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6 Simple Steps To Uncover All Social Conversations About Your Brand

People like to talk about brands online.

Whether it’s discussion about new products, bad customer service, funny commercials or even social media fails, these discussions are happening all day and every day on social networks and other online channels.

Social media conversations come in all shapes and sizes but those that are positive have the potential to make your brand look good. Really good. And these discussions can help drive traffic to your website, create leads, increase brand loyalty and open up robust lines of communication with customers.

But to do it right, brand’s need to listen, understand and finally react to what they are hearing online.

To show you exactly how social listening can be used to track all mentions of your brand, the following guide will use Talkwalker’s Brand Listening IQ App to analyze the social buzz around the launch of Windows 10 (stats from June 28 - July 26). We’ll explain exactly what you need to look for and how to find the insights that matter for your brand.

Step 1: Identify The Right Search Queries

Before you even get started, the most important factor and the thing that will impact all your measurement and analysis is what you search for. The key here is to make sure you’re tracking what you need.

If you only want to know results in the US, just input the English version of your queries but if you’re a global brand, you may need to translate your brand name into several languages. You’ll then need to spend a bit of time going through your results to make sure you’re excluding irrelevant topics.

For Windows 10 these are the topics we’ve looked at to get a broad global view of the social buzz:

 

Step 2: Breaking Down The Buzz

This is important because it gives you a first look at your social media footprint, before we even get to whether the conversation is good or bad. This also gives you a quick overview of the spikes in brand mentions which you can then analyze more exactly:

Mentions of Windows 10 peaked on July 24th in the month before the launch

Looking at the general buzz around the Windows 10 launch a couple of things stand out. First of all, the biggest peak of conversation for Windows 10 was on July 24th with a variety of heavyweight tech publications such as PC Gamer and Gizmodo publishing guides and tips for the upcoming upgrade.

The conversation about Windows 10 is driving a lot of engagement, with the 1.3m mentions of Windows 10 over the last month driving over 5 times more engagement.

Using this information,  the Windows 10 team can get a first idea of the success of their online PR and marketing efforts and can be encouraged that their new release is driving social conversations ahead of the launch.

Step 3: Analyze Sentiment On Social

Now we get into the deeper insights to understand positive and negative sentiment about your brand. You can look at this overall, across all media types but it may be more useful to divide this up by media channel so you can get a better view of where positivity and negativity is coming from. This can give you an idea of where to target your communications to improve your online reputation.

Positivity for Windows 10 is coming from Facebook and Instagram, negativity from news sites and forums

Overall, conversations about Windows 10 are more positive than negative but looking a bit closer, we see some patterns. While conversation about Windows 10 on social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is more positive, on forums, online news and magazines, there is more negativity.

Based on this information the Windows 10 launch team could re-examine their comms strategy towards online newspapers to try and improve sentiment on these channels.  One way to do this would be to dig deeper to look at negative articles that are getting a lot of engagement. A look at the three most shared negative results from newspapers gives an idea of some of the problems they are facing

The issues range from major coverage of Microsoft’s losses in the New York Times to Russian news outlet RT covering a vulnerability in the Windows 10 preview that could give hackers access to people’s computers.

On the flip side, Windows 10 could put additional effort into marketing and PR on Facebook for example, where they can build on existing positivity to encourage positive momentum and amplify the reach of their message by identifying & engaging with potential brand ambassadors

Step 4: Understand The Key Discussions

With major brands in particular being discussed on multiple online channels like social networks, news website, blogs, forums and more, understanding the main topics of discussion can be tricky. Social media analytics helps to take some of the subjectivity out of this process and gives you hard numbers to determine the hot topics dominating the conversation around your brand.

 

Topics combining Windows 10 and "mobile" are being discussed frequently online

For Windows 10, one of the biggest topics of discussion is how the new OS will work on mobile. This is apparent in the frequent use not only of the term “mobile” but also “Lumia” Microsoft’s smartphone as well as competitor “Android”. At an earlier stage of product development such social insights can help to guide R&D teams and general product development strategy. At a later stage, such as the pre-launch phase monitored here, such information can give the Windows 10 team an idea of which aspects of the new release are driving the most interest, determine whether this matches objectives and then refine messaging and communication if necessary.

Step 5: Who Is Driving The Most Discussion?

Understanding the key topics of social conversation is important but using social media analytics, brands can go further and see exactly which websites, blogs, tweets and even journalists are driving the conversation on social channels.

All the most engaging sources are linked to tech specialist websites, blogs and Facebook pages

From the top influencer chart above we can see that traditional media giants like major international news sites and TV websites are conspicuously absent and instead, tech publications like Gizmodo, The Verge and specialist Facebook pages rule. This can give marketers and PR professionals alike a clearer idea of the publications on which to focus their efforts, and better reallocate their PR budgets by targeting the channels with greatest potential.

Step 6: Getting A Global (And Local) Perspective

For major brands like Microsoft, brand listening needs to be a global exercise and by looking at a map of social mentions, the launch team can see which parts of the world are discussing Windows 10 the most.

Social buzz around Windows 10 is coming from every major continent but the US are leading the way

A regional view can help brands to get more precise insights about exactly which parts of a country are the most excited about a new product

Washington state, where Microsoft is based, is generating a disproportionate level of social buzz, a sign of Microsoft’s efforts to promote their new OS

Location insights about social buzz surrounding a product launch can give sales teams an idea of which countries or regions are discussing new products the most and then determine whether it’s necessary to create tailored value propositions for each country or region.

Following these 6 steps, brands of all sizes based in all parts of the world can listen to the social conversations that matter and begin to assimilate the insights they find into their marketing, communications, customer service and even product development strategy. All of this can be done easily and instantly using our preconfigured IQ App for Brand Listening.

And this is really just the first step. By combining social listening for brand/product names with more complex filters isolating particular features and integrating social data with other data streams such as sales figures, brands can begin to see how their online presence and interactions affect their bottom line.

Image Credit: Designed by Freepik

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