idea. All the market research, investments and official legal aspects are done, and you are fortunate enough to have a valuable team by your side. Don’t cut the blue ribbon just yet. No business plan is complete without a clear branding vision for your company.

From B2B organizations to startups, great companies have brilliant branding style guides. Serving as the foundation for the face of your company, branding style guides should be an integral part of your marketing and content strategy.

 

A Brief History

Style guides are not a revolutionary concept, even though technology today makes us believe they are. With the invention of the printing press, suddenly more people could access information. Early printing publications created branding style guides relative to their businesses to create cohesiveness through layout and art as well as speech and prose. No kidding! This is why we use branding style guides today.

 

What Are Branding Style Guides?

A style guide, in essence, is a document that provides insight and scaffolding for the way your brand should be presented to the world from a graphic and language angle. It creates a coherent, overarching perspective of 3 key concepts:

 

  • Design: How will the logo look? What sort of color palette and themes will be used? How about font choice? What kinds of photography do you deem acceptable?

 

Check out this example from Spotify on what their logo is allowed to look like when used by their partners.

Content creation company screenshot of Spotify Style Guidelines to show example of style guidesContent creation company screenshot of Spotify Style Guidelines to show example of style guides.

We can see that they clearly show what is acceptable from their wordmark to their logo. They allow for examples of what NOT to do to make sure that they are completely transparent.

 

  • Language: Limitations of names, pairing of brands, terminology, authorizations, endorsements, and use of content—all these things need to be disclosed. Language can also overlap with design choices – what is it that viewers should feel from a selected photograph? What kind of communication style does your brand give? Is it simple and straight to the point or is it more thoughtful and open to interpretation?

 

Here is an example from Nike Football on what sort of language style they want to use in all their marketing choices.

 

Content creation company screenshot of Nike Football brand book to show example of style guides.

Content creation company screenshot of Nike Football Style Guidelines book to show example of language in style guides. 

Their title page immediately introduces us to the theme of their brand. Large, block letters against a passionate photograph of players in the background invokes their bold and shameless message. Inside we find more of the same, rather instead of calling it “identity guide” or “design rules,” they have “DESIGN COMMANDMENTS,” paralleling their motto, “BE BIG, EXPRESSIVE, UNAPOLOGETIC.”

 

  • Character: What sort of personality does your brand have? Is it fun and witty or quiet and subdued?

 

Find out about Chipotle’s personality by looking at their Instagram. 

 

 Content creation company screenshot of Chipotle's Instagram Profile to show example of personality.

 

Chipotle wants to interact with their customers on a personal level by showcasing memes about their food as well as their team. While it’s important to be relatable and approachable to customers, it is also important to highlight your products and brand as well at the same time as being in line with your mission statement.

 

Consistency is Key!

 

As discussed in our previous blog post, “The Importance of Having Consistent Social Media Themes and Styles,” consistency gives your brand a clear direction, a higher accuracy in targeting potential customers, and is necessary for brand growth. Having an aesthetically pleasing look and a clear communication style across all parts of your business is the goal here.

 

Not to mention, branding style guides also allow companies to tell a dynamic story about who they are and what direction they are going. With technology advancements today, businesses are fortunate to have an opportunity to tell their story on many new platforms and to an even bigger audience than ever before. It is crucial for an upcoming business to be as homogenous as possible across all areas, especially social media.

 

Today, social media serves as a first impression to many people about your company. Take pride in that! Building brand style guides can be overwhelming to one person, so share it with a content creation agency. Bright Age can help you with your branding and graphic design needs as well as your social media look. They can help guide you through the process and conduct the market research needed to help your company reach its potential. For more information on our services, please follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

 

How to Grow and Maintain Your Social Media Audience with Community Management

As a brand, growing your social media audience takes prioritizing and knowing who your target market is. Essentially, the goal is to have your content seen by the whole community. However, conducting a strong audience is challenging for any business. What is the secret to building a social media empire? The answer is authentic engagement.

Just as we do in person, we all want recognition and to have our questions answered on social media. A strategy of checking direct messages is not necessarily enough engagement to maintain a steady social media presence. Other ways to increase your presence include checking who your new followers are, seeing who is liking your photos, commenting on their photos if appropriate, and simply learning to navigate and communicate with what is relevant to your brand on all social media platforms.

community management social media marketing services

The use of social media marketing services makes this process a lot more manageable. This engagement strategy, if staying consistent, can really impact your brand awareness in a positive way. Another thing to note while engaging through social media is that everyone interprets certain things differently. You may intend to say something one way but the person you are communicating with may read it differently. This is just the way digital communication works, which is why it must always be cautious and strategic.

 

 

Engagement doesn’t always have to consist of your followers asking you questions. If you take the time to ask your followers questions, taking their wants and needs into consideration, this will help you prioritize and organize your social media platforms. One of the most important things to strive for when maintaining your social media audience is setting goals. This is a crucial step, not only at the beginning stages of your brand, but throughout your brand’s growth as well. At Bright Age, our social media marketing services will help you set and maintain those specific goals.

 

Networking is an important tool that is widely used in business, specifically to build connections with people throughout the world. We all know that brand loyalty is essential to businesses, but how exactly is it achieved? Strategically speaking, promotion is one of the most important things to assess with brand loyalty, especially on Instagram. Learning how to incorporate a promotion strategy will make your brand more acknowledgeable. The goal in achieving this is to gain repeat clients, which in return will help build brand loyalty. With Instagram, it is important to take advantage of the tools that the app offers. Create Mode is a significant tool that allows brands to post questions, polls, and other things that allow followers to actively engage with your posts. Many brands out there aren’t utilizing these features enough. Another great feature is Instagram Live. This makes it so that followers feel as if they are part of your brand, especially if you communicate with them through the live video. This is a way to significantly increase your engagement with your followers.

 

Considering the 73% of brands that post at least one photo or video per week on Instagram, only about half of them promote their Instagram through Facebook tabs. This takes time that these companies may not have. That is why the team of innovative marketers at Bright Age offer great social marketing services that will help grow and maintain your brand with community management using authentic engagement.

How to Use Facebook and Instagram Live to Market Your Brand

Live streaming has become a popular trend that brands are utilizing to market themselves on a variety of social media platforms. Since live streaming was not offered on social media apps previously, platforms like Facebook and Instagram have followed the trend and allowed users to become part of the experience as well. Viewers would rather watch videos via live stream than watch a video through a traditional post, so why not use live streaming to help elevate your social media strategy?

screenshot of Sephore Instagram Live to show example of social media strategy

It is important for brands to utilize Instagram and Facebook Live because it creates a personal connection between the brand and the viewer, as the content is natural and unedited. A brand can utilize live streaming in a variety of ways: to reveal new products, debut recent initiatives, or cover live events in real-time. Live streaming is geared towards an in-the-moment experience, causing users to feel an urgency to watch the live video or they will miss the opportunity to see what the brand is promoting within the live stream.

On Facebook Live, viewers are able to respond during the live video using different “reaction emojis” to be able to show the brand how they are reacting to their content within the live stream. By live streaming, it allows viewers to feel like their feedback is being heard. Both Facebook and Instagram provide viewers with the option of responding within the comment section for questions, comments, or feedback that the streamer could respond back to within the live stream if they choose.

social media strategy showing Facebook reaction emojis users can respond to live stream

When using Instagram and Facebook Live, it automatically moves your content to the first spot within the “Stories” feed, showing users that you are currently live streaming. These platforms are prioritizing live stream content as they want users to be able to have the opportunity to interact real time with the streamer. Live streaming also acts as a free advertisement tool to help expose your live streams to your followers, as a free notification is sent when you start the live stream to users who prefer to receive Instagram Live notifications. After the live stream is over, brands can post the completed live stream to their story so users who were unable to watch, still have access to it for 24 hours.

A variety of brands and influencers have used Facebook or Instagram Live to increase their social media marketing and have been successful doing so. Let’s check out a few different ways you can be successful using live streaming!

Ways to Be Successful Using Instagram and Facebook Live

  1. Understand Your Purpose: Think to yourself, what is the point of this live stream? To gain more followers? To launch a new product? To receive feedback from viewers? Understand what you are trying to accomplish throughout the livestream, so you can strategize different tactics to reach it.
  2. Set a Goal: Before you start live streaming, create a clear goal of the things you want to accomplish during the live stream. Understand what target audience you want to reach and the number of viewers you want to reach throughout the live stream.
  3. Engage Your Audience: Engaging with your viewers allows a relationship between the viewer and the brand to be built. Creating a strong relationship takes time and effort, so responding to comments and answering questions allows the viewer to feel like the brand cares about their opinion.
  4. Promote Your Live Stream: Post a few days before the live stream on different social media platforms announcing that you are going to be live streaming on a certain day and time. This allows hype to be built for the live stream and gets followers curious as to what is going to be announced.
  • screenshot of brand promoting live stream on instagram showing social media strategy

Live streaming can be a new way of elevating your social media strategy, while also creating a strong relationship between the brand and the viewer. Viewers want to trust the brands they spend their money on, so live streaming is a perfect way to show reliability and authenticity.

 

How Social Media Management Varies Based on Consumer Behavior

The abilities we have as consumers has truly started from the bottom and risen to the top, especially in the past decade, due to social media. This is all based on the realm of social media community management. Consumer behavior, which has also shifted immensely, is essentially the actions taken prior to purchasing a product or service, the time that is spent on decision making, and the actions taken after purchasing the product or service, both short term and long term.

Consumer behavior varies drastically depending on many things; most importantly, the time it takes to make a decision. While we work closely with a wide variety of clients, each one is unique when it comes to social media community management. For example, the consumer behavior of someone bidding on an item with Profiles in History is quite different than that of someone completing an architecture project with EZ Plans. With Profiles in History, the bidding happens fast, due to the nature of an action, meaning it is more of an impulsive purchase. Although these decisions still take time and thought, the decision making would not take as long as if you were to create an architecture project with EZ Plans. This custom home architecture service would not only take a lot longer, but the consumer behavior would change throughout the process. This would then shift from impulsive behavior to “time consuming” behavior.

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modern style iphone mockup of Instagram

Engaging and communicating with consumer behavior is why social media community management is ever evolving. This is why working with a digital marketing agency is essential for your brand or company. Another important topic to consider when thinking about consumer behavior in the digital age, and selling products and services through social media platforms, is traffic. In April 2017, Instagram hit over 700 million monthly active users, adding approximately 100 million users each year since the end of 2013. Toward the end of 2018, Instagram hit a total of one billion monthly users, which currently stands as its monthly active user rate. Not to mention, over half of these users are on Instagram daily. The way we enhance our consumer satisfaction through Instagram at Bright Age is by constantly engaging with our fans and followers via live interaction, and always making sure their questions are answered in the comment section or through direct messaging. This is a great way to build on the importance of social media community management.

busy intersection of people crossing the streetThroughout the past decade, we all know that social media has played a huge part in the lives of youth and young adults, but some of us may not know that this is the same for businesses. Almost 75% of businesses use Instagram, so it doesn’t come as a shock that 83% of the one billion monthly Instagram users say that they have discovered new products and services through Instagram.  This is exactly why when brands are thinking about incorporating social media platforms for digital marketing, the important question to ask is: will this add value to my community? The capabilities we have as consumers allow us to explore and interact with people throughout the world using social media platforms. Let Bright Age, a digital marketing agency specializing in communication management help you add value and navigate the consumer era.

How to Improve Your Company’s Online Presence through Community Management

Online community management is something that is often confused with social media marketing, and although the two have significant overlaps, it’s important to note their differences. Community management comes after social media marketing, focusing on customer service and monitoring responses on social media content. Community management is vital if you want to present your company as likeable and reliable, and it is necessary if your goal is to not only retain fans, but also to gain potential customers, partners, and employees. Here are a few easy steps to improve your company’s online presence through the use of social media community management.

Actively Monitor Mentions

The breadth of your community isn’t often confined only to social channels, such as Facebook and Instagram, but also on external articles and blogs, and the discussions and comments on those platforms. It’s important to actively monitor mentions of your brand, especially in places you might easily miss, such as when users don’t directly tag your brand in their posts, when your brand name may be misspelled by users, or when customers are mentioning your brand by product instead of by name. Make a daily effort to keep up on monitoring mentions, so that you are able to identify conversations you can join or initiate with your audience.

Engage Thoughtfully

After monitoring your mentions, create a thorough plan for executing how to engage with your customers. In today’s atmosphere in regard to social media community management, community managers are expected to reply in a timely manner, with carefully crafted and thoughtful responses.

Social media community management screenshot of Sprouts Facebook page responding to customer positively

Take a moment to thank fans for positive comments. As for negative comments, keep your responses public to stay transparent and so that other customers who may have similar concerns can easily find an answer, except in cases where the conflict is personal. Providing a well thought out response to a negative review or comment rather than ignoring it, shows potential customers how much your company values feedback and open communication.

Reward Fans

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While monitoring your company’s mentions, take note of users that are consistently engaging with your posts. You can use your observations to change your social media strategy and create certain campaigns targeted towards certain groups. Offer discounts or free samples, or organize a giveaway to reward loyal fans. Even simpler, acknowledge fans who enjoy your products or your services by incorporating user-generated content into your posts, turning brand enthusiasts into brand ambassadors. This will show existing and potential customers you truly care about what your fans have to say.

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Community management is integral to a social media strategy for companies looking to increase their reach and improve their online reputation. However, the seemingly simple act of monitoring mentions can in itself be time-consuming and difficult, let alone crafting thoughtful responses to customers or organizing giveaways. Reach out to a digital marketing agency with thorough knowledge of social media community management, such as Bright Age, in order to coordinate a digital marketing campaign that will work best for your company.

How to Use Analytics & Reporting to Drive Your Social Media Strategy

Have you been consistently posting aesthetically pleasing content and applying all of the steps of a strong social media strategy, yet it seems your brand’s engagement rate is at a standstill? While posting at the right time and including interesting captions does retain consumers, it is crucial to a company’s survival to understand the data analytics from your social and reports that track your social media data. Once that information is received and understood, then you can figure out a strategy to grow your brand on a larger scale.

Understanding KPIs

KPIs, (Key Performance Indicators) include likes, clicks, shares, comments, mentions, and much more, which gives you evidence of how well your business is performing. Examining these numbers informs you which aspects of your social media are falling short compared to the rest. Additionally, each social media platform has its own KPIs. For example, Facebook includes paid likes and post reach whereas Instagram contains profile visits and total reach. Each social media platform comes with its own terminology and aspects of documented social media data. Depending on your business and what you want most out of your social media presence, you can determine which platforms and metrics take the majority of your focus.
Key Performance Indicators icon on working laptop at sunset to show example of reporting

Reach and Impressions

Two metrics to consider closely are reach and impressions. Reach is the amount of people that see your content, and impressions are the amount of times your content is shown, whether it was clicked or not. Because of the different algorithms Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook use, not everyone will always see your content. Posting content that will captivate your target audience and entice them to engage should always be your primary goal. Shares and comments let more people see your material, which in turn increases your reach and impressions. Moreover, the metrics you are most interested in will be catered differently to each social media platform, so it is crucial to optimize your core KPIs on each platform.
Instagram Performance summary to show how analytics and reporting can drive a social media strategy

Key Factors for a Better Strategy

To develop a better strategy for your social media plan, there are a few factors that should be taken into consideration.  First off, examining your company’s social media data helps you understand your target audience. It will show you when your followers/consumers are active online and who you are reaching. Second, as previously mentioned, knowing your KPIs will distinguish which social networks your content will thrive most on. Lastly, numbers don’t lie. The reports you read will help show you which of your content performed best, and knowing these facts can help you alter your content for the future. Maybe the three minute video you posted did not receive the engagement you thought it would. Because you can analyze the number of clicks or shares the video received, it will better equip you to know what to change for the future. Galaxy Theatres Social Media Platforms to show various social media platforms for reporting

Collecting data will not only provide concrete evidence as to what is truly happening behind your social media strategy but will help you optimize your strategy to make it the best it can be. At times posting intriguing material with entertaining captions can be an extensive task, so let a social media agency like Bright Age handle the analytics behind your top-notch content!