How to use social media insights to understand what’s impacting your brand’s health

At Zavy, we’re often asked by social media managers, “why did this post go so well, and this post, which followed the same template, not achieve the same success?” – or, to put it another way, “what are the optimal conditions that will help us grow a healthy brand?”

We’ve all been in the position of having the best laid marketing campaigns go live, only to find that it just doesn’t work. Where what worked last year just isn’t having as much of an effect now.

It’s frustrating, and of course, this is where research comes in – before we launch a campaign, we can look at other campaigns in our category and see how they’re succeeding (or not) in capturing the imagination of our customers. We can read the news or even look out the window to get an idea of what’s going on in the world outside that might affect our customers’ choices.

Finding the right tools

We can also use technology to understand and predict the conditions that might impact not only our social performance but also our brand’s health. For many companies, this includes using a social media listening tool to understand the volume of mentions of their brand, and the overall sentiment of those mentions – whether they’re positive, negative, or neutral.

At Zavy, we can use social media insights to understand the heart, soul and feel of engagement around your brand. Being able to access real-time information about how people feel about your category, products, or services, as well as staying ahead of the stories that are driving conversation. That last part is important: some things (like pandemics or lockdowns, for example) are out of your control.

We use the Zavy score – the coming together of all social media engagement data, layered with sentiment insights – to understand your brand’s overall health on social media, and the Pulse dashboard to see it’s trajectory over time. We use our Map dashboard to identify the type of content that is sparking the highest quality engagement and sentiment for your brand (and your competitors), so you can do more of the good stuff that people enjoy and less of the stuff that they don’t. And we use Radar, our social listening tool, to help you stay ahead of conversation about your brand, and the topics your customers care about.

It’s different to other social listening tools because it harnesses emotional analysis to identify not just how positively or negatively people feel about your brand (although it does that too), or a topic you care about – but how optimistic, angry, disgusted, or fearful people are feeling about it. This is matched with content insights so you can see exactly what piece of content is driving those emotions.

For example, if you search for the term “lockdown” in Radar, in Australia we can see that while fear and optimism are the most dominant emotions, anger and sadness have risen, and fear spiked around the anti-lockdown protests.

Meanwhile, searching the same term here in New Zealand shows a wider gap between optimism and fear and the other emotions. Anger and sadness have stayed comparatively low – until this weekend, when feelings of anger spiked around an article about psychological resilience during lockdown.

How can marketers use this information?

Well, if the overarching emotion dominating conversation is fear, consider what your brand can do to help or mitigate fear. That could be by showing how your team is sticking to the rules and helping customers stay safe during lockdown, for example.

It could be by sharing content that makes people feel good – something nostalgic, looking back on happier times, or something that makes them laugh. Or… if people are feeling angry, perhaps now is the time to read the room and stay quiet while emotions are running high. Wait a few days and see if the storm blows over.

See how advanced social listening could help your brand

Zavy’s Radar analyses thousands of news stories, social posts and comments, to give you valuable insight into current conversations and sentiment online. It’s a simple way to ensure your social and content strategy are fit for the road.

You can test-drive Radar free for two weeks – all you need to do is sign up here.

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