Keeping Tabs on Social

For today’s marketers, keeping on top of social media networks and communities has evolved into a continuous workflow. From monitoring and listening to customer engagements, to sifting through deeper analytics and recording interactions, social has become a full-time channel for many marketing teams.

From a tech standpoint, managing and monitoring social has traditionally required several point solutions, with one logging mentions, one handling analytics and so on. Now, all-in-one social management solutions allow marketers to listen to what social users are talking about, track competitors and their customers, focus on hot trends and analyze all of that information in one place.

The challenge for marketers in the social space lies in the fact that the noise-to-relevance ratio in social communication is high, and finding and targeting relevant users can be tough. Add in multiple layers of tech required to pull it off and things can get difficult and confusing in a hurry. All-in-one social solutions allow marketers to engage audiences, publish relevant content to social networks and track how that content performs, as well.

“If I told you that you needed to use four point solutions to run an email campaign it would sound absurd, but that’s how social has developed because we’re in the early days of social. It’s the true predictive indicator of customer intent. I’m a huge fan of search – it’s a great marketing tool – but social is true, real-time and predictive. People tend to talk about activities like moving, weddings or graduations—those are predictive behaviors, and you can focus on those,” says Viralheat president/CEO Jeff Revoy, whose company specializes in social management technology.

In the world of social media, people are constantly giving predictive indicators of their future purchasing intent. Tech solutions such as Viralheat allow marketers to listen for and that information, and to get a sense of what types of things potential customers are looking for. For example, marketers can target customers who are planning weddings or celebrating anniversaries by focusing in on their social media behavior.

“That’s the power of real-time, predictive data, and that’s why analytics is part of our entire solution, from listening to engaging. There is so much social data out there and to be able to mine it, find valuable nuggets and take the actionable steps on those nuggets is exciting,” Revoy says.

For a recent launch campaign project for Deutsche Telekom/T-Mobile, the client was able to monitor industry leaders in their space prior to a new product roll-out, and the Viralheat platform allowed them to identify the space’s top influencers, who their followers were, and to track competitors. That information helped in mapping out their social media marketing approach.

“They were able to launch a beta program and target industry influencers prior to releasing a new product. It’s a great example of being able to really listen and take the analytics and do something actionable,” Revoy says.

The best part about these all-in-one solutions is that content is consolidated into a single stream, to allow marketers to see what’s happening across all streams in real time, in one place. Direct integration with CRM systems is next up on the horizon, as is integrating with analytics platforms, so the future is bright for solutions in this space.