How to Use Social Media Data to Get Closer to Your Audience – Tips from a Brandwatch Webinar

Using social media data for marketing is not “big news” anymore for most marketers. However, are you sure you are taking full advantage of the data you’ve collected?

Group of Business People Discussing About Data

During a webinar presented by Brandwatch a few weeks ago, we learned some insights about how social media data can let you know more about your audience and help you to optimize your marketing strategy.

Compared to traditional media, the biggest advantage of social media is that it enables marketers to have a conversation with their audience. They can listen to what their audience are talking about, and then send out a better brand message to them at the right time.

Understanding New Trends

Let’s start with the listening part. We all know that understanding market trends and recognizing the swing of momentum are essential for brands trying to develop new markets or create successful products. By collecting and analyzing social media data from your target audience, you will gain some insights about new trends in your industry.

For instance, social media may inform you about which geographical areas are most receptive to a new trend. A good example is from a report- Social Listening for the Food & Beverage Industry – by Brandwatch. In order to know which locales care more about healthy eating, Brandwatch compared the conversations about bacon and kale and showed how the two foods have developed unique followings throughout the US. The result suggests that kale is a more popular topic in the Northeast and West than in the South and Midwest. By doing more tests like this, marketers may find that states favoring kale also welcome conversations about other healthy foods.

Using social media data in this way can also tell you about a lot of other things affecting consumer interests such as the influence of seasons, sponsorship deals, world events, etc.

Understanding the Competition

It’s crucial to understand your competitors if you want to win in your niche. Social media data can also help you with this. During the webinar, Natalie Meehan, Marketing Insights Analyst from Brandwatch, presented a vivid case about the competition of cordial market leaders in the UK. By looking into when competitors are leading the conversation on social media, marketers can identify the best times to release campaigns to have the biggest splash. As the chart shows below, the Ribena’s marketing team may not want to launch their new product in April since Robinsons always peak at that time when Wimbledon – the international tennis event – they sponsor is in the news.

Brandwatch-social-media-data-cordials

Getting the timing right

Most marketers understand the importance of doing the right thing in the right season. Yet timing is not only about seasons. When measuring the timeline of consumer activity, micro-pictures depicting date and time changes are as same important as the macro ones.

Emily pointed out that people are more likely to tweet about their intentions to eat healthily at 3 pm and 9 pm during a day, maybe because they are tend to feel guilty after a sumptuous meal. However, the healthy food producers peak their tweeting is around noon which is not matching with their target audience. How can they have a conversation when they are not engaged at the same time? Social media efforts can only maximize the ROI when you target the right audience at the right time.

At the end of the webinar, James Lovejoy, Content Researcher from Brandwatch showed us how to collect, analyze and interpret social data using Brandwatch. If you are interested in Boolean logic and data analysis, take a look at the recorded webinar below:

We haven’t used Brandwatch yet but it looks like a solid tool for collecting and analyzing social media data. Don’t hesitate to comment below if you have anything to share.

Thanks for reading,

Bianca Hu – Digital Marketing Specialist at Delightful Communications

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