Customers do NOT talk on the topics brands want to push out. And us, marketers and brands alike, miss out on important, relevant conversations just because we are too self involved. We want to brag, not to listen.
And maybe that is why Share of Voice is such an important metric, the one you’ll find showcased in every social media analytics tool dashboard. Similar to fans/followers/likes, without context this might just be a vanity metric. Why? Because:
- A Share of Voice increase might actually mean you have a problem. I.e a product malfunction, a reputation crisis, the site is down, there are rumors the company is being sold out etc. Ask yourself why the increase before you decide it is a good thing.
- A Share of Voice increase might not mean you did good by your brand. It can literally mean that your competitors stopped pushing their product through PR or ads. Or it might mean that the online retailers had giveaways/special offers that triggered online mentions and now they stopped.
- A Share of Voice increase might be a blip on the radar if not interpreted correctly. If you track it monthly, it can literally mean just some dozens of online mentions, and they could be just a halo effect of a PR campaign you did a while ago.
There are a lot of solutions for the problems outlined above, but they imply that both the analyst and the Marketing Manager are willing to hone in on what is really important and don’t give in to the reporting frenzy. Let’s just list a couple of these solutions.
Three Solutions To Improve Reporting Focused On Share Of Voice.
- Proper set-up of both the social listening tool AND the reporting framework. Make sure that your tool is set up properly by setting up spam filters and including all relevant sources for you.
For example, if you are running a PR campaign on multiple industry publishers’ sites, make sure the tool crawls them (Forbes, for example, has been reported to prohibit tracking by some of the tools I worked with)
- Double down on Share of Voice with other relevant data points to paint the whole picture.
This translates into sentiment analysis (how much of the mentions are positive/negative) and follow that trend, Also track main topics of conversation and most shared news.
- (For pros with access to a lot of data and in depth understanding of business needs and brand identity): leverage imagological analysis to create an ideal brand persona and measure and report on that one.
How would that look? It’s not an easy job and as an analyst you need full access to the brand strategist/whoever safeguards the brand in the company you work for or on the client side if you work in an agency. This ideal brand persona would focus on two, maximum three dimensions. Let’s work with an example, let me stick with Vodafone as I already wrote about them.
For Vodafone the dimensions I would work on would be (just off the top of my mind, brand execs might not agree on this one): 1) technology, 2) stakeholder relationships, 3) value for money provided. The social listening tool would be leveraged to tag all mentions with one of these three and I’d double check on the sentiment analysis. And then it’s a matter of numbers. And good, relevant reporting on brand health and which of the dimensions is responsible for most of the risks or most of the positive conversation. This will not only paint the entire picture, it will also help brand execs know what dimensions need improvement in terms of brand perception and where more investment would actually turn the needle.
Done with reporting? Let’s look at other ways to leverage social listening for your content.
Reporting is important, but sometimes most of the juicy stuff that comes out of social listening gets lost in translation from analyst to reporting template. The insights sometimes just do not fit into the little boxes, graphs, the quarter of the quadrant you have available to squeeze in all your learnings.
The solution is simple: go beyond this and provide the team that actually creates the content for the brand with the insights you get out of listening in on all those conversations. What to look at?
First of all, look at what your target audiences are interested in/talk about.
See if it matches your content strategy. If not, update it to include trending topics. If yes, ask yourself if you have the right tone of voice, reach the audience at the right moment and have the right distribution channels in place to reach them. Maybe you do talk about topics important to the audience, but not on the right channel. When doing social listening reporting for one B2B business I found a lot of conversation around engineers (the business’s core target), but it was all on … google groups if you can believe it! An idea we discussed back then was to talk with our in-house engineers and identify one brand advocate to enter those groups and share relevant know-how and be helpful for the community there. Similar to Quora, where brand advocates respond with helpful advice and are fully transparent about where they work.
Address the problems your customers experience while engaging with your brand’s product/service.
If they have security concerns you could propose to address those in a lot of ways: improve FAQ section on website, create educational content on how they can protect their personal data, have live Q&A sessions on your social channels on the topic. You get it, be transparent and helpful.
Look out for potential partners out there and get the right people from your team to contact them.
For example, while working for Small Academy, a Romanian start-up focused on delivering quality STEAM courses for kids aged 5–14, I joined a lot of Facebook groups for teachers and parents. Just being part of those communities helped me get names of school principals that we could work with, influencers we could reach out to. You get the idea.
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