Social Media Impact on Marketing Landscape

Social Media has forever changed the marketing landscape. Traditional advertising campaigns are now being supported with viral videos and trending posts. Of course with any good Social Media campaign you receive a lot of online traffic. But how do you sort out the noise and reach the important content? As any marketing professional will attest, data is the bread and butter for running any good marketing program. However, in the Social landscape, companies are moving away from traditional metrics such as retweets, and likes. The focus is now on identifying metrics that can be acted upon and could translate into business. An important issue when working with Social Analytics is identifying the right insights.

As stated in this Search Engine Watch article, Social Listening offers valuable insights on your brand. In the article, a fitness-wear retailer had to recall a line of clothing due to quality reasons. After the recall, customers expressed their views on Social Media. However, the retailer did not respond to their customers and instead continued to post on unrelated topics. Since the brand did not address the specific problem nor the posts from their customers, the retailer received considerable negative exposure and also suffered a decline in share prices. It is possible that the retailer missed acting on these specific customer posts due to the sheer volume of traffic.

Social Analytics helps address this problem and allows you to almost instantaneously track your customers comments about your brand. But in order to successfully listen and interact with your customers, you need to focus on the right topics. Social Analytics tools allow you to sort traffic based on channel, keywords, subscribers, and various other metrics. This classification allows you to assess what is important and what isnt. With reliable analytics at hand, you can track content, follow trends, identify insights and most importantly, act upon those insights.

Another important benefit Social Analytics offers is the ability to balance brand promotion with Social Listening. The reason major brands such as Starbucks and Zappos succeed in the Social Media landscape is because they provide their customers exactly what they want. Zappos has a good Social presence because they balance their interactions with customers by listening to what they share on these channels. By promoting their products, sharing customer experiences, and providing subscribers with relevant content, Zappos drives traffic to their Web site and ultimately lead them to buy their products.

This balance allows companies to succeed in the Social landscape. Social Analytics plays a vital role in any online campaign, and finding the balance between listening, brand promotion and customer interaction is key to success. Understanding your consumers and listening to them will help you to benefit from your Social Media campaigns.

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