Businesses utilising social media to market and grow themselves is not a new concept; many companies now employ a specialist social media team to monitor their social media channels. Not only is a strong social media presence helpful, it’s now essential.
But do we really know how to extract the most from the wealth of data out there? Whilst using social media such as Twitter used to be about watching, listening and monitoring the conversation to seek out what the public think about your business, it now delves much deeper. To truly utilise social media for the benefit of your business, you need to be responding and integrating with the conversation.
Similarly, when it comes to raising investment for your business, whether you choose the crowdfunding or angel funding route your business needs to have a solid social media presence. The bigger your online presence is, the easier you’ll reach your funding target; engaging with potential investors and sharing your campaign as far as possible are both key elements to securing your goal.
London’s Social Media Week is currently in full swing, and this morning’s talk by Sysomos covered this topic in full. Their social media monitoring programme delivers the insight you need to develop new strategies, uncover opportunities and make smarter decisions.
Sysomos market themselves as the ultimate social media solution for businesses. With their platform, you get instant and unlimited access to all social media conversations. The ability to see what’s happening, why it’s happening, and who’s driving the conversations. And the power to uncover meaning in the data – not only from the tone of conversations, but from advanced sentiment analysis by gender, age and location.
During the talk, Sysomos explained the three most important ways that their service can help businesses tap into social intelligence.
Firstly, their programme offers an authority score, which analyses those who are tweeting about your subject area or business and differentiates tweeters who are influential in your field from those that aren’t. Through this, you can easily choose which individuals and brands to communicate with and targets to get your message out there, rather than wasting time sending your message out to hundreds of people that aren’t relevant to you.
Their service also offers the ability to benchmark events. Through this, you can analyse how well your recent promotion has been received, compared to your last one, as well as comparing your social media presence to others in a similar industry.
The most important point that the speakers were intent on the audience taking home was the importance of using social media intelligence to gauge and monitor consumer happiness; essentially, it’s all about responding, rather than just listening. A recent, well documented case of companies going the extra mile through social media was between Three and 02. The tweets that followed show just how easy it is for companies to connect with customers on Twitter:
@dpmay @O2 we'll #makeitright Dan. Pizza & Ice-cream on the way 🙂
— Three UK (@ThreeUK) August 3, 2015
https://twitter.com/O2/status/628244580102742016
In an age where businesses can network and engage with clients with just a few clicks of a mouse and consumers use Twitter as their first port of call for a complaint, social media is an indispensable tool; a slow response can make or break a company’s reputation. Twitter is a global platform with 304 million monthly active users; harnessing that data is essential for any business in the 21st century. Even for small businesses, using a service such as Sysomos can cut time and costs and connect you with the people that will enhance your network, and in terms of investment, help you reach your goal and grow your business in the right direction.
Miranda Wadham on 15/09/2015
