Brand awareness is probably one of the most sought-after objectives when it comes to social media content marketing and it can really elevate your business to new heights. While developing and implementing a content strategy is essential to growing your social media profiles, it is also crucial to evaluate and analyse social media metrics that will make you understand what your target audience is responding well to or if there is a need to revise the initial plan. 

We can all recognise a few social media metrics and some of the most common ones can be likes, comments, views, shares. For someone managing a business page, they will be able to also see metrics such as post engagements, website clicks, impressions, reach and more. 

However, whether you are just starting out on social media or you are already an established brand on these platforms, it is challenging to keep up with the algorithm changes, billions of users and shifting age groups. So, what can you do to take advantage of social media features to generate a more in-depth and accurate evaluation of your brand’s positioning on online networks? Well, social media listening might be just the perfect solution for you to not only monitor mentions of your brand, tags and customer feedback but also get a deeper understanding of the online perception on your brand and industry, as well as find out what your competitors have going on social media and what makes your audience tick. 

Here Are 4 Reasons Why You Should Use Social Media Listening

Increase Engagement Rates

Interaction is a two-way street and there are many pieces of research that revealed the fact that more than half of online users like when brands engage with their audience. Social media listening will provide you with relevant data about your audience and how to engage with. Putting in the effort to craft responses that actually bring value to your followers will take you a long way on social media platforms. Users are most likely to make purchases from brands that are interactive in the digital space and it can really boost your engagement rates, regardless of the chosen platform. 

Monitor Your Brand and Your Competitors

Deciding to monitor your brand’s position in the online environment through social media listening enables you to also track the activity of your competitors and analyse the conversations that take place on different channels about you or your competitors. This can also help you evaluate the online sentiment regarding your campaigns and tweak your strategy in real-time to maximise the reach and impact it has on your target audience. 

According to Hootsuite (https://hootsuite.com/), these are a few things to help you get started with social media listening:

• Your brand name and handles
• Your product name(s), including common misspellings
• Your competitors’ brand names, product names, and handles
• Industry buzzwords
• Your slogan and those of your competitors
• Names of key people in your company and your competitors’ companies (your CEO, spokesperson, etc.)
• Campaign names or keywords
• Your branded hashtags and those of your competitors
• Unbranded hashtags related to your industry

Free Feedback 

What could be better than your consumer telling you exactly how they feel about your brand and the areas they think could be improved? Positive feedback is great and reflects well on your brand in the online environment but does not actively contribute to your improvement. Acknowledging feedback that highlights areas, where you can perform better, can be an amazing way for you to really listen to your consumers and understand how you can make their experience with your product or service more pleasant, closer to their expectations and your goals. 

New Opportunities

Is your audience constantly bringing up what is not working about a product or what issues or challenges they’re facing when it comes to your brand or one of your competitors? That is pure gold! Here is your chance to not only potentially improve your own product/service to fit your consumer’s needs better but also a great opportunity to think about a new product to help solve an issue that your online community is dealing with and is actively telling you about it. Whether it makes you think about expanding, rebranding or focusing on one branch of your business, social media listening might reveal new business opportunities you are currently missing out. 

At Social Gamma, we provide full-service marketing packages that can help you achieve your digital goals and grow your business through both organic and paid techniques. If you would like to know more about who we are and what we do, please visit www.socialgamma.com and get in touch with us today!

You may not have heard of Pinterest if you are not an avid fan of arts and crafts. Pinterest is a hub of quirk and interest, an online visual search engine that allows its users to discover, pin (aka collect on a page/profile) and share pictures and videos relating to their interests. They pin these items on “Boards” – different pages they label as subcategories like Fashion, Craft, House Inspo and so on.

Pinterest is a huge hit amongst the public as a personal tool, but what benefits can it provide to your business? Like all social networks, it can be used carefully and cleverly as a marketing tool to do 5 key things.

Grow Your Audience

The more frequently you use the site, the more likely your content is to be pinned. When this happens, your content and services are exposed to new groups of people, with massive global potential.

Grow Brand Awareness

With all these potential people seeing your content, it’s a great opportunity to reinforce your brand values and personality by selecting content that fits. As you are more active and engaging, the audience learn more about you and this helps to build brand awareness and loyalty.

Improve your SEO

Using the correct keywords across Pinterest can help to improve not just Pinterest Search Rankings, but also Google Search Rankings for your business.

Increase Website Traffic

Creating content to pin allows you to include a direct link to your website, product or service! This means that every single piece of content you are sharing can have a direct call-to-action with potentially great results.

Place Ads

Like other platforms, Pinterest even allows you to turn your content into ads and will place them across the network. These appear to a person looking like normal pins – almost. They have a small text indication that the piece of content is an advertisement. They have an easy to use ad manager that allows you to define audience characteristics including Age, Gender, Interests, Location, Language and Device. You can even use business analytics so you can see how your ad is doing.

This is all great! But how do you know if Pinterest is for you? Have a look at what your business is promoting and compare it carefully to the type of content and consumers on Pinterest. If you are a finance business, then it might not be the right move. However, if you are a fashion, beauty, furnishings or even craft brand then Pinterest could be a roaring success for you. All you need then is content that can make you stand out from the crowd.

Having done a lot of reflecting on our beliefs and our ethos at Social Gamma, we are embarking on a new chapter in our company story: Social Good.

Social Good is a mission, a way for us to apply our individual and collective beliefs to our work every single day. The most fulfilling projects and clients we have taken on are the ones trying to make a positive change in the world, and we want to build them up to something greater than ever before. We’ve made the decision to make a change and a difference.

We’re focusing in on just a few key industries:

• Health, Wellness and Nutrition
• Non-Profit
• Sustainability
• Education

Having worked with many clients in these industries so far, we’ve come to love not just what they do, but what we can do for them. For our health, wellness and nutrition clients we have carried out a variety of web and app development services, as well as investor and lead generation digital ads. We have helped our clients gain key investors, find leads and even maintain and develop their online presence to ensure their continued success. Our non-profit and sustainability clients have benefitted form our social media expertise. We’re proud of the achievements we have made on their channels, both in engagement and follower retention. We have also helped them to achieve fundraising goals and launch successful events and projects. Our education clients found new leads and an increased following through paid lead generation and social media ads.

And this is not just a side project. The team has always had a passion for giving back, from their university days to now. One of our Account Managers, Ana, has volunteered at a special school, helping children from the ages of 8-14 with learning difficulties and autism. She also worked with toddlers in foster care. Our Lead Creative, Rebecca, was a Team Leader for breast cancer awareness charity “CoppaFeel!”, promoting the cause, educating young people on campus and raising funds. The team won a fundraising award and ranked 3^rd on the UK CoppaFeel! University Fundraising Leader board the year she graduated. Our Managing Director and Founder, Ria, led a group called Remedy Through Music, who visited children’s hospitals every week to sing to the patients. We are inspired to this day by the people we worked with and the plans we helped carry out.

So now, our mission is clear. We will use our skills and know-how to spread the positive waves out into the world! If you are in the health, wellness and nutrition, sustainability, non-profit or education industries and you’re looking for a Digital Marketing Team who share an affinity with your values and passions, then give Social Gamma a call. We look forward to doing Social Good with you!

Businesses nowadays are no stranger to the cultural phenomenon that is Instagram. With over a billion users on the platform, those who don’t get on board risk missing out on a whole untapped double-tapping audience.

More recently, businesses have started to realise that simply having an Instagram account isn’t enough. There is a fine art to ‘gramming’ for your business, so read on to find out about some of the top businesses taking it in their stride.

 

 

1: @balletoperadeparis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ballet uses banners (pictures spread across multiple posts) on Instagram to elevate their already stunningly beautiful photographs. Amongst these is sneak peak shots at practices, to entice followers and excite them about shows and events to come.

2: @lego

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might expect a Lego Instagram to be full of cute shots of kids playing with bricks… but you’d be wrong. Lego have done something really clever by curating their feed to be Lego built images of popular culture, and beautifully directed images of their new products. See unique film announcements, or even a life size carriage for the Royal Wedding.

3: @gucci

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This renowned high fashion brand ensures all their posts aren’t just basic product images. They contain eccentric, over the top foregrounds and backgrounds laid out in an almost obsessive manner, to give their feed the feel of excess. You are buying into the lifestyle, not the product.

4: @jessicavwalsh

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whilst she might not be a business selling a product, Jessica Walsh is selling her design services, and he has a beautiful Instagram feed to show the world exactly what she’s all about. This kaleidoscope of colour and surprising imagery is designed to freak you out and challenge perceptions of modern life.

5: Haagen-Dazs (multiple handles)

 

 

 

 

 

 

The popular ice cream brand is updating themselves to be more accessible to millennials. Their redesign covers packaging, instore look and online presence, with the whole direction of the visual identity being to make it “instagrammable”. It’s said to be the biggest packaging overhaul in almost 20 years.

Instagram itself underwent a rebrand to keep up with the beast it evolved into. They understood that they were no longer just a photo sharing service, but a massive opportunity for businesses. To reflect this, they changed their logo to the simple shape with a gradient background you see today. People took a while to get used to it, but now curating your feed is a huge deal, with whole marketing teams dedicated to perfecting posts for business.

https://vimeo.com/166138104

To find out more about how Social Gamma can boost your social media, drop us an email via our contact page.