But how do you get market research right? What methods should you use, and how can you entice your target market to talk to you?

Today, we’re going to go through everything you need to know about market research, from why it’s important, to the best methods for your brand.

Why marketers should care about market research

Market research is vital for everything from pitching your marketing messaging to building customer loyalty. Some benefits of good market research include:

• Helping your brand to give customers exactly what they want.
• Strengthening your position in the market.
• Minimizes investment risk by helping to inform decisions.
• Identifies threats to avoid and opportunities to grab.
• Gives insight into competitor strengths and weaknesses.

Qualitative vs quantitative research method

Qualitative research has qualifiers. Qualifiers are markers of confident uncertainty. Qualifiers are necessary when data is opinion-based, or isn’t underpinned by numerical data.

So, qualitative research tends to deal in opinions and descriptions. In market research terms, qualitative data tends to come in the form of customer opinions and feedback. It’s gathered using open-ended questions such as “What do you like about our product?”.

Qualitative data is very useful for understanding nuances that can’t be revealed by numerical data. That being said, it can be difficult, costly, and time-consuming both to gather and to analyze.

Quantitative data, by contrast, deals in quantities. Quantitative data is all about numbers. Numerical data based on metrical analysis forms the backbone of quantitative market research. Quantitative customer surveys will use answer formats that can easily be entered into a graph or chart, such as “Yes/No” answers or “Rate X on a scale of 1 to 5”. Most suitable chart to visualize the survey data is a Likert scale chart.

6 Market research methods to gather audience insights

The best market research will combine qualitative and quantitative methods for a complete, nuanced, and easily understandable picture of their target market and its needs.

1. Consumer behavior observation

When done well, consumer behavior observation takes a ‘fly on the wall’ approach to consumers. As the name suggests, it involves monitoring consumers to see how they behave in natural settings. 

If you run a bricks and mortar shop, consumer observation would involve watching how your customers behave in your store. You might note down things like the displays that catch their eye, which products they linger over, the route they take around the store, how they respond to atmospheric features like scent, lighting, and music. After a while, behavioral patterns will emerge which will help you to arrange your store and products for best effect.

In an online context, consumer behavior observation will rely more on behavioral analytics. For example, you might look for patterns in page traffic, bounce rates, purchasing behavior, and so on. This will yield valuable insights into the pages and products that catch consumers’ eyes, elements of your website they find frustrating, and so on.

2. Market and competitive analysis

Market and competitive analysis involves looking at your wider market context and taking a peek at how your competitors are faring.

Competitive analysis is a very strategic way to improve your position. Learning more about your competitors and the ways that they engage your primary market helps you to gain a competitive advantage, both by utilizing their more successful strategies (but better!) and differentiating yourself so that you stand out.

In order to analyze your competitors, you need to understand your market. So, before you start, define your primary and secondary markets, including the products you’re pitching at them, the consumers that occupy them, and the competitors also in that space. 

Then, you can start competitor analysis. This can involve everything from signing up to competitor marketing materials to reading their case studies, looking up their publically-available metrics, and monitoring their brand mentions.

Less glamorous brands that struggle to make a splash on social media can benefit a lot from market and competitive analysis, especially when it comes to things like SEO. For example, smaller SaaS brands are unlikely to get a statistically significant amount of brand mentions on platforms like Facebook. But they could benefit from reading a relevant SaaS SEO case study.

3. Social media listening

Social media listening is a powerful way to gain deeper insights about your brand and how your target audience thinks about you. Put very simply, social media listening involves monitoring social platforms for mentions of your brands, engagement with your brand materials, and so on. 

Social media is a very qualitative market, so it’s worth bearing in mind that a lot of what you hear will be opinion. Rather than taking everything you learn personally, look for broad patterns in your brand mentions. For example, if a lot of people are raving about a certain feature of your product, build on that in your next marketing campaign.

Social media listening and analytics with Keyhole

Social media listening is where Keyhole comes into its own. Keyhole’s Social Listening Analytics Suite will constantly comb the internet and log all mentions of your brand. You can use this to easily see how widespread your brand mentions are, and to take the temperature of discourse about your brand.

Keyhole will also alert you if something changes in your brand mentions. For example, if you suddenly get a spike in mentions and coverage, Keyhole will let you know.

This allows you to take action quickly. If you’re getting traction for good reasons, you can leap on the opportunity. If it’s for bad reasons, you can quickly dive into damage limitation mode and save your brand from a PR disaster.

Social listening is one of the very best ways to understand how your brand is perceived by your audience. With Keyhole, you won’t miss a single mention.

4. Surveys and online polls

Online surveys and polls are a good way to gain nuanced consumer insights and get a read on general customer satisfaction. There are various different types of surveys, designed for both qualitative and quantitative research.

Many brands use popups to offer quick surveys to customers based on their experience of the product, site etc. Popup surveys are usually quick and easy for customers to complete, and they’re a good way to get a lot of data very quickly. That being said, some consumers find popup surveys frustrating, and they do add an extra layer of friction to your site experience.

Longer-form questions and surveys allow you to get detailed information from your target customers on a wide range of things. However, it’s harder to get responses to these surveys as they take up more time. In order to encourage people to take more detailed surveys, some brands offer incentives like gift cards or entry into a prize draw.

5. Focus groups and market testing

This method involves bringing people who fit your target audience profile together and holding in-depth interviews and discussions about your product, your marketing messages, your competitors, and so on.

Focus group discussions can be very productive. People will reveal personal insights about your product/service and what they’re looking for that would be hard to glean through other market research techniques.

Market testing is a form of market research that sometimes occurs in focus group settings. This involves handing out product samples to your focus group and asking for feedback. It could also involve showing your customers different types of marketing content and asking them to rate or comment on them.

Market testing in a focus group context gives you the opportunity to observe how customers interact with your product or content, and draw insights that might not otherwise be possible. For example, you can observe non-verbal cues like frowning or enthusiastically grabbing a product. These cues might indicate discomfort or delight in ways that a survey can’t express.

6. Online market monitoring

Online market monitoring involves things like following market trends, perusing publically available sales data, watching follower counts, observing fluctuations in customer behavior, and so on.

Online market monitoring is particularly useful for quickly spotting and grabbing trends and opportunities. For example, many successful B2B SEO strategies involve closely monitoring the B2B market and taking advantage of keyword trends as soon as they appear. As B2B SEO is hard to achieve through means like focus groups and online surveys, online market monitoring is crucial to nail this tricky market.

Hashtag analytics and tracking with Keyhole

You need a tool like Keyhole to get online market monitoring right. Keyhole’s hashtag analytics and tracking helps you to effortlessly measure every campaign you’re running, across every social platform. It will tell you what’s working, what isn’t, and what trends you could take advantage of.

Additionally, a robust content management system can streamline the creation, management, and optimization of digital content across your marketing channels, complementing tools like Keyhole.

And that’s not all. Keyhole can generate great-looking reports on your online monitoring with just a few clicks. This is great for seeing success trends at a glance and sharing them with stakeholders.

Final thoughts

A good understanding of the market gives you a huge competitive advantage. But understanding doesn’t happen automatically. In order to gain the actionable insights you need, market research is a must.

Keeping track of your market, your target customers, and the ever-changing trends you could use to your advantage. It’s important to conduct regular market research. It’s also a good idea to monitor markets on an ongoing basis.

This is where tools like Keyhole come in. With Keyhole, you can keep close tabs on everything from social media engagement to brand mentions. It’s perfect for social listening and audience analytics. Why not get in touch today and find out what Keyhole can do for you?

Author Bio

Nick Brown is the founder & CEO of accelerate agency, the SaaS SEO agency. Nick has launched several successful online businesses, writes for Forbes, published a book and has grown accelerate from a UK-based agency to a company that now operates across US, APAC and EMEA.

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The post 6 Market Research Methods & What They Reveal About Your Audience appeared first on Keyhole.

With roughly 6,000 tweets going out per second, getting vital information becomes a challenge. While Twitter’s basic search features help you get most of the job done, gathering highly specific information requires more — Twitter’s advanced search.

So, if you’re a marketer trying to analyze their competitor’s account or if you’re trying to identify new customers, you must learn how to advance search on Twitter.

In this guide, we’ll help you navigate Twitter’s advanced search to connect meaningfully and stand out in a storm of tweets. 

But first—

What is Twitter’s advanced search?

Twitter’s advanced search lets users refine their search with utmost precision. It lets you filter tweets based on specific criteria such as keywords, hashtags, dates, and users.

Understanding Twitter advanced search features

To get started, you need to know:

How to advance search on Twitter 

This feature provides a different user experience based on the device you are using. Once you get a hang of it, you can conduct an advanced search directly via the search bar.

Twitter for Desktop

1. To get started, look for your key phrase in the search bar on the top right side. Once you hit enter, your screen will look like the screenshot below.

2. Click on Advanced Search. A screen will pop up where you need to enter the Words fields. You can either enter one or all fields based on your requirements. Ideally, you should enter the “exact phrase” section to get the best results.

3. Next, you will need to fill in the Accounts fields. Here, you can enter the account name you’re searching for, the account that was mentioned, or the account someone replied to.

4. Once you’re done with the above steps, set the applicable Filters — replies and links.

5. In the Engagement fields, enter the replies, likes, and retweets to make your search more precise. In this example, I’ve used comparatively larger numbers to get results from big accounts.

6. For the Dates, enter the range you’re looking for. The smaller the range, the better the search results. 

7. Hit search. Since our search was somewhat specific, we could narrow it down to 3 tweets. However, you can also filter your results using the 5 tabs under the search bar — Top, Latest, People, Media, and Lists. 

Still not happy? Tweak your search again to narrow down the results.

8. Finally, is this a search request you’ll need to keep coming back to? Click on the 3 dots in the top right corner. Then, click Save Search.

Twitter for Mobile

For starters, the mobile version doesn’t have a dedicated Twitter advanced search feature. However, once you know how to work with the desktop version, you can replicate those steps here. Alternatively, you can use your phone’s browser and mimic the steps shared above.

Nonetheless, to simplify your Twitter search, follow these tips:

• Enter your exact phrase in quotation marks to narrow your search
• Put either the exact match or keyphrase in the search bar for refined results
• Enter X -Y to get results on X without mentions of Y
• Write “min_retweets:(number)” or “min_faves:(number)” consolidated results
• Looking for verified users? Try “filter:verified”
• Need a specific account? Try “from:(account name)”
• Seeking account mentions? Try “to:(account name)”

Search operators and their significance

Keywords and phrases

A keyword search looks for the entered word or phrase anywhere in the record. Keywords and phrases are the best search operators for specific topics, brands, or events.

Exact match vs. broad match

An exact search shows results directly related to specific keywords or phrases enclosed in quotation marks. It tells the search engine to dig out content with the exact phrase as it’s entered, in the same order. 

These are particularly useful for precise information, like a specific definition, quote, or product details. 

On the other hand, a broad match retrieves a wide range of results related to the entered terms. Twitter’s algorithm interprets the keywords in various ways and provides results loosely concerning the search terms. 

Broad search helps you discover new and unexpected information. It’s ideal for open-ended research or when you don’t know what you need.

Hashtags and mentions

Hashtags and mentions are commonly used as search operators on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. 

Hashtags group together similar conversations on social media platforms. Once a hashtag is published, users can click on it to see other posts under it. You can also search for the hashtag on the search bar for relevant content. 

An @mention contains a username anywhere in the tweet or caption and notifies the mentioned user of the post. Brands often track mentions to monitor online conversations, analyze brand image, collect testimonials, and discover customer needs and grievances. 

Filters

Filters are search operators or criteria to refine and narrow search results. They help you specify certain conditions the results must meet to be displayed. 

Advanced operators

Advanced search operators refer to special commands to modify searches. These are typically useful for narrowing down searches and digging deeper into results. Some important advanced operators command include: 

• Cache: This helps users find the most recent cache of a webpage (e.g. cache:hubspot.com)
• Allintext: This operator command checks whether your search terms show up in the text of that page (e.g. allintext:home decor)
• Inanchor: This command lets you find webpages with inbound links with a specific anchor text (e.g. inanchor:medicine)

Some other significant advanced operator commands include: 

• Location: 
• Allinanchor:
• Allinurl:

Use cases: How to use Twitter’s advanced search

To help you understand its practical application, here are some practical use cases of Twitter advanced search.

Unveiling new and relevant topics

Adding new and relevant topics to your content strategy is vital for consistent customer engagement. However, tracking trending hashtags isn’t enough to dig into the context. 

Here, filtering your results using Twitter’s search operators can pin down the contextual relevance of trending topics. 

For instance, you want to track tweets on the latest movie Oppenheimer and how Christopher Nolan filmed the explosion scene without CGI.

Here, you can type “Oppenheimer” in the search bar. Then use the advanced search’s exact phrase section to get trending tweets with topic-specific details.  

Generating leads for your business

Consistent lead generation is essential to sustain your business. It maintains a scaling revenue stream and contributes to the company’s growth. 

Twitter is a goldmine for customer acquisition. And with the advanced search feature, you can leverage this reach to the fullest. It displays Twitter users matching your criteria and lets you find the most qualified leads. 

For example, you run a bookstore in Houston and want to target local readers.

For this, you can use geotargeting commands on Twitter for advanced searches like the above screenshot. It shows you local book-loving Twitter users. Then, you may nurture these leads. 

Customer engagement strategies

Platforms like Twitter are perfect for identifying and engaging your target audience. You can respond to positive tweets mentioning your brand or product. Companies can also track customer grievances via Twitter to resolve them. 

However, not everyone talking about your brand will tag you. For more diligent monitoring, save a Twitter advanced query about your brand name, product name, common misspellings, and website. 

For example, Starbucks wants to interact with its happy customers on Twitter. To narrow the search, they can type “best experience” and @starbucks in the advanced search filters. 

The search results will track the tweets and let Starbucks engage satisfied customers. 

Riding the wave of trends

Brands participate in social media trends to increase reach and stay relevant. However, don’t jump on every trend. Identify those that suit your brand image and are popular with your audience. 

Here, Twitter’s advanced search options can help you find popular trends in your niche. You can search Tweets in specific geographies, dates, or a specific sentiment (like in the screenshot above).

Analyzing competitor strategies

To stay ahead of the curve, know your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. How? Through competitor analysis. It lets you enhance your business strategies and avoid mistakes, giving you a competitive edge. 

Set up an advanced search to find Tweets mentioning your biggest competitors. Then examine the results to understand what people love or hate about your contemporaries.

For example, Wendy’s can monitor Taco Bell via Twitter’s advanced search. For that, they must type @tacobell in the accounts section.

The results will show mentions of reviews, new offers, and customer complaints. Use these insights to fill in strategic gaps and outdo the competitors.

Attracting competitors’ customers

Twitter advanced search is also valuable for identifying dissatisfied customers of your competitors and tailoring offers to woo them. 

For that, you can simply type the competitor name in the “Accounts” field and dissatisfaction phrases in the “Words” field. 

For example, rival brands can search for “disappointed”, “worst”, and “bad”, etc., followed by mentioning their biggest competitor — Canon, in this case.

The results will show unhappy customers. Analyze their grievances to see how to offer potential customers a better experience. Contact them with relevant offers and communicate how your services are better suited for their specific problems with your competitors. 

Conducting in-depth market research

By running social monitoring and sentiment analysis through the Twitter advanced search, you can delve deep into customer needs and market changes. You can identify frequently reported issues and solve them quickly. Simply monitoring your niche-related conversations can gather insights into customer expectations and preferences. 

Moreover, by using engagement parameters, you can identify thought leaders and popular influencers in your industry.

As influential Twitter handles get more likes and retweets, filter search results to narrow down tweets with higher engagement. Performing this type of advanced search helps you pinpoint users who can impact peoples’ opinions in your industry. 

Let’s say you are a beauty brand conducting market research for your new lipstick range. Type:

• “Lipstick” in the Words section
• Then the required likes and retweets in the Engagement section to find users with significant reach. 

Crafting a creative content strategy

Twitter is a hub for trending conversations. Advanced search dives deep in there to see what your customers resonate with and spark new content ideas. 

Search for a specific topic on advanced search and adjust engagement numbers to find tweets with higher reach. 

For example, Twitter’s advanced search may show that your target audience is talking about organic coffee. Then, you can Tweet about it to engage your audience. 

Advanced search tools and automation

While Twitter’s advanced search is a nifty way of strategizing engagement, it may fall short of your scale. You need automation and advanced search tools to ensure accuracy. 

You can explore third-party tools with enhanced search capabilities by skimming through testimonial tweets. Look for platforms with automated social listening and analytics for a streamlined process. 

Save your searches and enable notifications to never miss a mention or update on Twitter. 

Opt for Keyhole’s Twitter analytics and reporting to automate searches and get updates on mentions, influencers, and trending topics. 

Conclusion

Targeted campaigns are pivotal to making a business successful. 

Twitter’s advanced search helps here by uncovering valuable customer insights, trending conversations, competitor strategy, content ideas, and more. 

But manually running an advanced search every time can be overwhelming. To simplify the process, switch to social media automation tools like Keyhole. 

We offer: 

• Social listening 
• Quick trend assessments
• Influencer tracking 
• Historical data

You get timely updates on trending tweets, regular reports on engagement, and deep insights into customer preferences. 

More importantly, don’t forget to innovate and adapt with advanced search to build a creative, on-brand, and engaging Twitter presence.

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The post Twitter Advanced Search: A Comprehensive Guide for 2024 appeared first on Keyhole.

But most importantly, what are people talking about?

#TrickorTreat

192.4K Posts and 589.9M Impressions (September – October 2020)

Remember how exciting it was to be a kid on Halloween? Getting your costume ready, staying up late, and getting to eat more candy than you could all year?

Those were the days!

This year, however, people were on the fence about it. Recent polls show that at least 38% of parents planned on allowing their kids to trick or treat this year, while for 31%, it’s a hard pass.

Curiously, 62% of poll respondents said that they would be handing out candy this year, while only 23% said they would go trick or treating. And well, having extra candy around is not such a bad thing.

Some candy brands came to save the day – and their profits – by finding creative ways to ensure that kids get a trick or treating experience this year.

Contender 1: Mars Wrigley

Mars Wrigley created a completely online experience with Treat Town. This new app – created in partnership with Disney Parks –  would allow users to engage in various Halloween-themed activities including virtual trick or treating.

The confectionery giant also partnered with the National Safety Council in creating a guide for parents to safely participate in Halloween.

Using their hashtag #bettermoments to promote the app on social media was a questionable decision. It is quite difficult to track a hashtag that most people would use in a context that is completely unrelated to your brand.

The #bettermoments hashtag is quite popular with topics such as pain, breakups and suicide prevention. These associations are the exact opposite you’d want as a candy brand.

Lesson learned – hashtag choice is crucial when using social media to track and measure your campaigns.

Alternatively, Mars Wrigley’s sub-brand Skittles used the #DareTheRainbow to promote two campaigns: a giveaway – with AMC’s The Walking Dead – and a zombie-prank challenge, resulting in 1.4 million impressions.

The beloved brand Snickers played it cool this year. After all, being voted as America’s most beloved Halloween candy gave the brand enough bragging rights. 

After a contentious battle between Snickers and Reese’s – Snickers took the crown. And the results were surprising, considering the number of Americans with peanut allergies has tripled since the 90’s.

What about the second runner-up?

Contender 2: Hershey’s

Hershey’s did not disappoint this year, by going all out and creating a robot-operated door that travelled to various American neighborhoods and offered a contactless trick-or-treat experience.

With little promotion, the #REESESDOOR hashtag gained about 385.3K impressions, and the story was picked up by many US publications. A single post from a TikTok influencer had over 35K impressions.

And despite gloomy expectations, recent data shows that candy sales have climbed 13% from last year. Halloween chocolate purchases alone are up by 25.3%.

Arguably, the increase in candy purchasing might have little to do with trick or treaters, and more to do with treating ourselves after a hard-knock year.  

While many might miss out on the trick or treating fun, parents and non-parents alike are not letting the holiday go to waste and are bringing the spook home. Data proves that you don’t need a party or trick or treating to partake in the festivities.

“Halloween Decorations” 

279K Posts and 915.8M Impressions (September – October 2020)

Halloween Decoration posts have been incredibly popular in social media, and also 53% of survey respondents indicated that they would be decorating their homes.

In terms of spending, decorations and costumes have the highest total expected spending this halloween ($2.6 billion each).

It isn’t too surprising. Halloween decorations are one of the safest ways to go all out when celebrating Halloween.

Out of 27.7 million Halloween social media posts, this neighbourly shout-out and this COVID-inspired house decoration were among the tweets with the most engagements in October.

And the Halloween decorations brand that is killing it on social media is none other than Home Depot.

Contender 1: Home Depot

That’s right, Home Depot mentions acquired 1.4 billion impressions in the past two months. In case you haven’t heard, their 12 ft. skeleton became the most coveted decoration this year.

Once social media posts started to go viral, sales went through the roof. Even with a hefty $300 price tag, Home Depot quickly sold out of the big-boned decoration. People wanted them so bad that ebay auctions were going for over $800.

So what does giant skeleton envy have to teach us?

Aside from tremendous entertainment, there are a few lessons we can get from the 12 ft. skeleton’s success.

First, visibility and impact – it is really hard to miss and ignore a gigantic skeleton in plain sight. With more than half the world using social media, if your product makes a visual impact, there is a chance that people will post about it.

Second, exclusivity – after selling out for good, the skeleton became even more desirable. Home Depot was very hushed about how many skeletons they sold, and simply communicated that they would no longer be available. 

Let’s be honest – we have a primal instinct to want what we can’t have. Indicating that your products have limited availability will make them more desirable to consumers.

“Halloween Makeup”

138.9K Posts and 688.5M Impressions (September to October 2020)

Speaking of desirability, most industries can only wish to have the social media success that makeup has had. In fact, it was the makeup industry that helped us realize the power of influencer marketing.

But is it successful across all social media platforms?

YouTube

YouTube has been the largest social medium for makeup-related content with the success of makeup tutorials.

To exemplify the power of YouTube and makeup influencers look no other than James Charles’ Halloween makeup video featuring Kylie Jenner.

The video has over 12 Million views, and it was engaged with over 818K instances. And while few brands could possibly afford a celebrity or mega influencers, collaborations with different influencers based on your budget can make a huge impact.

But what about other platforms?

Instagram

Instagram has become another great medium for cosmetic brands. The brand Anastasia Beverly Hills was a pioneer in turning its focus to Instagram over YouTube.

The brand amassed a 20M following on Instagram, leveraging short videos to create mini tutorials featuring their products and using contests to boost engagement.

This year, one of the posts gathering the most engagement (77K) was French makeup artist Marion Moretti’s post. While she showed her stunning The Mask rendition, she also invited engagement both online and offline.

Moretti, made sure to tag all of the makeup companies she used for her look, and even created her own hashtag (#camelloween2020) to encourage user generated content.

TikTok

A new great opportunity for cosmetic brands, and really any brand, looking to use social media as a way to showcase their product is TikTok.

Elf cosmetics launched the contest #eyeslipsface in October, asking TikTokers to “give face” while using their commissioned song. The catchy song and giving TikTokers the freedom to be creative paid off: the #eyeslipsface has over 6.6B views.

So what can we learn from cosmetic brands’ success on Halloween?

Like any makeup guru will tell you – “when in doubt, keep blending.” Not blending into the background, but blending different elements together to make them cohesive.

Make sure you blend your content and strategy with the medium you’re using. Fit is everything in social media and every platform has its own metrics and formulas. 

For example, Instagram can help consumers discover your brand and make decisions about your products. On the other hand, TikTok will help you connect with a younger audience and encourage engagement with  your brand. 

As for influencers, fit is even more important. In order to be successful, it is important to be authentic. So, influencers will have control over the message and the audience. 

Find an influencer that will be able to deliver his/her message about your brand in an authentic manner. Also, pay attention to their followers and determine whether this is the audience you want to reach.

“Halloween Costume”

1.9M Posts and 9.3B Impressions (September to October 2020)

Which leads us to Halloween Costumes – in our humble opinion – the true spirit of Halloween. 

Bear with us now..

Humans around the world and history have used costumes as a way to celebrate their cultures. For example, Jewish people wear costumes for Purim, during Carnival people dress up in the Caribbean, Venice and Switzerland.

We wear costumes to create the fantasy of inhabiting a new persona. For a day, we get to absorb the positive attributes of our character. Clinging tights on any given day might make many men feel emasculated but that wouldn’t be the case if it’s part of a superhero costume.

There is an important insight from this. Thinking about consumption has enormous psychological implications. More often than not, people consume a brand because of what it makes them feel about themselves, not necessarily for the benefits of the product.

In many western cultures, Halloween is the day to dress up in costume. And today, sharing your costume in social media has become the norm.

This is why an average $3.4 billion is spent on Halloween costumes every year. Men spending $96 on average, while women spend $77 – which is surprising, since women usually pay the pink tax.

So what costumes were popular for Halloween 2020?

According to Freightgeist – Google Trends report on Halloween costumes – the top 10 Halloween costume searches are as follows:

1. Witch
2. Dinosaur
3. Harley Quinn
4. Rabbit
5. Clown
6. Angel
7. Fortnite
8. Devil
9. Ninja
10. Spiderman

Which leads us to the Halloween costume social media post with the most engagement for October

Which leads us to pet costumes, Americans spent about $440 million to dress up their furry friends. And this trend continues to grow by about 16% each year.

While popular human costumes are witches, princesses, villains and superheroes. These are the 5 most popular animal costumes:

1. Pumpkin
2. Hot Dog
3. Superhero
4. Cat
5. Bumblebee

This year, posts featuring cats with the #Halloween2020 was among the most popular this year, whether it was costumes for cats, or black cats. In fact, the Instagram account Meowed by 9GAG had a great month on Instagram: total engagements were 19M – that’s 11M more than September.

So is the real winner of #Halloween2020 the noble cat? At least those cats that had the patience to be dressed up and photographed by their owners.

The greatest contender is of course, the dog. While dog costumes are not among the top posts of #Halloween2020, there are fewer dog costume posts (21.8K) than cat costume posts (39.2K). 

Dog costume posts, however, had 126.8 M impressions in the past two months, making them the true social media winner of this Halloween.

If you’re wondering why, just look at this picture and try not to smile! If you’re wondering why, just look at this picture and try not to smile!

So what did social media teach us about Halloween in 2020?

This Halloween taught us that even when facing curveballs and adversity, new opportunities can be created. Not only for marketers but also for people who want to continue enjoying their favourite holiday.

The most creative brands – and people – have one thing in common: adaptability. All the brands we mentioned were able to get a good perspective on the situation to understand what people really wanted and then created a solution.

Practicing social media monitoring and listening can help identify trends and inform our process to create opportunities. It also allows us to track our performance and adapt as needed.

Both in marketing and in life, we can take this important lesson into consideration. Pay attention to what is happening, inform yourself as best you can, and be ready to create your own solutions.

Do you have any 2020 lessons you’d like to share with us? We’d love to hear from you!

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that helps marketers make decisions by gathering with social media data.

About The Author

Mariana O’Connor is heading content and email marketing at Keyhole. She has a Masters degree in Marketing from the Schulich School of Business. When she’s not reading or writing about the latest marketing trends, she is usually out and about, working out, learning a new skill or watching RuPaul’s Drag Race.

The post We Analyzed A Million #Halloween2020 Social MediaPosts – This Is What We Learned appeared first on Keyhole.

And how do you even begin to answer that question?

In this guide, we’ll cover the metrics and benchmarking tactics needed to judge the performance of your social media campaigns.

What type of success have your competitors seen? Where do you stand relative to them? What type of content will you have to produce to keep up – or better yet – raise the bar?

Asking questions like these through social media benchmarking will help you pinpoint exactly how well your social media campaigns are performing, and where they can improve.

What is Benchmarking?

Benchmarking is comparing your marketing processes and performance to your direct competitors or to industry standards.

Benchmarking helps you ask the question, “what does success look like?”

Every modern marketer is looking for metrics to predict, improve, and evaluate the performance of their campaigns. And for every campaign, benchmarking is the first step to a strong quantitative strategy.

What is Social Media Benchmarking?

Social media benchmarking is an evaluation of your social media performance against your competitors and/or industry standards.

Through social media benchmarking, you can objectively compare metrics like follower counts, post reach, engagement rates, posting times, and whatever other metrics are most relevant to your business success.

Why Should You Benchmark?

Whether you’re comparing key quantitative metrics or establishing the type of content that performs best in your industry, benchmarking helps you set a target to aim for.

Without benchmarking, you’re operating in the dark—subjectively judging the success of your campaigns without any real grounding in reality.

And more than any other marketing channel, social media can be a bottomless pit of wasted time. You or your competitors may be getting lots of shares, follows, and likes, but is it translating into business success?

Here’s why benchmarking is a great idea:

1. Set Realistic Goals

Social media benchmarking helps you compare apples to apples.

Every brand would love to have millions of followers, but maybe that’s just not realistic in your industry. 

A thorough benchmarking analysis of your most relevant competitors gives you a clear picture of the value social media may bring to your business.

2. Educate Your Strategy

Social media doesn’t just have to be an artform.

You can make it a science too.

By evaluating your own social media successes and the successes of your competitors through benchmarking data, you’ll be able to create a highly actionable social media strategy that’s more based on facts than feelings.

3. Evaluate Your Performance

By properly benchmarking the metrics you’re most interested in tracking, you can more effectively and realistically track your own performance. 

That means less guessing, and more confidence in your strategy. Using benchmarks will also help you prove your worth to your boss or clients, and more easily track the ROI of your efforts.

How to Conduct Social Media Benchmarking (in 6 Steps!)

It may sound cliché, but there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to social media benchmarking, just like there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to social media.

Here are 6 highly actionable steps to help you benchmark your social media success.

Step 1 – Establish Your Goals

To start, you’ll have to determine what you’re trying to get out of being on social media in the first place.

It’s unbelievable how many marketers skip this step! Never “do social media” for the sake of doing social media.

Establish your business goals, and then determine what role social media plays in achieving those goals.

And it’s best if those goals are measurable.

For example, you may be in sports marketing, trying to build an online community around your team’s brand. In that case, you would be more interested in benchmarking engagement metrics or finding the type of content that gets the most reach in your sport.

In contrast, if you ran an e-commerce business, you’d be more interested in driving visitors to your website to purchase your products. In that case, you’d want to track link clicks or conversion rates.

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C will also play a role.

Are you looking to increase your customer base in the form of widespread brand awareness on Facebook and Instagram, or are you using social media as part of a B2B sales strategy on LinkedIn?

Establish your goals, and write them down.

As you work through your benchmarking strategy, every question you ask should relate specifically to these goals.

Step 2 – Determine Your Competitors

Who are your competitors?

This question may be more tricky than it seems at first, as there are many types of competition:

Direct Competitors – Competitors that provide the same services in your same target market.

For example, if you ran a local clothing boutique, your direct competitor could be another local clothing store.

Indirect Competitors – Competitors that provide different services but still compete with you in your market.

Keeping with our local clothing boutique example, this could be a big box store that also sells clothes—like Walmart.

Replacement Competitors – Competitors in a different industry whose products could be a substitute for yours.

For a boutique local clothing store, this could be an online monthly clothing box subscription.

Potential/Future – Future or potential competitors that currently don’t serve your market but likely could in the future.

Perhaps a platform like Amazon will one day allow people to easily purchase local clothing products from your particular market online.

So: in our case of social media benchmarking, take the time to really think out your competition, both online and offline—and how they relate to your business goals.

For example, if you’re a local clothing boutique, you may be indirectly competing with Old Navy for foot traffic, but you may not gain anything from comparing your social media performance to theirs—so it wouldn’t make sense to include them in your analysis.

But if you do have plans to scale your business to bigger proportions, then it does make sense to compare to the larger brand—even if it’s overly ambitious at this point.

Refer back to your business goals and then make a list of your top social media competitors.

Step 3 – Pick the Right Social Media Networks

Next, we want to figure out which social media networks to use in our benchmarking exercise.

And to be clear, we’re not trying to answer the question, “Which social network should my brand use?” just yet. In this step, we’re trying to answer, “Which social media networks should we benchmark?”

Start by using your competitor list. Take note of which platforms each of your competitors is using. 

If they’ve already run campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, all we have to do is measure which accounts and platforms have seen the most success to better educate our own strategy.

And the key here is not to limit your benchmarking to only the platforms your brand is using. The whole point of this exercise is to identify industry standards.

In this step, you should also think about your audience. Are there any networks that your target audience is using that your competitors aren’t yet?

For example, a newer platform like TikTok (as of the time we’re writing this post) may be unexplored territory. Or maybe your competitors haven’t invested in video content on YouTube yet.

Critically think about which platforms you may want to consider using, and include them in your analysis.

Step 4 – Choose Which Social Media Metrics to Measure

Now’s the time to decide which metrics best reflect your business goals we identified all the way back in step 1.

Here, you should also determine if you want to benchmark at the account level or the industry level.

For example, do you want to benchmark the performance of your top competitors, or do you want to do a widespread analysis of an entire industry?

You may need to revisit your competitor list at this point. But that’s okay—this whole exercise is literally a learning process.

Moving along, let’s choose which metrics matter most to you. You may want to consider metrics like:

• engagement rates
• reach, impressions, or views
• follower counts and growth rates
• content type distribution
• post timing and frequency
• top accounts
• sentiment analysis

For each of these metrics, you may be interested in not only the average or median performance, but also the top performers too.

Related reading: 5 Under Analyzed Social Media Metrics that Matter [+ Tools to Measure Them!]

Step 5 – Write Down Actionable Insights

All too often, marketers gather and look at data because they know it’s what they should be doing, but they don’t take it as far as creating actionable insights from the data.

So now’s the time to create some key takeaways—because we don’t want all of this data gathering to be for nothing.

This step is all about interpreting your benchmark data.

Write your findings down, and make written recommendations as to how they should impact your social media strategy.

Your insights could focus on things like business potential, what types of content stand out from the rest, accounts to follow in your industry, or when to post.

Here are some example insights you could come away with:

“In our industry, videos have 3x the engagement rate of photos. We should incorporate at least one video per week into our social media strategy.”

“Among our competitors, Instagram posts receive more reach than Facebook posts, but Facebook posts receive more link clicks. We should focus our Instagram posts on branding, and focus our Facebook posts more on driving visitors to our e-commerce website.”

“In our industry, posts receive far more engagement at the beginning of the week than at the end of the week. We should adjust our social media content calendar to reflect that.”

“Our competitor, Johnny’s Jeans, has the highest Instagram engagement rate of any of our competitors. They post a mix of user-generated content, in-store videos, and feel-good quotes, so we should aim to incorporate all three into our strategy.”

As you can see, these insights can take many forms. Remember to center them around your business goals!

Tip: To really drive it home, put these insights into a presentation, infographic, or marketing plan. Showing how you’re exceeding your competitors—or how you plan to get there—is a great way to prove your worth.

Step 6 – Take Action and Repeat

Put your insights into action!

Depending on your business goals, you may either want to keep continuous tabs on your key metrics, or perform another one-time audit once you’ve had some time to implement your strategy.

The key is to keep measuring and keep evaluating. Social media changes quickly, so your analysis is never done.

Using Keyhole for Social Media Benchmarking

Keyhole has all the tools you need to make your social media benchmarking efforts simple and painless.

Let’s take a look at a few examples in action.

Example: Benchmarking Engagement Rates

Engagement rate is the average amount of engagement that content in a particular category receives on a particular platform. 

Engagement comes in many forms: likes, favorites, shares, replies, views, clicks—you name it. Here’s a breakdown of what counts as social media engagement on different platforms.

In other words, engagement rate reflects how often people interact with your posts. This is normally seen as a reflection of how well content resonates with an audience.

And you can measure engagement rate as loosely or as fine-grained as you like, dependent on your business goals.

For example, you can measure engagement rates for all posts from a particular account, or engagement rates for a particular type of content in an entire industry, or even engagement rates on a particular day of the week.

Example: Benchmarking Follower Growth

Let’s say your business goal is to create brand awareness.

You’ve already benchmarked your social accounts against your competitors, and you’re already miles ahead in terms of engagement, but you want to be sure you’re also reaching a widespread audience—not just the same small, engaged audience every time.

As a result, you’ve decided follower count will be one of your metrics for success. 

Using Keyhole’s account tracking tools, you can track and benchmark the follower growth of your account vs. your competitors. 

Get Started with Keyhole

Keyhole has all the social media listening tools necessary to benchmark nearly any account or any industry, including:

• Campaign & Event Tracking: Compare your campaigns to your competitors’
• Brand Monitoring: Track posts, engagement, and reach of any brand
• Influencer Management: Identify influencers that can help your business goals
• Market Research: Forecast trends with our AI-driven tools
• Sentiment Analysis: Compare the emotional responses to you and your competitors

Keyhole is easy to use and free to try. So it’s a great place to start with your benchmarking efforts.

The post Analyze Industry Competitors Using Social Media Benchmarking appeared first on Keyhole.

But being left with a small relevant dataset is common, even though the process involves keyword research to target what your audience is saying about your brand and competitors.

Adding hashtags to your social media listening strategy can help ease the problem.

By tracking certain tagged topics, you’ll collect more applicable information about what your audiences say and think about you. Your understanding of how to market your brand will improve as a result.

What Is Social Listening with Hashtags?

Also called social media monitoring, the goal of social listening is to gain an understanding of how people perceive your brand based on what they say about it online.

Standard social listening involves tracking what consumers say on virtually any digital space, using hashtags enhances the library of data collected on social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram.

It’s a type of data mining.

It revolves around identifying posts that use tagged topics, along with analyzing those posts to quantify metrics such as influence and engagement.

Hashtag tracking plays a key role in social listening because:

• It’s easier to identify hashtags than keywords, since they’re already somewhat popular
• Members of your target audiences use industry-related hashtags
• You can track the activity levels of hashtag trends and conversations, helping you determine how large a crisis is or how popular a positive message is
• By adding sentiment-based keywords to your trackers, you can measure the general feeling about a given tagged topic

5 Types of Hashtags to Monitor

The scope of your social listening strategy won’t be wide enough if you only track one kind of hashtag.

As you plan and implement the strategy, consider monitoring these five different types of hashtags:

1. Brand Hashtags

Track these hashtags along with positive (fun, great) and negative (bad, won’t) keywords to measure sentiment.

As you identify users with clear opinions one way or the other, reach out.

This could involve asking what they specifically like or dislike, building genuine conversations to earn their appreciation.

As a bonus, these conversations could result in developing ideas to improve your product or service.

Not only should you include your brand hashtag when sharing original content, but encourage your fans and followers to use it too. This is a win-win scenario, because:

• You’ll have more social content to track and analyze
• Users will have a clear way to share posts with the community interested in your brand, helping them gain a larger following

Example: #JustDoIt

Under Nike’s famous brand hashtag, people share posts about sports, athletic apparel and motivation.

Keeping tabs on the hashtag gives Nike a clear picture of what their target markets think about the brand’s identity.

2. Your Competitors’ Brand Hashtags

What you can do for your brand, you can do for the competition.

As potential customers use opposing hashtags, track them and use keyword filters to figure out what prospects do and don’t like about other brands.

When you identify a prospect, you may feel the need to gently reach out and explain why you succeed where your competitor fails. This can involve giving a demo or free trial, depending on your industry.

On the flip side, look out for satisfied customers.

If your company doesn’t offer the service or product that made them happy, your team may have a new idea to consider.

Example: #BeMoreHuman

By monitoring the Reebok hashtag, Nike digital strategists can figure out which posts:

• Earn the most engagement
• Express a clear opinion about the Reebok brand
• Reveal prospects to follow up with

From there, Nike’s social team can take the approach it wants to when it comes to interacting with users or studying successful content.

3. Chat Hashtags

A quick search using key terms should reveal chat hashtags relevant to your industry and audience.

Popular on Twitter, you can monitor a chat to learn more about users who are interested in the subject matter.

Tracking relevant chat hashtags as part of your social listening strategy allows you to:

• Make content ideas based on people’s opinions, pain-points and comments
• Track if your company or competition is referenced during the conversation
• Connect with new prospects, as many people who may be interested in your company might not know about it

Example: #SoloPR

Your brand stands to benefit as a member of either category. As a public relations team, you can make new contacts.

As someone who targets these professionals, you can stay on top of industry trends.

4. Event Hashtags

As more marketing and public relations teams use social media to amplify events, tracking event hashtags should secure a spot in your social listening plans.

Monitoring activity before, during and after the big day can provide insights about:

• Any concerns attendees have
• Which parts of the event were most appreciated
• When activity around your hashtag rises, and if any spikes correlate with certain parts of the event

Example: #GRAMMYs

It’s not your average event in terms of scope, but social media marketers in the music and entertainment industries stand to benefit from tracking #GRAMMYs on Twitter.

Staying on top of your data feed and tweeting appropriately can boost audience and engagement numbers as moments go viral, users disapprove of a speech or if there’s backlash against a winner.

5. Campaign Hashtags

Not everyone will directly mention your brand when using your campaign hashtag, meaning there’s a clear need to track the tag’s performance as part of your social media monitoring strategy.

The same goes for online campaigns from rival brands.

Similar to brand hashtags, you should track campaign hashtags with and without sentiment-based keyword filters.

Doing so gives segmented looks at how consumers view the campaign.

It’s easier to sort through relevant and irrelevant data – as well as pinpoint issues and action items – as a result.

Example: #ShareACoke

Coca-Cola’s famous campaign never seems to end, as customers keep sharing photos of namesake cans and bottles.

By monitoring this campaign hashtag as a competitor, you can:

• Develop ideas for future campaigns
• Learn how to alter your products or make new ones
• Determine which types of digital content you should be making and encouraging your audience to create

Tracking this hashtag as part of Coca-Cola’s social listening strategy helps its marketers:

• Repurpose the most popular content
• Reach out to well-known personalities using the hashtag
• Study what charged the campaign’s success

5 Social Listening Tools

If your digital team doesn’t already use one, your step after identifying hashtags is finding a tool that collects accurate data.

There’s a library of social media analytics services to choose from, each with features and price points to suite different teams. We looked into 25 platforms in this blog post.

But since not all of them apply to social listening, here are 5 tools that do:

1. Keyhole

But tracking hashtags and keywords, collecting metrics to improve your social listening approach, is a reason why users love us.

You can compile Twitter and Instagram content in real-time, displaying data such as reach, impressions and activity numbers on a shareable dashboard.

Plus, you can rank influential posters and track demographic metrics such as gender and location.

If you happen to miss monitoring an event or campaign, we’ll get historical social media data for you.

2. Social Mention

Think of this tool as a social search engine. Entering a hashtag will generate pages of user-generated content from more than 100 platforms.

Social Mention tracks traditional metrics such as reach and sentiment, making it useful for listening to discussions around brand and campaign hashtags.

But it also displays unique metrics such as passion – the likelihood that users will post more than once about your brand.

3. Hootsuite

A popular platform management tool, you can also use Hootsuite for social listening.

After you identify keyphrases, create a stream for each one.

You’ll get a grid of social content, showing basic engagement data. Hootsuite also lets you flag posts and assign team members to address them.

What’s more, you can restrict the stream results based on data such as location.

4. Twubs

Twubs is a hashtag directory, fit for basic social listening on Twitter.

Typing a hashtag into the home page’s search bar will generate a live stream of tweets, also giving you an option to access limited historical data. Within Twubs, you can reply to tweets and post new messages with the given hashtag.

5. Twitter Advanced Search

Don’t overlook Twitter itself for basic social listening.

You can use the advanced search function to refine your queries, identifying posts that use any given hashtag.

The range of filters for dates, sentiments, locations and keywords helps you zone in on specific audiences. And since you’re operating on the platform itself, it’s easy to engage with people.

Segmenting Your Audiences

Dividing the audiences you identify through social listening into sub-categories can help you develop content to better meet their diverse needs and interests.

In this case, social market segmentation starts with sampling messages that use a monitored hashtag.

Depending on the popularity of the tag, this could involve looking at 10% to 100% of the posts.

By examining profiles and other messages, divide the posters into groups based on data such as:

• Age
• Industry/Expertise
• Influencer Status
• Geographic Location

Look for themes and prevailing opinions within each group. For example, you may notice a segment of your audience expresses a common concern. Another may frequently post about a topic related to your brand.

Regardless, developing these consumer personas is an exercise in better understanding your markets and knowing how to communicate with them.

That’s the goal of social media monitoring, after all.

Comments to Reflect On

Optimizing your social listening approach with hashtags and select keyword filters can generate a library of relevant data, providing more information about your online market.

And by monitoring different types of hashtags, you may even unlock an audience you didn’t know you had.

That, in itself, could take your marketing strategy in a new direction. Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram.

The post Using Hashtag Tracking to Optimize Social Listening Strategy [+ Tools!] appeared first on Keyhole.

In a world where information is available in real time and content is accessible on-demand, broadcast and media companies have to keep pace with changing audience expectations.

Below, we will explore the ways social media can be used in broadcast and media to create a more compelling programme and increase audience engagement. 

We’ll also discuss a couple of case studies and ultimately show you how you can use social listening tools like Keyhole to automate the task of turning raw data into actionable information. 

Without much ado, let’s dive right in.

Why Do Media and Broadcasting Companies Need Social Media Analytics?

Before we get to the “how”, we first need to make sure that the “why” is clear. 

Here are some stats that illustrate the importance of social media in the modern consumer’s everyday life as well as how social media relates to broadcast and media:

• According to a 2018 Nielsen report, 45% of consumers almost always use a second screen when watching TV. 28% of consumers sometimes use another digital device simultaneously, while only 12% of consumers never use another device when watching TV. The numbers are significantly lower for audio content.

• The same Nielsen report shows that most of the consumers that are second screening do so to look up information related to the content, express their opinion on the content, search for a product after they’ve seen an ad, or read other people’s commentary on the content they’re watching.

• Similarly, a 2015 Fortune report showed that in 2014, there have been more than a billion TV-related tweets, with 85% of users who use Twitter during prime-time tweeting about the content they’re watching.

Source: Fortune.com

These stats clearly show that most modern consumers are second screening – and are doing so to look for or provide extra information/opinions on the content they’re exposed to.

Instead of competing with real time and on-demand content available online, media and entertainment companies need to work with social media and leverage the wealth of data from multiple sources to optimize their strategy and operations.

This takes us to our starting question: Why do media and broadcasting companies need analytics?

Social data can help companies to:

• Understand audience preferences and activity patterns to optimize content and ads
• Find out what causes viewership spikes and drops 
• Analyze audience sentiment on a weekly basis, about each episode, season or programme
• Define audience demographics for more precise targeting
• Keep pace with trends and find out who are the influencers that create a buzz in the industry
• Make better predictions based on the conversations that the audience are having before/during/after airing a programme
• Analyze channel profitability and impact, to optimise investments and identify when to cancel or renew a show

The benefits are clear. 

So why aren’t most broadcasting and media companies using social media analytics to improve their performance?

The problem lies in the amounts of data – with so much data available across different channels, it takes a lot of time and effort to sift through the noise.

That’s why it’s crucial to approach analytics systematically.

Wondering how?

Your 4-Step Social Analytics Plan

To turn social data into actionable insights, broadcasting and media companies need to tackle four critical components:

Social Listening

Before you analyze social media data, you need to gather enough information about the relevant conversations that your audience is having online.

The biggest challenge of the social listening phase is the amount of data available.

If you pull your data directly from the social media platforms, you will end up with a pile of unstructured information that would a long time to organize before it can be used for analytics.

That’s where third-party social listening tools like Keyhole come in handy – these tools allow you to focus on the conversations you are interested in, and avoid the rest, saving you lots of unnecessary work in the process.

Data Refinement

The mass collection of data in the first phase results in mounds of information that have high-potential, but need to be organized and structured before they can be used. 

Manually extracting and then refining all the data is an exercise that requires a lot of effort.

To ensure that no conversations and opportunities are missed, most modern organizations overcome this challenge by automating the data selection and categorization process.

Goal Setting

The insights you get from data only make sense if you know what you are trying to accomplish. A common mistake in broadcasting and media is silo thinking and disparate data across the organization.

More often than not, different departments have different ideas about where the organization is headed, and they use social media to achieve different outcomes. 

Needless to say, this diminishes the value of the collected data – the only way an organization can increase engagement, optimize activities and drive better performance is by creating a single, shared vision about the organization’s goals.

Sustainable Strategy Creation

Finally, organizations have to take it one step further and develop a long-term, sustainable strategy that outlines how the collected social media insights will be used across the organization.

This is an iterative process that involves continuous testing and refining.

Now that we’ve explained the four step process of turning raw data into useful, actionable insights that can drive change in the organization, let’s talk a bit more about…

What Metrics Can You Track?

Public Sentiment

Sentiment can be positive and negative, and by following online conversations on forums and social media platforms, networks can get a real-time insight into how people feel about their programme. 

TechTalk’s has published a report on the most popular TV shows public sentiment. We’ll discuss some of their findings, as these are a great illustration of what we talked about until this point.

With 32,197,368 mentions, and an average of 3,7 mentions per users, Stranger Things tops the list of the most talked about show at the time when TechTalk was gathering their data. 

This corresponds with Netflix’s streaming data about the third season of Stranger Things – according to their insights, with a record of 40.7 million household accounts watching the show since its global launch on July 4th, Stranger Things was the most watched series on Netflix.

Stranger Things has a more or less gender-balanced viewership: 44% of the viewers who talked about the show online are male and 56% are female. 

More than 80% of conversations online were positive.

The data shows that most of the public sentiment about the show was positive, with disgust and fear amounting to a total of 12%.

The show is in the horror genre, so these numbers are expected. 

If we analyze the mentions and pieces written on the show, we could see that a lot of the conversations are about Jim Hopper’s anger management issues and Steve Harrington being the best (and most underrated) character.

Influencers

Another way broadcasting and media could use social media analytics is to find influencers in their industry.

One way of doing this is finding the most popular stars in a show and then using these findings to enhance marketing. 

Another way is to find creators who are in some way related to the industry and are influential within their community – and then use these creators to generate buzz around a new programme, a show, or a campaign.

This is exactly what YouTube did when launching their YouTube Red service which offers an ad-free option and premium content that stars some of the most popular YouTubers.

Competitive Analysis

Social data can uncover great opportunities for broadcast and media companies.

One such example is Netflix’s decision to pick up the TV series, Lucifer, after it had been cancelled by Fox.

Netflix is known to leave nothing to chance, so this decision, just like most of the streaming giant’s decisions, was made after a viral #SaveLucifer Twitter campaign was launched by passionate viewers on May 11^th.

The campaign amassed 1M tweets in less than 24 hours.

With so many people invested in the show, it was only logical that Netflix would renew it for a fourth season and give millions of viewers what they want. 

“Lucifer is a fantastic show that has really resonated with audiences in parts of the world, so we felt it was important for our licensing team to try to help that show continue for our fans,” Netflix’s VP Cindy Holland said for Deadline.

Netflix is great at monitoring and analyzing public opinion and conversations with apt data collection. They rely on these actionable analytics and insights that support better decision-making.

Hashtag Campaigns

Disparate information can make it hard for organizations to track online conversations. 

The #SaveLucifer had this problem when more and more people started joining the campaign with different hashtags.

How theCHIVE Uses Unique Hashtags to Engage their Follower Base

TheCHIVE Charity Group, had a hard time tracking and engaging their 20 million strong follower base. 

TheChive’s solution to this problem was to begin using unique hashtags for their campaigns.

Let’s have a quick look into their use case.

WHO ARE theCHIVE

TheCHIVE is a popular website that publishes feel-good photos and videos.

Over the course of 10 years, theCHIVE have amassed a following of millions, and have 20 million monthly users.  

The company’s charity division leverages the website’s massive influence and strong social media presence to find people in need, focusing on rare medical cases, special education initiatives, veterans and first responders.

What theCHIVE will usually do is ask their audience to share a photo with a hashtag and then donate $1 per every shared post to the related charity or cause. 

Over the course of 10 years, theCHIVE have managed to raise over $10M for people in need all around the world.

The Problem

The problem that theCHIVE had was keeping track of all the people that are engaging with their content. They were looking for an easy way to track all the mentions and the online conversations that were going on about a campaign. 

One of these campaigns was the first-ever national beer tournament which theCHIVE organized across 50 US states. They needed to pick two winners from each state, who then confronted each other on a national championship. 

The problem was, how do you track all the contestants in all 50 states in real time?

The Solution

TheCHIVE’s solution was using unique hashtags. For every state, theCHIVE came up with a dedicated hashtag. 

So now, they had 50 different hashtags they needed to track in real time… which is where Keyhole came in.

Using Keyhole, theCHIVE were able to monitor all the online conversations people were having online related to the championship, and access them via an easy-to-use dashboard that gave them a complete view of the entire tournament.

Now that you know how social media insights could be used to reinforce a channel, a programme, a show or a campaign, let’s recap…

Why is it Important to Measure Your ROI?

Measuring your ROI will enable you to understand your market, your audience’s preferences and help you spend your money more wisely by investing in projects that are more likely to take off.

By measuring your ROI, you’ll be able to understand what kind of shows your audience likes the most, test how long they’re willing to wait between different episodes of a programme, what are the optimal times to post, what stars or characters are the audience’s favourite, how your audience reacts to product placement, and more.

All this will enable you to optimize your investments, improve predictions, enhance advertising and ultimately offer better service to your customers.

How to use Keyhole as a Tool for Media and Broadcast Industries

By now it’s already clear why broadcasting and media need to look past TV ratings and traditional forms of testing, like focus groups and pre-screenings.

They need to create a “blended” listening practice that incorporates social media analytics.

However, social listening and analytics can be a time-consuming activity given the amount of information available (we’re talking millions of consumers), so it’s important to automate the parts that can be automated. 

Third party analytics tools like Keyhole streamline social listening and gather and structure the data for you.

Using Keyhole, you will be able to:

• Get more information about your reach
  
• Understand the demographics of the people that are having conversations about your company or products online

• Find the most influential individuals among those that are talking about you

• Track trending topics and keep pace with what the audience wants to consume, so that you can create a more effective content strategy

• Find out the optimal posting time and length so that you can spend your marketing dollars more wisely

• Compare your performance to the performance of your competitors

• Get more in-depth insights about a specific topic you’re interested in exploring further
  
• Predict how the conversations you are tracking will evolve the following week and month

All these features and much more are part of what Keyhole offers as a tool. 

Final Thoughts

Social media platforms have become a valuable business intelligence tool where millions of people give away free information about their habits, opinions, and needs. 

As the media consumption habits are changing and more and more people are second screening, media and broadcasting companies need to start looking into social media for meaningful insights that could drive better decision-making.

When done correctly, social media analytics can help broadcasting and media companies to have better conversations with their fan base, identify brand affinities and influential individuals, optimize their programmes and ultimately increase their profits and ratings.

However, most organizations still struggle to determine which data they need to analyze and what counts as “noise” and should be left out.

Third party social listening and analytics tools like Keyhole take away the time consuming grunt work of data collection and sorting and give organizations clean and understandable reports on what the organization does right, how it competes with other players in the market, and help to uncover opportunities to improve their performance.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram.

The post Broadcast And Media Companies: Improving Performance With Social Media Analytics appeared first on Keyhole.

Some of the most important ones are often ignored in favour of “vanity metrics” – numbers that don’t help guide your marketing decisions, but are easy to track.

To make strides in your social approach, it helps to dig deeper into underlying data.

To start, monitor these five social media metrics:

1. Click Through Rate (CTR)

CTR measures the number of people who click through to your website after seeing your post.

It’s common practice for marketers to A/B test headlines and calls-to-action (CTAs) on web pages to track CTR, but not as many do the same with social media posts.

For those not familiar with the concept of A/B – or split – testing, it’s a way to compare two versions of a marketing piece.

For example, you could send different renditions of an email message to 100 people. The one that yields the highest CTR wins, and will be sent to your remaining contacts.

You can test:

• Link Length
• Posting Time
• Visual Content
• Copy (including CTA)
• Hashtag Strategy, if applicable

Why This Social Media Metric Matters:

Based on the results of a few tests, you can start determining the best posting practices for getting clicks.

The Tool: Twitter Analytics

Twitter is the ideal platform for A/B testing posts.

Repeating tweets is normal. Only a tiny fraction of your audience is online at a given time. And depending on how many people they follow, your followers’ timelines are packed with tweets.

After conducting a few split tests, just click the option to view each tweet’s activity metrics:

Then compare the CTR for each tweet.

2. Response Rate to Prospects and Customers

Social media users sent 21% more messages to business accounts in 2015 than 2014, according to research by Sprout Social. And 40% of these messages, including complaints and questions, require a response.

This data shows that community managers are increasingly valuable, as they directly deal with current and potential customers’ problems.

Why This Social Media Metric Matters:

If you seldom track metrics related to issues community managers solve and questions they answer, you lose insights into your overall customer service approach.

After all, you’d know to restructure your strategy if half of client issues went unsolved. And if an interaction as painful as this one happened, you’d have to take action.

The Tool: Hootsuite Core Analytics

Whereas the majority of social media analytics platforms focus on external data, Hootsuite Core Analytics also deals with internal metrics.

To measure the performance of your team and individual colleagues, you can track stats such as messages sent and issue resolution time.

3. Sentiment

Sentiment may seem like a superficial social media metric at first, but it can prove valuable.

It’s measured by monitoring messages and relevant keywords, sorting them into emotion-based categories. For example, some categories could be sad, angry, happy and appreciative.

Why This Social Media Metric Matters:

You can glean useful information by analyzing posts talking about your brand, services and sector. This is especially true when you have a large enough sample size to confidently say “wow, people love aspect X of our industry but hate aspect Y.”

Based on sentiment analysis, you can come up with small ideas worth further investigation, like:

• Launching events or campaigns your audience would likely enjoy
• Replicating services or products that your key markets appreciate
• Altering how you position your brand based on what people say about your competition

The Tool: Social Mention

Think of Social Mention as a search engine with a complementary social media analytics suite. You can access a stream of user-generated content from more than 100 platforms just by typing a keyword.

It records sentiment through a positive-to-negative content ratio, along with a look at neutral posts on the right side of your screen:

4. Network Referrals

As well as promoting your brand and engaging key audiences, your activity on social media should drive traffic back to your website.

You can measure network referrals to see how well you’re doing.

Normally, referral traffic is defined as visits to your website from sources other than Google. When someone clicks a link to your website on Instagram, it’s a referral.

Why This Social Media Metric Matters:

Website traffic generated from social media is often a guiding metric in overall marketing strategies because:

• Noticeable changes can indicate whether or not your content meets your audience’s needs
• You can see which shared URLs drove the most traffic, indicating what your social market wants to learn about
• For some news and content-based organizations, analytics firm Parse.ly says Facebook alone drives more traffic than Google

The Tool: Google Analytics

Used by marketers worldwide, Google Analytics is the top choice for analyzing website traffic – including network referrals.

Find your key stats by clicking Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals:

From here, you can see which network drove the most sessions, page views, pages per session and more metrics.

You can also dig deeper to see how individual links performed on each platform:

5. Assisted Conversions

You’ve probably tracked conversions from social media when running targeted campaigns, but your social media activity can also help collect assisted conversions.

What’s an assisted conversion?

If a social platform plays a role in the conversion path, except the last interaction, it gets an assist.

For example, someone clicks a Twitter link to your site, leaves and then comes back a day later to convert.

Here’s a sports analogy to clarify – numbers 9 and 22 get the assists, but 21 scores the conversion:

Why This Social Media Metric Matters:

The assisted conversions metric gives you another look at how your customers behave and meet the goals you’ve set for them.

By analyzing assisted conversions from each social network, you can plainly see which ones impact your online success and which ones need new strategies in terms of what you post and how you advertise.

The Tool: Google Analytics

Stick with Google Analytics and find this metric through Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions:

You can see how social media compares to other assisted conversion sources. What’s more, you can look at the assisted conversion value from each social platform to learn which ones are most profitable:

Assisted conversions, network referrals, sentiment, response rates and split tests results may be under-analyzed, but they certainly matter with regards to building a strong marketing strategy.

Set and meet goals based on them to get a leg up on your social competition.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram.

The post 5 Under Analyzed Social Media Metrics That Matter [+ Tools To Measure Them!] appeared first on Keyhole.

Social media is an enormously powerful tool for managing customer relationships, broadcasting positive brand stories and introducing new products. But while the benefits of this free, fast and intuitive marketing channel are virtually limitless, it also has some potentially serious risks.

But there’s good news; with proper planning you can avoid the most common mistakes that lead to a social media crisis.

What Causes Social Media Crises?

Common Mistakes — Just about anything can spark social media outrage and bring out the trolls, but the most common slip-ups include:

• Spelling and grammar mistakes made by professional organizations
• Accidentally liking an inappropriate post
• Tweeting a personal message from a professional account
• Unintentionally making an offensive statement

Serious Problems — Employee sabotage and hacking are much more serious offenses, it can result in somebody’s identity getting stolen. While businesses can, and do, shift responsibility for the malicious post, they’re often criticised for allowing their login credentials to be compromised.

Catastrophic Events — Intentionally racist, sexist, or malicious comments made by companies or individuals ignite the worst type of social media crisis. These statements can significantly impact a brand’s revenue and reputation, and recovery could take years.

Look no further than Roseanne Barr for a trending example of how powerful one tweet can be.

In the days following her comment, Barr’s television contract was canceled, her reputation was heavily damaged, and she lost an estimated $3 million in revenue.

So, how can you avoid a social media crisis? Here are 6 steps you can take.

1. Have a Crisis Communication Plan

The most important steps toward preventing a social media disaster are understanding what crisis management means for your business and creating an action plan to address your risk factors.

While you can’t predict every crisis, you can train your social media team to prepare for, and effectively manage, potential problems.

Since social media is your front line of communication during a crisis, your plan should include specific guidelines to protect your brand. Most importantly, always have a second set of eyes on every post before it’s published. Companies should also train more individuals in crisis communications and social media management than you think you’ll need.

2. Monitor your Social Media for Trouble!

Identifying problems as soon as they arise is critical to crisis prevention. Unfortunately, you may never know about the biggest issues facing your company because 96% of angry customers don’t complain to brands directly. Many of these upset customers prefer posting about their poor experience on their own timeline. These “dark” complaints could go unnoticed, causing negative impact, without proper tools and training program.

Social listening tools allow you to monitor keywords and indirect brand mentions as well as direct mentions. This gives your company a much more holistic view of what your customers are saying across all social platforms.

Keyhole’s Intelligent Notifications feature is an excellent example of how brands can set up alerts to detect direct and indirect (‘dark’) posts with negative sentiment.

Keyhole AI detects any tracked posts with negative sentiment made about your brand, and you automatically receive an Intelligent notification in your inbox, which allows you to react to the post before the negative sentiment escalates.

For instance, United Airlines would have seen this tweet and its volume, the first mention of the United Flight 3411 incident, with Keyhole.

This would have given the airline an ample runway to handle the crisis before it escalated.

3. Always Engage with Your Audience

Social profiles are frequently viewed as sales tools instead of powerful customer service platforms for building brand loyalty and customer care. By solely pitching products rather than having meaningful conversations with your followers, you could miss opportunities to address customer experience problems early on.

According to Maritz Research, 49% of customers expect companies to respond to Twitter complaints, yet only 29% of those who complained received a reply.

Additionally, customers who complain expect a response within 4 hours, while the average brand response time exceeds 10 hours.

It’s crucial to respond quickly and professionally when negative comments about your company are discovered. Ignoring criticism, even when it isn’t posted directly to your page, sends a message to your followers that you don’t care enough about them to respond.

4. Respond to Criticism Professionally

Knowing how to properly handle criticism in a public forum is essential to protecting your reputation. A single rude response to a genuine complaint will do far more damage to your image than the original comment could.

Deleting comments and blocking users may seem like the quickest way to fix a problem, but doing so could cause your customer to become more outspoken. Instead, make an effort to understand what caused the situation and show a willingness to make things right.

Consumers typically complain on social media when their problem has not been properly resolved. You may be able to prevent your customers from complaining in public by providing a seamless resolution process on your website or over a business phone app.

Angry customers want to express their frustration quickly, so they usually avoid email. Adding a simple feedback button to your site may prevent them from firing off a raging tweet for all to see. Just make sure it’s easy to find and effortless to use. You could even offer visitors incentives for leaving feedback if it they’ve been poking around your site for a while.

5. Choose the Right Person to Manage Your Accounts

Assigning your brand’s social media strategy to an intern or an inexperienced employee may save you money, but it could also be a recipe for disaster.

A great social media manager has a level head, is capable of handling a crisis, and is well-organized and detail-oriented. Finding someone with public relations experience adds another layer of insurance against mistakes.

Prefer to outsource the work? There are many companies specializing in managing social media accounts for businesses. This option may be the most impactful if you have room in your budget. You can use virtual assistant services and better time management strategies to handle more tasks efficiently.

6. Draft an Employee Social Media Policy

Most people might think their private social profiles are safe for ranting about work stress, but negative posts can have serious consequences if customers or coworkers see them. Distribute guidelines about how to reference your brand online, but don’t scare your team away from posting. Happy employees are some of the best recruiting tools you can ask for!

Closing thoughts

The benefits of using social media intelligently will always outweigh the risks. Remember to monitor for problems, listen to your followers, react quickly and compassionately, and plan ahead, that way you’ll be able to maximize the benefits of this channel while avoiding potential crises.

The post 6 Critical Steps To Avoid A Social Media Crisis appeared first on Keyhole.

Website getting traffic but still not getting conversions?

If you think your content’s fine, then perhaps you need to take a look at your keyword strategy?

Yes, you sometimes need to go all the way back to make sure you’re drawing in quality leads from the right channels.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the most brilliant and engaging pieces of content in the world. If you targeted the wrong keywords, none of your PPC, SEO, or content marketing strategies will consistently produce profitable results.

The good news is, keyword research doesn’t necessarily have to be extremely difficult. With the right tools and tactics, you can definitely discover lucrative keyword opportunities without breaking a sweat.

In this post, we’ll show you the best ways to do keyword research so you can bag winning keyword suggestions every single time.

Let’s get started.

1. Turn Seed Keywords Into Long-Tail Keywords

Regardless of niche, keyword research always starts with a seed keyword that’s too broad and competitive to be feasible.

That’s why you need tools like Ubersuggest to expand your seed keyword into hundreds of long-tail keyword ideas. These are keywords that are at least 3 terms long and target a narrower audience.

To use Ubersuggest, simply enter your seed keyword and click “Look Up.” Don’t forget to adjust the localization of your keyword to generate suggestions that are relevant to your place of business.

Within seconds, Ubersuggest will generate hundreds of long-tail keywords as well as present the metrics that can determine their profitability.

To keep things short, here is a brief explanation of each of the three metrics you’ll encounter in Ubersuggest results:

Search Volume
The first metric measures the average monthly searches. This can be directly used to gauge a keyword’s popularity and demand.

CPC
Short for cost per click, the CPC metric denotes the average amount that advertisers are willing to pay for PPC advertisement actions. A high CPC often signals that a particular keyword can be monetized and converts well.

Competition
Lastly, Ubersuggest measures the competitiveness level of keywords on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0. For faster results, it’s recommended that you target keywords with a competitiveness score of around 0.4 or less.

At this point, you should be able to come up with a fresh lineup of long-tail keywords (whether for PPC or SEO) based on the initial results.

But don’t get overexcited — there’s still much work to be done to make sure your keywords lead to conversions.

2. Pluck Out Commercial or Transactional Keywords

A rule of thumb when doing keyword research for SaaS is to find the balance between search volume and competitiveness.

Of course, you don’t want to target keywords with barely any demand at all. You shouldn’t go with the flow and pick up a keyword that everyone else uses, either.

What you want are long-tail keywords that pertain to a user’s desire to take action.

You can do this by injecting commercial or transactional terms into your Ubersuggest keyword suggestions. Just enter terms like “buy,” “price,” “service,” “shop,” or whatever term makes sense for your seed keyword in the “Filter Results” field.

After applying your filters, Ubersuggest will then refine and drastically reduce the number of keyword suggestions. This makes it much easier for you to spot profitable keyword opportunities:

3. Track Trending Keywords on Social Media

If you’re trying to build traffic through social media, then you’ll need a slightly different approach when doing keyword research.

The main issue is that social media networks use internal search engines that don’t use the same keywords as web platforms like Google. As such, you need to use a keyword tracking tool that’s specifically tailored to social media networks.

Keyhole is, without a doubt, an excellent tool for this job. It allows you to find and monitor trending keywords as well as hashtags on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram — two of the biggest social media networks in terms of user engagement.

Just like Ubersuggest, you can start using Keyhole by entering a seed keyword. This time, however, you need to specify if you want to track a hashtag, keyword, URL, social media account, or brand mention.

To fine-tune your keyword tracker, click “Advanced” to reveal the filters you can use to refine results. For example, if you want to ignore posts from a direct competitor, click on “Ignore posts” and fill in the rest of the details.

Let’s say you want to track the keywords “WordPress,” “web design,” and “blogging.”

After the initial data is produced, you should be able to see pertinent information, such as the number of posts with your keywords, their collective reach, and even the overall sentiment of users.

Before you save your tracker, don’t forget to specify how you want to receive alerts. This will enable you to be always in tune with social media users when it comes to your target keywords.

Remember that tracking keywords on social media can improve conversions in two ways.

Apart from letting you gauge the demand for a keyword, it will also give you opportunities to initiate and close conversions yourself whenever your brand or product gets mentioned. For this, simply, track your brand name or social media handles via Keyhole.

4. Get Suggestions from the Keyword Cloud

Once your Keyhole tracker is up and running, it’s time to snag yourself some keyword ideas.

From the main dashboard, navigate to “My Trackers” and select the tracker you want to work with.

This will pull up real-time data based on the tracking options you’ve set earlier.

Now, to locate new keyword opportunities, scroll down to the “Related Topics” section to view the hashtag and keyword clouds. Here, you can visually observe the popularity of keywords that are related to your seed keyword:

How can social media keywords boost your conversions?

Good question.

Remember that most if not all online users only transact with brands they trust.

By participating in conversations and offering your expertise to social media users, you slowly build your brand’s authority in your niche. Of course, researching hashtags will also allow you to extend the social reach of your content whenever you share something.

To learn more how to leverage social media networks to win your audience’s trust, you can refer to more guides here.

Conclusion

Keyword research is a fundamental piece of online marketing that marketers love to overlook.

Hopefully, the guide above put keyword research in a new light. It’s not necessarily the most difficult aspect of online marketing, but it can have the biggest impact when it comes to the visibility of overall profitability of your website.

Do you have other suggestions on how marketers should perform keyword research? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!

The post Attention: These Keyword Research Tips Can Skyrocket Your Website Conversions appeared first on Keyhole.