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15 Social Media Branding Strategies to Capture and Retain Your Target Audience

Updated on March 5th, 2020.

As competitors strengthen their online profiles, the need to differentiate your brand’s identity on social media grows.

Building a recognizable brand known for its positive qualities will help gain and retain followers. Successfully executing branding strategies can help win customers, too.

But developing a powerful, branded social media presence is a challenge you can’t quickly overcome.

Consider using these 15 social media branding strategies to do the job help you achieve a strong social media brand presence.

Jump Links:

Influencer Marketing:
1. Connect with Influencers
2. Get an influencer to Takeover

Consistent Messaging
3. Optimize Your Bio and Your Profile
4. Develop Your Voice
5. Be Consistent with that Voice and Your Topics
6. Post Regularly
7. Embrace Visuals

Continuous Engagement
8. Share User Generated Content
9. Create Groups or Communities
10. Join Chats
11. Avoid Platforms Unpopular with Your Audiences
12. Promote Your Profiles Beyond Social Media
13. Offer Users More than They Expect

Ongoing Analysis
14. Monitor Constantly
15. Measure Your Efforts

Influencer Marketing

For those who’ve built a respectable social media following, many strategists consider influencer marketing a next step in building brand recognition.

By getting an influencer who closely aligns with your target image to promote your accounts, audiences should associate your brand more closely with that target image.

For example, many consumers associate Under Armour with athletic strife and excellence because Steph Curry is its biggest spokesperson.

Though your brand may not be able to contract an NBA superstar, there are almost certainly influencers in your industry who can deliver branding benefits.

To identify influencers based on the hashtags and keywords they post with, make a search for those terms:

1. Connect with Influencers

The first step in executing an influencer marketing campaign is identifying suitable influencers.

Of course, they must have large audiences. But those audiences must be engaged. Some studies show the average engagement rate on Twitter is between 1 and 2%, so anything higher is suitable for an influencer.

The next step is building a relationship with an influencer who matches your criteria.

You can start by following target influencers on their main social channels, interacting with their updates and sharing their content.

Once you’ve built some rapport, pitch a campaign that builds your brand’s image while benefiting the influencer. The next section covers an example of how to do so.

2. Get an Influencer to Take Over

Getting an influencer to run your social channels for a day entices their fans to follow you, while giving him or her another avenue to showcase wit and knowledge.

For example, comedian and diehard Boston Red Sox fan Rob Delaney ran the MLB Twitter account on May 7, 2013. The profile gained about 20,000 followers, as Delaney tweeted baseball “facts.”

Influencer Marketing - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies - Influencer Takeover for the MLB

What’s more, the takeover helped MLB build a reputation on social media that many sports organizations aim to achieve: being funny and relaxed.

Consistent Messaging

The core of brand building on social media largely involves creating themes — or, messages — and regularly demonstrating them through text and visuals.

Whereas influencer marketing campaigns may be best executed once you’ve grown a sizeable following, consistent messaging should begin when you join a social channel.

It may take trial and error to see which kinds of content best resonate with target audiences.

But once you’ve figured that out, being consistent in your messaging should reinforce your brand image.

3. Optimize Your Bio and Profile

Your social profiles should encapsulate your business and its main messages, acting as a pitch for those who visit.

Summarize the benefits of using your products or services in your profile description, including applicable keywords to make your account easier to find for audience members. You should also provide another method of contact for serious business inquiries.

Consider emulating these profile descriptions:

Profile Optimization - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies

Depending on the platform, you can also alter your background, profile picture and theme colours to reflect your logo and match your website.

By doing so, consumers will begin to recognize your brand assets.

4. Develop Your Voice

Establishing a common posting tone makes your updates distinct and easily-recognizable. This can also help build a connection with your target audiences, especially if your voice is in tune with them.

Take IHOP as an example. On Twitter, the pancake house appeals to its young demographic by piggybacking off popular phrases among teens and writing without punctuation — similar to what you’d see in instant messaging.

Develop a Voice - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies

If you’re unfamiliar with relevant phrases or jargon, monitor your main social channels more closely. You’ll likely identify niche terms you can use to develop your voice.

On a surface level, using a distinct voice increases IHOP’s engagement. Deeper, it encourages followers to associate IHOP with a laid-back dining atmosphere.

5. Be Consistent with that Voice and Your Topics

You must be consistent with your voice — and the topics you post about — to build an authentic connection with your target audience, influencing them to keep your brand top of mind.

Otherwise, that voice you’ve worked hard to create may seem forced and disingenuous.

Deviating from core topics can also compromise brand tone and messaging.

Going back to IHOP as an example, its social media strategists don’t post about government food sanctions. Doing so could damage how the audience perceives the restaurant.

Stick to your voice and main topics to enforce your brand’s image.

6. Post Regularly

Since social media branding centres on influencing your audience to easily recognize and remember you, irregular posting damages your efforts by keeping you off user newsfeeds.

Posting frequency depends on audience activity and how audience members engage.

For example, you may realize that tweeting in the morning earns more replies than doing so in the evening. You could also earn more engagement by posting twice a week instead of five times to a given platform.

This will take some experimentation to determine.

However, an optimal posting schedule helps keep user attention while potentially earning more followers.

7. Embrace Visuals

Images can be powerful tools to encapsulate your brand’s identity and messages, instead of seemingly-random pictures with your logo tacked on.

Visual content should reflect:

  • Themes your brand stands for
  • Your brand’s unique or differentiating values
  • The topics your audience is interested in

Take this image from Red Bull’s Instagram account as an example:

Use Visuals - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies

It shows Red Bull’s connection to extreme stunts and appeals to its high-energy audience.

As well as engaging fans, visual content of this quality builds and solidifies brand identity.

Continuous Engagement

Frequently engaging fans, followers and other audience members allows you to constantly communicate and demonstrate your brand’s core values.

You can engage audiences by sharing original and third-party party content that ties into brand messages, or running contests and social events related to them.

For B2C brands, replying to users also exemplifies favourable traits such as friendliness and helpfulness, especially when answering questions and helping solve issues.

As a bonus, regular engagement helps keep your brand at the top of consumer minds. This can potentially boost sales and other meaningful actions.

8. Share User-Generated Content

Like posting testimonials on your website, sharing user-generated content that positively depicts your brand can strengthen its identity.

Consider that more than 90% of consumers trust earned media — characterized as word-of-mouth from impartial sources — more than all other types of advertising.

Take a plus-size clothing company for example.

To reap the benefits of word-of-mouth on social media, share similar user-generated content.

9. Create Groups & Communities (or Participate in Them)

Creating, or participating in, groups and communities helps overcome many networks’ low organic engagement rates.

This helps generate buzz around your brand’s content. You can reach users who are interested in your industry or offerings, avoiding crowded timelines that constantly update and bury your posts.

For instance, an analytics company may create, moderate and promote a group about data mining. Not only does this give the company another method of engaging target audiences, but it furthers branding efforts.

That’s because, in the eyes of group members, the company aligns itself with images of research and analysis.

10. Join Chats

Similar to groups and communities, Twitter chats let you directly engage members of your target market to create buzz around your brand’s ideas, opinions and content.

Use a chat’s hashtag to interact with industry players — ranging from prospects to other businesses. You’ll likely build your follower count as you answer questions and interact with fellow participants.

Twitter Chats - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies

This type of direct conversation and engagement allows you to demonstrate expertise and helps build brand reputation among active industry voices.

11. Avoid Platforms Unpopular with Your Audiences

You may waste time and resources attempting to engage audiences on each major social network, as your target audiences may not be active on all of them.

LinkedIn may not be ideal for brands that target teens and young adults, whereas Snapchat likely won’t yield noticeable results for B2B companies.

What’s more, as developers create hyper-specific social media platforms, it may be advantageous to focus your efforts on ones that cater to your target audiences.

For example, many cosmetic surgery clinics favour niche forums over Google+ and LinkedIn:

Niche Platforms - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies

That’s why committing to a group of social platforms — slowly expanding it when appropriate — can help focus your engagement and branding tactics.

12. Promote Your Profiles Beyond Social Media

As your profiles act as engagement and branding hubs, it’s worthwhile to promote your accounts outside of social media to grow their followings.  

You can grow your social media presences by:

  • Participating in Industry Events
    • Run a booth to promote your products. Create valuable physical content to distribute. Strike up a conversation with attendees. As more people learn about your brand, you should gain more attention on social media.

  • Including Handles in Stores and on Products
    • For businesses who drive sales through physical locations, posting images of social networks lets customers know on which platforms you’re active.

By drawing offline attention to your social media profiles, your online branding tactics are likely to reach more users.

13. Offer Users More than They Expect

The bulk of users solely expect to receive status updates, albeit ones with original content, as they follow your social accounts. But offering perks can work to strengthen brand image.

For example, send a private message to new followers that contains a free coupon. It can use your brand slogan, colours and general information, encouraging them to visit your store or website.

They’ll be exposed to more branding tactics — whether physical or online — as a result.

Perhaps most importantly, giving customers more than what they expect influences them to link your brand to a positive experience.

Ongoing Analysis

As with any marketing activity, you must regularly analyze your social media branding efforts to ensure to your tactics are working. Otherwise, you lack insight into your performance.

The worst case scenario? You devote countless hours and a sizeable part of your budget to strategies that don’t yield desirable results.

The best case scenario? Your strategies effectively establish a brand identity, yet you ignore data that can help further establish this identity at a faster rate.

These two scenarios depict why ongoing analysis is crucial to successful branding on social media.

14. Monitor Constantly

Enacting a social media monitoring strategy helps ensure you don’t miss opportunities to build brand identity.

For example, as consumers may forget to tag you or misspell your handle, you can monitor company-related keywords to pick up on their posts and strike up a conversation.

Tracking industry keywords can also uncover engagement opportunities and openings to discuss your business.

Social Media Monitoring - 15 Social Media Branding Strategies
This Twitter live-stream sample is from a Keyhole real-time tracker.

This is beneficial for both branding and public relations because it opens doors to resolve issues and answer questions, exemplifying your business’s positive characteristics.

Finding these opportunities should accelerate your social media brand-building efforts.

15. Measure Your Efforts

Measuring social statistics such as reach and engagement can help refine aspects of your branding strategy.

Assume that using specific hashtags is a key part of promoting your initiatives and products. However, you discover that few users search for — and view posts containing — these hashtags.

Likewise, checking ad performance statistics may reveal they’re not reaching target audiences.

Word of your brand may not be spreading quickly enough as a result.

By measuring these social tactics either manually or with a tool, you can determine if it’s worthwhile to alter your strategies to build brand recognition among prospects more effectively.

Final Thoughts About these Social Media Branding Strategies

It’s important for digital marketers to ensure their activities — ranging from influencer campaigns to active social media monitoring — help establish a clear brand identity.

This means you shouldn’t post for the sole intention of getting shares and winning followers. Instead, think about how your actions can support brand goals and perception.  

The shares and followers will come as you work to build a unique reputation that resonates with your target audience.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

Social Media Trends to Track in 2020 and Beyond: Marketing Tools, Content, and Strategy

Predicting the future of social media trends isn’t easy, but that’s precisely what makes it so much fun! 

For example, Facebook was expected to lose its overall social media dominance. Yet, it’s 2020, and Facebook still remains the most widely used social media platform.

At Keyhole, social media is our bread and butter, and our team here works hard to stay up to date with all the key social media trends. 

We have a good idea of where social media trends are headed in 2020. And best of all…

… we don’t mind sharing our secrets.

Jump Links:

Social Media Trends:

1. Content is (Still) King
2. Visual Content Continues to Dominate
3. Influencer Marketing is Still Going Strong
4. Customer Service is More Important than Ever
5. Things Are Changing

The Top Social Media Tools to Consider in 2020:

1. Keyhole
2. Kicksta
3. Audiense
4. AgoraPulse
5. Meet Edgar

Here are the trends to keep an eye on in 2020 and some relevant social media tips and tricks to help you navigate your digital journey better. 

1. Content is (Still) King

Social media platforms continue to update their algorithms in order to show the most relevant content to social media users. 

Sure, you can pay for some extra exposure, but ads can only do so much for you. The only way you can retain visitors and turn people who stumbled upon your content into prospects is by providing them with enough value.

Here are three things to keep in mind in 2020:

1. Choose Your Platform Strategically

Choosing the right social media platform is more difficult than it seems, and more important than what you might initially think. 

It’s essential that you understand the function of each platform, so that you know which one suits you best. 

Let’s say you’re running a food blog, and your content revolves around posting recipes and food images. 

You wouldn’t choose Twitter to be your main platform now, would you? 

You’d probably opt for Instagram, as it provides a neat balance between image focus and shorter text descriptions (e.g. you could post an image of your cooked meal, and provide the recipe below). 

Suggested read: Writing Instagram Captions that Convert: Content, Formatting, and Hashtags

2. Repurpose Content… The Right Way

Besides understanding each platform and choosing the right one(s) for your brand, skip cross-posting the same content as much as you can.

Yes, you read that right!

Posting the exact same content across all the platforms you’re using makes you look lazy, non-creative and repetitive. 

We’re not saying that you can’t repurpose content (in fact, you should!), but each social media platform has its own audience, content strategy, as well as different areas of focus and specific writing styles.

Something that works well on Facebook may turn out to be a complete disaster or come across as unprofessional if you publish it on Linkedin. 

Here are some great pieces on repurposing content that might help you get started: 10 Ways To Repurpose Content For Social Media and Ins and Outs of Repurposing Content for Social Media Posts.

If you aren’t sure how to approach this, you can always hire a social media expert to guide you. 


3. Stay Consistent

Let’s not forget about consistency.

Imagine you were posting Instagram stories on a daily basis, communicated regularly with your followers, and you suddenly disappear for a month without notice to your followers, only to re-appear because you’d like to promote your newly published recipe ebook. 

News flash: you’re neither getting the recognition you want, nor stepping up your marketing trends game. 

People appreciate continual effort – that’s when you receive continuous validation.

2. Visual Content Continues to Dominate

The focus on visual content is needed now more than ever.

Using visual content improves overall marketing trends, and it can do wonders for your social media engagement. 

Don’t just take our word for it – take a minute and consider the following visual content statistics:

  • 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. 
  • 40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text.
  • Publishers who use infographics grow in traffic an average of 12% more than those who don’t.
  • Pinterest generates more referral traffic for businesses than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined.  

Convinced already? 

Visual content is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise monotonous and quantity-driven content production. 

Making visuals part of your everyday social media strategy can truly change the way customers perceive you and your brand. 

And with the availability of visual tools today, it’s easier than ever!

The downside is, with such a vast number of visual tools to choose from, it can be tricky to pick the right one. 

The best option is to use several visual strategies that fit your brand’s needs and that you feel comfortable with.

If you’re using Instagram, don’t skip IGTV; if you’re frequently posting on Facebook, don’t just post images or longer texts, post infographics as well as image quotes. Iif you’re on YouTube, go live every so often!

Suggested Read: Incorporating Memes, Emojis, and Gifs Into Your Social Strategy for Higher Engagement

Yes, users appreciate consistency and continual work and efforts, but they cherish spontaneity too! 

Visuals You Can Use on Your Social Media Platforms

  • Images (both customized and stock) 
  • Videos (both live and recorded) 
  • Screenshots
  • GIFs
  • Memes
  • Pie charts 
  • Quotes (placed on customized images)

Visual content adds value to your written content, helps increase engagement, and provides a more meaningful user experience. 

Suggested Read: 10 Mistakes in Your Visual Content Strategy [+ Tools to Fix Them!]

Incorporating visuals in your strategy can be challenging, but visuals resonate with current marketing trends and they simply are what users prefer. 

Just put yourself in their shoes for a second – would you enjoy any social media platform without  visual variety or image originality? 

People want what’s pleasing to the eye. Your task is to give them what they want. 

3. Influencer Marketing is Still Going Strong

Contrary to popular belief, influencer marketing isn’t dead. In fact, influencer marketing is expected to become a $5-$10 billion industry by 2020. Well, guess what? It’s 2020 already! 

The whole point of influencer marketing is to find influencers suitable for your brand so that they can promote it for you. And this is the key thing when starting your influential marketing campaign – to find the proper influencer(s). 

Don’t get carried away by the number of followers an influencer has, or what they’ll demand as compensation (some pay influencers, or give them a free product, others may do both).

It’s not that these things are irrelevant, it’s just that there’s much more to it. 

Suggested Read: Using Hashtags to Find Influencers on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook

For example, what if an influencer that you’re considering to propose a collaboration to, has been known to collaborate with competitors, or tends to promote and accept EVERYTHING that is offered to them?

Do you think this would make your brand be recognized, valued or appreciated? 

Or imagine contacting a well-known food blogger – this is obviously someone who frequently posts food images, visits different restaurants and writes reviews on different meals.

But, you’re selling athletic wear and you want to promote a healthy lifestyle and a proper, balanced diet. Do you believe this influencer is the right option for your brand? 

Suggested Read: How to Find Micro Influencers on Instagram to Boost Sales

Remember, influencers should help build trust in your brand, not ruin it.

In an era when influential recommendations are something users highly appreciate, making sure you find the right influencers is more important than ever. 

Besides this, make sure both you and your influencer are satisfied and happy with your collaboration. A successful influencer campaign is when both sides are satisfied with the cooperation. 

Marketing trends are called trends for a reason – they target current popularity, and can garner immediate success.

However, a carefully crafted influential strategy can bring you more satisfactory results in the long run than just complying with ongoing marketing trends. 

Suggested read: Instagram Influencer Marketing: A Start-to-Finish Guide

4. Customer Service is More Important than Ever

Social media platforms are indeed a place for you to promote your content and your brand. They’re also a place for you to interact with your customers and loyal followers. 

And this aspect is becoming much more important over the course of time. Plus, establishing communication with the people following you has never been easier. 

Make sure you read reviews and testimonials – see what people think of you/your brand; what they’d like to see more of, what they dislike, or what they’d expect from you in the future. 

Also, try to answer any messages you might be getting as well as comments – sound professional, yet friendly; approachable, and neutral. 

If you’re interacting one-on-one with a follower, always use their name when addressing them. People love hearing their name or reading their name.

It conveys a more personal tone, and makes it seem as though you’re paying extra attention to them. 

On the other hand, we’re aware you can’t do everything on your own. Even if you have a whole team behind you, you’d still need additional help if your business is expanding. 

Thankfully, chatbots are there to help you.

Did you know that 40% of consumers don’t care if a chatbot or a real human helps them, as long as they get the help they need? 

Source: Facebook for Business

Chatbot intelligence and algorithms are expected to grow and improve beyond what we consider imaginable.

They’re able to communicate with several people all at once, and if we’re being realistic, this isn’t something that even a whole team of customer support can surpass. 

Suggested read: Instagram Messages: How Businesses Can Engage Their Audience & Tools to Manage Your Inbox

5. Things Are Changing

If there’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that things change. 

Fast.

And of course, in 2020 we’ll continue to see rapid change. 

So, to remain relevant, you need to embrace the unknown.

Social media platforms have a wide range of algorithms and they’re constantly upgrading, evolving and trying out new things. 

One such example is Instagram deciding to remove “likes” from its platform (they’ll remain visible for you, but others won’t be able to see them). 

Changing “the visibility of the Instagram likes” changes the overall perception of Instagram as a social media platform. This also changes how the upcoming marketing trends and strategies will resume on this platform. 

For example, up till now the relevance of posts, captions or whole accounts in general were calculated based on the number of followers and likes.

The greater the number of likes, the greater the level of validation and recognition. 

This modification changes the game now – without likes, Instagram users will have to focus on providing better content, high-quality photos as well as come up with different strategies to prove their Instagram status. 

And then there’s the rise of TikTok, the video sharing app that is quickly becoming one of the most popular apps among social media users all over the world.

Currently, TikTok’s users are mainly teens and Generation Z. However, given the app’s algorithm which doesn’t require creators to have many followers to receive lots of attention, more and more people from varying age groups are joining every day.

As the app’s popularity grows, it’s only a matter of time before brands start exploring TikTok, just like it happened with Facebook and Instagram.

This only serves to show you that you can never fully master a particular social media platform, as they’re constantly evolving. 

The greatest social media tip would be to never lose the sense of adjusting to what’s yet to come. That’s the ultimate marketing trend that never changes.

Now, let’s talk about… 

The Top Social Media Tools to Consider in 2020

Ever noticed how the appearance of new social media tools impacts which platforms we continue using, which tools we keep and which ones we completely ignore? 

As the social media world changes, the social media tools end up changing too. This in turn modifies how we perceive certain marketing trends in  general. 

Without further ado, here’s a short list of some of the most effective social media tools we suggest checking out: 

1. Keyhole

We’ve built such a comprehensive social listening and analytics tool that you’ll wish you discovered it sooner. Keyhole keeps track of the conversations on all social channels and it analyzes them. It can help you research your market, understand the impact of your campaigns and find top influencers. The best thing? A free trial. 

2. Kicksta

Best for Instagram-focused brands. It helps you build your following way faster by targeting followers of similar accounts. It also assists you in finding better partnership opportunities as well as ways to boost your sales. 

3. Audiense

A great audience segmentation tool. It analyzes and helps you to understand your audience, and enables you to create highly specific audience segments, adapt your targeting and deliver personalized messages, which is great. 

4. AgoraPulse

A great asset to your already existing social media tools. AgoraPulse helps you manage your social media presence. It gathers all your conversations in one place and helps you schedule your posts and create a winning content calendar. It allows you to create audience segments and manage your team too. 

5. Meet Edgar

A social media scheduling tool that helps you post older posts. Recycling your old killer posts increases your traffic and gets you greater exposure.

This is even more relevant if you’ve written a great piece a while ago, and in the meantime your brand has grown – it goes without saying that you’ll expose your content to more readers. 

Keep in mind that this is by no means an exhaustive list. Still, it’s a basic guide to get you started.

Final Thoughts on Social Media Trends, Tips & Tricks

People spend a great deal of time on various social media, and this is nothing new. 

Some of it is productive and with an end goal, and other times it’s just aimlessly scrolling through accounts, and randomly liking specific posts. 

Whatever their reason may be, it’s fine either way. 

What matters, however, is that now you know just the right tips and tricks to make their social media experience much more enjoyable and keep up with the ever growing competition in your industry in 2020. 

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides social media analytics and hashtag tracking for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. Get started for free.

Social Listening: Best Practices For Growing Businesses

Updated on January 23rd, 2020.

More than listening to what customers are saying about your brand or industry in the social sphere, this one question is important:

What do you do with what your customers and prospects say on social media?

Jump Links:

5 Social Listening Best Practices:

1. Pick a Successful Competitor to Imitate
2. Determine When to Engage an Ongoing Conversation
3. Have Relevant Departments Go All In
4. Carefully Consider Your Choice for a Social Media Listening Tool
5. In the End, How Much is Social Listening Doing For You?

Hearing what customers say on social media is one thing, but understanding how to use their conversations to your brand’s advantage is another.

500 million tweets are sent every day. That’s ~6,000 tweets per second.

And that’s just Twitter.

A prospect could tweet something as simple as “I need a black shoe right now” and get the attention of seventy of her followers engaging with the post.

What would happen, if you as a shoe brand (for instance) chime into that conversation with a link to your black shoe — including a discount coupon?

Here are five social listening best practices that can make a huge difference in your business:

1. Pick a Successful Competitor to Imitate

When you learn from people who are already doing well, you’re in essence skipping the mistakes they made before getting to where they are today. You can avoid most of mistakes they made.

On learning from competitors, PR expert Gini Dietrich says:

“Analyze your competitors’ marketing—see which efforts work well, and understand why stakeholders like them: What is their primary messaging? Why does or doesn’t it work? How do people respond to the company’s overtures online? Is word of mouth positive or negative? Why?”

Businesses perform better at social listening when they ethically learn from competitors who are already doing it right.

Piecing together their strategy is like scoring a free cheatsheet. Visit their platforms to see how they’re doing their social media — responding to feedback, joining industry conversations, and so on.

Fashion company Topshop, for example, is a good brand to learn social listening from. And of course, there are several other brands out there that are awesome at this.

While many other fashion brands only only take advantage of world-renowned events like Valentine’s Day and Christmas, Topshop takes advantage of other smaller festivals or events — especially in entertainment and fashion space.

When conversations about #EEBAFTAs (the hashtag for British Academy Film Awards) were trending on Twitter, Topshop joined in.

Tweet of Topshop during the #EEBAFTAs

Remember, this is an event many other fashion brands don’t value as much as they do more popular events. Well, Topshop decided to participate in the conversation on Twitter and their engagement rate soared; one of their tweets with the hashtag became the most popular on their timeline.

So, when looking for brands to learn your social listening strategy from, companies like Topshop are good examples to learn from. They look at other industry-related events that most of their competitors aren’t looking at and take advantage of them.

There are hundreds or even thousands of other brands you can learn from. Do your research on brands doing social listening well in your industry and see how you can learn from them.

But what if you step into a lively conversation and get a slap in the face? You need to know when to enter an ongoing conversation on social media.

2. Determine When to Engage an Ongoing Conversation

Social media is built on conversations, and consumers want to be talked to, not sold to.

Social media marketing guru Carlos Gil put it more succinctly:

“Talk to your audience, make conversation, build relationships. Consumers are people and they don’t want to be sold to, they want to be engaged so engage them.”

But it’s not just getting into conversations with prospects that’s important, you also need to know when and when not to engage them.

Ever gotten into a conversation and then realized you shouldn’t have? Or maybe your timing was just off?

When to enter an ongoing conversation is crucial.

It determines whether or not you’ll be getting any benefits from your social listening efforts or not. It determines whether you’ll get bashed or praised for joining a conversation. Avoid regret. Pick and choose your times to engage.

Here’s a few examples of typical conversations, and how to engage them:

Customer Service Queries

Customer service related queries require your immediate response.

Customers get angry all the time for different reasons, and you want to ensure they don’t stay angry. Or they need to ask questions before buying from you.

In any case, you want to respond to customer service requests fast.

“Netflix is known for its superior online customer service. That is due in large part to a corporate culture that empowers employees to act quickly”

– Rebekah Radice, Founder at RadiantLA

78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor service experience.

An Ongoing Conversation About a Government Policy

Trying to take advantage of a social media conversation about a government policy that hurts people is an example of a potentially bad time to enter a social media conversation (depending on your stance).

For instance, following a ban from the US president last year, people from Muslim-majority countries were banned from entering the US. Taxi companies weren’t happy about this, and so they all went down the JFK airport and stopped pickups from working.

Amidst this commotion, Uber saw it fit to join the conversation and advertise their service, in theory helping stranded passengers. The turn out was bad. #DeleteUber became a thing on the Internet with many users posting how they weren’t happy without Uber’s position on the ban:

#DeleteUber campaign.

If you’re not going to sympathize with people who find a particular policy disturbing, it’s best to stay away from conversations like this.

When to Keep Quiet or Simply Apologize

Sometimes it’s best to remain silent — when saying anything at all will make a situation bad on all sides. Depending on the vitriol being spread, you may just want to pretend you didn’t hear a thing.

A smart rule of thumb is to only get involved in conversations when you know you won’t get burned or miss out on significant benefits.

For example, these conversation scenarios are clear enough to know whether or not to chime in:

  • An angry customer is egging people on and you feel you might be baited into a fight – Do not chime it.
  • You feel tempted to speak ill of a competitor’s product. – Do not chime in.
  • You feel tempted to market your Spring bouquets on Christmas Day (making you look like an extraterrestial)- Do not chime in.
  • You will literally miss the party if you don’t get into a conversation on time — like tweeting about Valentine’s Day on February 15 – Chime in!
  • You won’t get burned for marketing your Valentine’s products on Valentine’s Day – Chime in!

These are just a few examples. Think up a few you want to avoid or join.

But it’s still not always this straightforward, right?

Sometimes it can get really dicey and you won’t be sure whether or how to respond to feedback in the sometimes volatile social arena. Everybody’s watching, remember?

And bad news travels fast.

For example, one Clayburn Griffin mentioned Cap ‘n Crunch on Twitter, saying…

Tweet about Cap'n Crunch by Clayburn Griffin

Cap ‘n Crunch probably wasn’t sure what the outcome of their clapback would be. But they took the risk anyway. As it turned out, it worked for them. Cap ‘n Crunch’s tweet clearly got more love than KFC’s.

Cap 'n Crunch's tweet at KFC

Should you do the same if you were in this situation?

Speaking about the reason for their clapback, Andrew Cunningham from Huge (which managed digital for Cap ‘n Crunch) said: “KFC came at us pretty hard, and at that point we had full license to zing them back.”

Sometimes it isn’t rocket science to know when to enter a conversation. Sometimes it is. A smart rule of thumb, however, would be to only respond to conversations that clearly CAN BE handled. And apologize when occasion demands.

Another good social listening practice is to have your social media team collaborate with relevant departments in your organization to provide accurate information.

3. Have Relevant Departments Go All In

Social media is clearly not a secondary channel for marketing anymore, it’s the main channel today.

And if that’s the case, then it’s worth having all relevant departments in your organization collaborating on it.

When an issue is brought up by a customer that your social media team doesn’t have enough expertise to handle, have them link up with the relevant departments that can provide apt feedback or information.

78% of customers say competent service reps play a huge role in a happy customer experience.

Service reps can’t be competent if they aren’t fed the right information by relevant departments. So departments in your organization need to collaborate with your social listening efforts.

Customers hate it when they reach out to your customer service via social media and don’t get a satisfactory response. Or when you tell them to send an email to get an issued solved. Nothing beats you giving them the right response right from social media where they contacted you.

“I have for 10 years—long before Facebook was even on the map—called myself a ‘relationship marketing specialist.’ And I love that term because to me it transcends the medium. It’s all about people doing business with people.”

— Mari Smith, Top Facebook Marketing Expert.

And remember, it’s social media — everybody’s watching.

This doesn’t mean your programmers, finance people, and other staff need to abandon their roles all the time to respond to customer complaints on social. But they can play a huge role in assisting your social media managers with the relevant information they need.

An open communication line between the social media team and relevant departments can work wonders here.

That said, your entire social listening effort, however, is nothing without a good social monitoring tool.

4. Carefully Consider Your Choice for a Social Media Listening Tool

Social media listening tools help you analyze what’s been said about your brand and industry on social media.

There are many social media monitoring tools out there, which makes choosing the right one a challenge sometimes. But you need to find the right one for your business anyway.

An inefficient social listening tool will make your social marketing efforts unnecessarily hard and frustrating.

If, for example, your tool can’t help you sort out the different sentiments in your social mentions, it’s going to be really hard to start scrolling through the many mentions you get to get the one(s) you’re looking for.

Want to monitor sentiment analysis for the hashtag you’re tracking like this? Try Keyhole.

Social conversation monitors have different capabilities. Some provide basic functions while others offer more advanced features. You want to pick the one that offers the functions that matter to your business.

5. In the End, How Much is Social Listening Doing For You?

You need to track metrics that matter. Otherwise, it’d be all for nothing. And there are lots of things to track, but you need to spot the ones that really matter to your business.

A few things to track:

  • Sentiment: How many mentions about your brand are favourable or otherwise.
  • Popularity: How many mentions are you getting per day, week or month?
  • Influencers: Who are the influencers talking about you, how many are they and what are they saying?
  • Most engaging topics: Which topics get the most likes, replies and reposts? Knowing this will help you understand where to focus your social listening efforts.

What you do with what you’re hearing about your brand is critical in this age where it feels like social media is controlling the world. Use the strategies in this piece to make the most of what’s being said about you and your industry.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword analysis and hashtag analytics. Get started for free and conduct social listening for your brand.

The Ultimate Facebook Analytics Guide: The Insights You Need to be Tracking

Facebook Analytics Guide

You still haven’t started using Facebook Analytics, have you? 

Could it be because you don’t understand it? Or perhaps you don’t know how to set it up in the first place.

Maybe you don’t see why you should be using another Facebook analytics tool. You have Facebook Insights anyway. 

We totally get it.

But, here’s the thing…

You’re missing out on the huge potential to make your ads more successful and reduce your ad spend, or even make what you’re currently spending bring you more value. 

The truth is, Facebook Analytics will completely change the way you do business.

While Facebook Insights does a good job to help you understand the value of your Facebook Page, Facebook Analytics goes on further to measure actions taken in the News Feed and how they affect actions on company websites, apps, and brick and mortar stores.

No more need for a handful of different analytics tools to monitor your Facebook Page, websites and apps. Now you can access all that data on one dashboard. 

Still feeling doubtful? We’ve prepared this guide to help you understand why you need Facebook Analytics in your life and how to master this powerful tool.

Read on. 

Jump Links:

What is Facebook Analytics?

Facebook Insights vs Facebook Analytics

How to Use Facebook Analytics

Use Facebook Analytics to Inform Marketing Campaigns

What is Facebook Analytics?

Facebook Analytics is the updated social media reporting tool that groups together all your Facebook pages, pixels and apps to give you a complete picture of how users interact with these platforms over time. 

For instance, you can see how audiences on your Facebook page and Facebook pixel overlap or connect.

In other words, you get to see how your Facebook audiences interact with your website as well as how your website audiences interact with your Facebook Page. This is because Facebook Pixel is a core component of Facebook Analytics. 

Facebook Analytics makes it easy for marketers to track the results from organic and paid ads across multiple devices and sessions. It makes monitoring and reporting very easy, which means you can keep improving your Facebook marketing campaigns. 

And here’s the best part; it’s FREE!

All you need is a Facebook page and pixel. 

Facebook Insights vs Facebook Analytics

You’re probably already familiar with Facebook Insights that gives you a report on your Facebook Page performance in terms of engagement and audience demographics. 

Facebook Insights and Facebook Analytics, though both analytics tools, are completely different. 

Facebook Insights is just for your page and lives within your Facebook Page, where Analytics is mainly for paid ads and lives within your Facebook ad account. 

Facebook Analytics gathers micro-level data from your Facebook Page and Facebook Pixel to show you how someone interacts with your page and website over time. 

So for instance, you can see how many people commented on your Facebook post, viewed your landing page and then made a purchase. 

Facebook Insights, on the other hand, relates to Facebook Page reach, post performance, and other micro-level statistics confined to your Facebook Page.

How to Use Facebook Analytics

For most marketers, the hardest part of using Analytics is setting it up. But worry not, we’ll take you step-by-step, and you’ll be a pro by the end of this guide. 

If you’re already using Business Manager, you’re already one step ahead. 

To get started, head over to your Business Manager account. Then navigate to the Measure & Report Menu and select Analytics:

how to navigate to the analytics tab through facebook business manager

Please note that for your Analytics dashboard to work, you need to install the Facebook Pixel. Facebook Pixel shows you who gets to your website by interacting with your Facebook content.

It allows you to see how your Facebook ads drive visitors to your website and what those visitors do when they get to your website. 

This information is important because it enables you to measure visitor engagement. 

You are also able to compare the number of leads you get versus the cost of the ads for that page, so you’re aware of how much it costs you to acquire a lead. 

It also grants you the ability to see what call-to-action buttons attract your visitors the most so you can use them more. 

The Pixel will also show you the shopping cart activity. Are people leaving items in their carts or completing the purchase process?

To find The Facebook Pixel, go to Ads Manager and click on “Pixels”. The installation process is simple, and Facebook walks you through each step required. 

Once you install the Pixel, give it time to run. Then, your dashboard will populate with your analytics data.

At the top of your dashboard, you’ll see the number of new users, unique users, and your retention rate ie. the percentage of people who return to your site. 

You can see the number of active users you’ve had in the last 24 hours and your best traffic sources under Growth Metrics.

Another important step after creating your Pixel is to customize your Event Source Group (ESG). This allows you to see analytics from all your assets (Pages, websites and apps). 

To create your event source group, choose the option in the top right-hand corner:

Creating a Facebook pixel - create an event source group (ESG)

Next, name your event source group and choose the apps, pixels, and the pages you want to be included in your reports:

Now, this is how your dashboard will look like:

Using Your Dashboard

No matter how amazing your campaign is, you need to analyze your Facebook ad performance so that you’re fully aware of how it’s performing and what needs to be improved. 

Facebook Analytics is the holy grail of advertising on Facebook. The tool will present you with loads of data from your ads. 

To get the most out of Facebook Analytics, there are three main components that you must fully understand.

Let’s take a closer look…

1. Funnel Analysis

The first important insight available in the Facebook Analytics tool is Funnels. 

To see the Funnels dashboard, click Funnels on the left side of the Facebook Analytics page. Then click on the ‘Create Funnel’ button.  

As you add a funnel step, a drop-down menu will give you options including conversations, messages sent, page views, post reactions, add to cart, etc. You can add all the options you think are relevant to you. 

How to conduct a funnel analysis on facebook analytics

For the Funnels dashboard to work, you need to make sure your Facebook events are set up properly in Pixels. 

install your facebook pixel and add what events you'd like to track.

Add all the relevant events. 

Why is Funnels so important?

With this feature, you are able to track your users’ journey from the moment they first interact with your asset until they reach your desired end goal. 

For instance, you can track a user from the moment they like your business page, like a post, click on a link, visit your website, add an item to their cart and finally make a purchase. 

Let’s take a look at the example below:

facebook analytics - funnel conversion example

For this business, 36.9% of the people that commented on their Facebook page went on to view their website. 10.5% of these then purchased their product. So 3.9% of people that commented decided to buy from the site.

Reports from Funnels will help prove the value of engagement on your Facebook page because you’re able to tell if comments and likes on your Facebook page result in users going to your website and ultimately converting.

You can take advantage of what is working within your funnel. 

Say the more people view your Facebook Page, the more they purchase. You can then create an ad to purposefully increase your page views. 

On the other hand, if you have many people visiting your page, but very few of them are adding your product to their shopping cart, then something is missing.

You need to give them an incentive to add items to the cart such as discount codes, personalized product offers, etc. 

You’re also able to see at what point in the funnel are people dropping off. 

Are they not clicking on your links? Maybe you need a better call-to-action. 

Or perhaps they’re leaving immediately after landing on your website. If so, you may need to reassess your landing page content. 

If they drop off after they add the item to the cart, you can create a follow-up email sequence to find out why that’s the case.

2. Customer Lifetime Value Analysis

The second powerful report on Facebook Analytics is Customer Lifetime Value.

To set it up, select Lifetime Value from the left-hand menu, then decide whether to include All Users (anyone that interacted with you) or Paying Users (only those that made a purchase).

Facebook analytics: customer lifetime value report

Why is Customer Lifetime Value important?

Facebook changed its system and now users see more content from friends and groups, and less content from pages. This means that you need to use ads to get more people to see your content in their feeds. 

This has made the ad space very competitive and now costs more to acquire leads. 

Each lead needs to be of high value for you to get a high return on investment.  You want each customer you acquire to engage on the long-term with your brand. 

You also want to focus on warm leads and not just cold leads because warm leads are more likely to convert into customers. 

Most businesses tend to concentrate on new customers and forget existing customers.

A customer may have bought a product from you, but that doesn’t mean their journey ends there. They are still useful to your business. 

There are many ways to increase a customer’s lifetime value to your business.

By looking at reports generated by Customer Lifetime Value, you can see how much a customer is worth to you over the course of several months.

With this feature, you can see how Customer Lifetime Value corresponds to changes you make in targeted ads, promotions, and so on.

Not everyone who sees your ad will become a customer immediately. 

Some people may want to interact with your brand several times before they make any purchase. Customer Lifetime Value allows you to see how a user’s value increases over time. 

With this data at hand, you’re able to tell which users to spend more ad money and effort on because they will bring more value to your business. 

3. Revenue

The third very important Facebook Analytics insight is Revenue. 

To set it up, choose a date range and then click on the Revenue option from the menu:

facebook analytics: revenue

The revenue report is quite great for Facebook audience insights. You can see the number of people who make a purchase and their age and gender breakdown. 

This helps you understand the people who are making the most purchases, therefore, helping you to make your Facebook ads even more targeted.

This way, you are able to make the most out of your ad spend. 

No dollars end up going to waste. 

Create Custom Dashboards

Facebook Analytics allows you to create a customized dashboard so that you can slice and dice your data in all sorts of ways and go as specific or in depth as you want. 

For instance, you can create a dashboard that compares specific events, specific groups of users (by age, gender, lifestyle, interests, etc.), different segments of users, etc.

You can also segment your reports in custom time windows, such as days, weeks or months. 

Custom dashboards allow you to create well-targeted marketing campaigns so that you can achieve your desired goals. 

To create custom dashboards, use the pin option in the top right-hand corner to pin a report and save it to a chosen dashboard:

facebook analytics: revenue. learn how to create a custom dashboard.

Use Facebook Analytics Data to Inform Your Marketing Campaigns

Data is useless if you don’t use it. 

You will only get real value from Facebook Analytics if you use the data you generate to make informed decisions for your business. 

The beauty of data is that it shows you what is working and how to keep it working. It also shows you what is not working and how to turn it around. 

A Facebook ad campaign may not bring you the conversion success you were hoping for. With Analytics, you are able to tell why that’s the case and what you can do to improve the ad campaign. 

You can also use Analytics to retarget people who may not have been convinced to become customers the first time around. 

You can do so by addressing the issues that stopped them from becoming customers and then retarget them with another campaign. 

You also get to see which assets are working the best for you. For instance, most people may be converting after messaging you on Facebook and getting a response. 

Then, you can maximize on this by using Messenger chatbots to automatically engage people who like your page. 

Data is a marketer’s gold mine and it can be the difference between a successful brand and an unsuccessful one.

That’s why clever marketers will use Facebook Analytics and other useful social media analytics tools such as Keyhole to monitor their campaigns.

Take time to explore and understand Facebook Analytics, examine your reports in detail and see your marketing campaigns reach heights you’ve never seen before! 

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides social media, keyword, and hashtag analytics for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. Get started for free.

Brand Collabs Manager: What is It?

brand collabs manager: what is it?

With influencer marketing and branded content continuing to surge in the digital marketing space, it’s no surprise that Brand Collabs Manager for Facebook and Instagram is being introduced.

Previously only available to Facebook creators, it’s a new marketplace tool being tested with a select group of Instagram creators.

Jump Links

What is Facebook Brand Collabs Manager?
What Criteria Do You Need to Qualify?

What is Facebook Brand Collabs Manager?

Facebook Brand Collabs Manager is a new marketplace tool that allows creators and influencers to easily share their insights and engagement metrics with brands, and help find brand partners that align with their audience or following.

It’s an easy tool that allows creators to manage their partnerships.

Brands or companies can also easily see insights when tagged in associated branded content within the Instagram app or within the platform.

What Criteria Do You Need to Qualify?

To have access to this new tool, Facebook requires its creators to meet a set of criteria.

In order to qualify, you must:

  • Comply with Facebook’s Branded Content Policies, which don’t allow certain forms of branded content, such as roll ads or banner ads
  • Meet Facebook’s Partner Monetization Policies
  • Have 1,000 followers and at least one of the following:
    • 15,000 Post Engagements (The number of times people have engaged with your posts through likes, comments and shares and more.) in the last 60 days
    • 180,000 Minutes Viewed in the last 60 days
    • 30,000 1-Minute views for 3-Minute Videos in the last 60 days
    • Be a Page Admin for the page you are submitting
    • Have a Page that is in a Brand Collabs Manager eligible country.

You can check your eligibility on the Facebook website.

If you are the admin of multiple pages, you’re able to check the eligibility of all your pages with a single click.

Haven’t met the requirements?

Not a problem. It’ll also show you what criteria you’re missing, and your progress on the requirement.

Interested in measuring social media analytics across different platforms? Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides social media, keyword, and hashtag analytics for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms. Get started for free.

Social Media for Nonprofits: Proving Your ROI and Impact through Social Media Analytics

Social Media for Nonprofits: Proving Your ROI and Impact through Social Media Analytics

Social media has radically changed the way people discover, consume, and share information about issues that matter to them. 

For nonprofits, that’s more than a good thing. 

Now your work, your impact, and your stories can get the recognition and attention they deserve.

Social media for nonprofits gives you the chance to tell your brand story, interact with your supporters and get them interested to support your campaigns. 

If you haven’t already, you need to start thinking about creating or optimizing your social media strategy.

But wait… 

Being on social media is not enough. Your efforts have to have some sort of return on investment (ROI) otherwise why spend so much time and effort on social media?

So, in comes social media analytics. 

In this blog post, we’ll show you why measuring your social media ROI is important, what you need to be measuring, and recommended tools to use. 

Jump Links:

Why Should Nonprofits Focus on Social Media?

Why It’s Important to Measure your Return on Investment (ROI) / Social ROI 

What Metrics to Track
Engagement
Reach
Website Traffic
Most Effective Channels
Conversion

Assign a Monetary Value to Each Metric Measured

ROI / SROI in Real Action
#WorldElephantDay
United Nations

Best Social Media Analytics Tools

Why Should Nonprofits Focus on Social Media?

Before we dive in, let’s first touch on why social media for nonprofits is an important marketing tool. 

Data by HubSpot reveals that the main reason why nonprofits engage in marketing efforts is to fundraise, generate brand awareness, recruit volunteers and share news.

nonprofits: why they engage in marketing
Source: HubSpot

Social media is perfect to help attain all of those goals.

Why? 

Because over 3.5 billion people currently use social media, meaning there’s no shortage of opportunities to find people who can support your cause through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

What are we trying to say here?

If used the right way, nonprofit social media marketing can greatly help you promote your organization and find people to help with your mission.

Why It’s Important to Measure your Return on Investment (ROI) / Social ROI 

Let’s get down to business.

According to The New Economics Foundation, Social Return on Investment (SROI) captures social value by translating outcomes into financial values.

While social media is exciting to use, it’s also difficult to place tangible value, especially in financial terms. 

So, even though you got 1000 likes on your Facebook post yesterday, how much did those likes contribute to your bottom line?

For marketers in nonprofits, this is a difficult question to articulate an answer for.

In a world where competition for grants is very significant, calculating your SROI can give you a competitive edge.

How? 

Measuring your SROI helps you to identify what is working and what is not. Not all social media platforms are equal. Some are better than others. 

By measuring your SROI, it will help you identify which platforms are giving you the most return, indicating which platforms you should allot time and energy towards.

Examining your social media analytics will help you see where your social media budget is most effective, especially if you use social media ads. 

You will get insights into areas where you shouldn’t be spending so much money on. 

If you don’t practice regular measurement and reporting on your social media efforts, you may end up spending time and effort on a strategy that is not getting you anywhere. 

The needs of your fans change constantly so you need to keep adjusting your social media content to match their needs. You can only do this by keeping up with your metrics constantly.  

Analyzing your SROI will give you insights into whether there are any gaps in your social media strategy, content, and key messages so that you can improve accordingly and continue to offer value to your audience.

By measuring your SROI, you will give everyone involved in the strategy a sense of purpose and a better understanding of why social media platforms are important to your organization’s mission. 

It will also help to emphasize the value your efforts are contributing to your organization’s overall goals. 

What Metrics to Track

Let’s get down to work. 

There are a lot of metrics that you can track if you want to know how effective your social media efforts are. 

However, not all metrics have the same level of importance.

Many nonprofit marketers focus mainly on vanity metrics, which is the number of fans, followers, and views. 

While these metrics are good to be aware of, they are not the most important when it comes to your SROI and measuring your impact. 

You may get excited to see your video got a million views, but you have to go deeper than just the views.

Beyond viewing the video, how many people out of the million viewers took a desired action such as making a donation? 

Worry not, there is an easy way to decide what metrics matter the most to your nonprofit. 

What you need to do is ask yourself these four questions:

  1. What does success look like to us?
  2. How will we know that we are achieving that success when we use social media?
  3. What three quantitative metrics can we create to measure this success? (eg. number of donations received)
  4. What three qualitative metrics can we create to measure this success? (eg. the interest created towards a cause)

With these questions in mind, here are five metrics that can help determine nonprofit social media success:

Engagement

Engagement refers to the kind of response your social media content is getting from your online audience. 

To measure your engagement look at the number of shares, comments, retweets, mentions, and link clicks. 

Here’s our engagement measurement formula:

Why is this an important metric? 

Engagement lets you understand what your target audience values most.

By tracking the amount of engagement your content receives, you’ll know if you’re offering people value and if not, you get a chance to do better in the future.

Reach

Reach refers to how far your messages go beyond your fans and followers. 

When your Facebook fans see your posts are they sharing them with their friends and family? When they read your blog are they sharing it on Twitter?

Reach is important, especially when you’re trying to create brand awareness or promoting a new cause.

You want as many people as possible to know about your organization and its campaigns. 

Website Traffic

You don’t want people to just see your social media content, you want them to take the desired action such as volunteer, donate, get involved in your cause, etc.

The best way to do this is to get them to your website where they can see more about your nonprofit and its activities. 

Make sure that you measure how much traffic your social media efforts are sending to your website, and the kinds of interactions these visitors have on your website.

Most Effective Channels

Focus on the channels that are giving you the most SROI. 

It’s important to understand your most effective channel so that you don’t keep wasting money and effort on platforms that are adding no value to your bottom line. 

Conversion

Remember when we talked about vanity metrics?

Here is where you separate the wheat from the chaff.

Besides attracting millions of fans, you want them to take certain actions.

This could be to donate, click on an ad, attend a charity event, visit your website, etc.

You need to know how many people take your desired actions because this is the one metric that truly informs your bottom line. 

Assign a Monetary Value to Each Metric Measured

Does your social media successfully convert traffic into donations?

proving roi and revenue for nonprofits meme
Source: Procurious

Your nonprofit needs to know whether the money and effort spent on social media are adding some monetary value. 

Guided by social media analytics, assign a bottom-line value to each type of conversion.

This will at first prove to be difficult, but as you continue to understand your social media efforts and corresponding goals, you will get better at it. So be patient with yourself. 

Here are some questions to help you assign a value to your metrics:

How much is each potential visit to your social media platforms and website worth to you?

How many donations can you collect through your social media platforms?

How much does it cost you to run effective ads to achieve your social media goals?

How much does it cost you in terms of labor? (consider the number of hours spent on social media marketing over a given period).

How much do you spend on social media tools? (eg. scheduling tools, analytics tools, etc.)

By answering these questions, you will be able to find out how much you spend and how much you make, thus allowing you to quantify (in monetary terms) your SROI.

ROI / SROI in Real Action

#WorldElephantDay Uses Keyhole to Help Find Investors

Every August 12th, the world gets together to save elephants for #WorldElephantDay. 

This annual awareness campaign is led by the World Elephant Society, a nonprofit tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity organization.

world elephant day

To make sure that the campaign increases reach every year, the organization uses Keyhole for Nonprofits to get more value out of its social media presence in two ways:

  1. Find and connect with influencers: Influencers are a great marketing tool to help make campaigns go viral through their spheres of influence. 
  • Identifying the right influencers can be a daunting task. World Elephant Society uses Keyhole to easily identify top influencers engaging with their hashtag (#WorldElephantDay), and directly reach out to them to amplify their message every year. 
  • By measuring how much reach their hashtag has garnered, they can know which influencers to align themselves with, in future campaigns.

    2. Collect campaign data to help secure investors and sponsoring partners: The organization works with Keyhole to help identify campaign reach, engagement, and growth and then organize all this data. The organization then presents it to potential collaborators and sponsors.

The United Nations Gains Consumer Insights with Keyhole

Every Woman Every Child (EWEC) is a global movement that mobilizes relevant stakeholders to address the major health challenges facing women and children.

Much of EWEC focuses on advocacy and helping people to understand why the health of women and children is critical to societies. 

They needed to understand who they were reaching on social media, and how they could measure the success of their strategies. 

Where are these people from? What devices do they use to access and engage with their content?

It was important for the organization to have this data so they could effectively drive their campaign forward.

Using Keyhole, the organization was able to measure:

  • Audience demographics (geography, gender, sentiments)
  • The effectiveness of partnership engagements
  • The geographical reach of their social media presence
  • How people were accessing their content

The UN was able to access these insights and extrapolate data to pivot their strategies as needed, and to measure success with their social media efforts. 

Best Social Media Analytics Tools

There are several good social media analytics tools that your nonprofit can use to measure its SROI. Here are our top picks:

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best tools to use when tracking your website traffic, audience demographics, on-site conversions and sign-ups emerging from your social media campaigns.

Facebook Insights

Facebook has become a popular charity fundraising platform. Facebook Insights, its built in analytics tool, is great in providing you with useful insights in the ‘People’ tab.

You’ll get to see audience demographics such as age, gender, and geographical distribution. 

These insights will help you understand if you are reaching the right audience and the kind of reach and engagement your social media content receives on Facebook.

Keyhole For Nonprofits

Keyhole helps hundreds of nonprofits prove their impact through Social Media Analytics to maximize reach, get more donors, and secure more sponsors over time.

Our tool helps you collect all the important metrics that you need to prove your impact to your donors and secure your donations.

Keyhole helps you to calculate how much interest and awareness your social media efforts have generated.

With this report, you can show your sponsors exactly how much value you bring as a brand partner.

More supporters bring you more funds. 

Through Keyhole you can practice social listening to find all the people talking about your cause and your nonprofit. 

These are your supporters, your advocates, and your ambassadors, people you probably didn’t know you had.

By knowing who they are, you can engage them and convert them into loyal supporters. 

We cannot emphasize enough the value of influencers to any campaign.

Keyhole will find and engage all the influencers and celebrities out there already excited about your cause. 

You want to know how much your nonprofit is growing, right?

Keyhole lets you watch your nonprofit grow over time. You will always be able to tell if your campaigns are reaching more people and if you have more followers and why. 

Wrapping Up: Where Do You Go From Here?

Measuring your nonprofit analytics is a necessary task that should be part of your social media for nonprofits strategy. 

When you’re armed with the right insights, you will always be able to make any necessary changes that will see your nonprofit achieve its overall goals. 

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

Using Hashtags to Find Influencers on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook

Using Hashtags to Find Influencers on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook

This article was updated on October 29th, 2019.

Finding influencers has become much easier over time – especially with the explosive growth of social media and information that is now available.

You can use available data from social networks and social media analytics tools to rank their influence objectively.

Using hashtags will bring your influencer marketing to the next level by filtering out influencers based on your contextual needs.

For example, if you’re looking for influencers to promote the Audi A4, you don’t need to use generic users who are influential in ‘cars’ — that’s too broad!

Instead, hashtags like #AudiA4 can help you find influencers with true reach and power over their audience to promote the Audi A4.

Want to learn how?

This article will walk you through some simple methods to find influencers on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook using hashtags.

Jump Links:

Instagram
Twitter
Facebook

Instagram

If you’re looking to find social influencers, Instagram is a great place to start.

Instagram has grown to be larger than Twitter, and is definitely a tool you should incorporate into your social strategy if you haven’t already.

One simple way to find social influencers on Instagram is to search for relevant hashtags, such as #AudiA4, and take a peek at the profiles of images that appear in the Top Posts of the hashtag.

Using Hashtags to Find Influencers on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Using the Audi instagram hashtag to identify influencers who talk about audi.

You can also use a tool like Keyhole to track hashtags and sort results by highest number of engagements or likes.

You can peruse the profile and compare against metrics such as engagement to determine if they are a viable fit.

When checking their profile, you can also check to see if they have an email on their profile, identify as an influencer, blogger, or have their own website.

Twitter

Twitter is another lucrative platform where you can find influencers.

Many users use Twitter as a direct distribution method, sharing their thoughts, opinions, and resources such as blog posts.

To use Twitter to find influencers, use the search bar and type in the relevant hashtag you’d like to search.

We’ll continue to use #AudiA4 as our example.

Using the Audi twitter hashtag to identify influencers who talk about audi.
Using Hashtags to Find Influencers on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Using the Audi twitter hashtag to identify influencers who talk about audi.

You’ll see a timeline of tweets for that particular hashtag. Twitter defaults to displaying the top search results, but you can also sort by latest Tweets, people, photos, and videos.

You can scroll through the list and begin to find influencers for your brand.

Some key metrics to examine when identifying influencers on Twitter are engagement, including Retweets and Likes.

You can click on their profile to learn more about the user, and examine metrics such as their follower count.

Facebook

Hashtags on Facebook are typically used less in comparison to platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, but there is still a plethora of opportunity to find influencers on Facebook.

In the Facebook search bar, type in the hashtag relevant to your industry that you want to search.

You will see all posts show up. You can choose to filter the search results by who the posts are coming from, post type, tagged locations, date posted, and more.

Explore a users profile to determine if they are a suitable influencer for your campaign.

Using hashtags to find influencers on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter will help identify users who may already be positively engaging with your brand, and will be a good fit for your marketing campaigns.

You can also use Keyhole to identify top influencers within a tracked keyword.

Hashtag Tracker - Snippet of Keyhole

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

5 Valuable Hashtag Marketing Strategies Proven to Engage Audiences

Hashtag Marketing Strategies to Engage Followers

Updated on October 17th, 2019.

Using hashtags effectively goes beyond casually plugging them into your tweets and posts.

On platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, calculated hashtag marketing can boost impressions, make your content more searchable and encourage users to talk about your brand.

Learning how to leverage tagged topics should be a priority for marketers.

Jump Links:

1. Brand Hashtags
2. Trending Hashtags
3. Chat Hashtags
4. Content Reflecting Hashtags
5. Call-to-Action Hashtags

Here are five hashtag marketing strategies that social media teams have successfully used to engage their target audiences:

1. Brand Hashtags

Think of a brand hashtag as your signature. Unique to your business, it should be a concise and relevant slogan you include when sharing original content.

Encourage followers to use it as well. This way, they’ll have a clear method of sharing posts with you and others interested in your company’s products or services.

The online community will also know how to find content about your brand.

Why Brand Hashtags Successfully Engage Audiences 

A brand hashtag is a way for users to let the social community know what they think about your company. Instead of just sending you a message, they’re speaking to their followers and other users who look for tagged posts.

Everyone stands to benefit, because:

  • You build a discussion around your brand, encouraging the online community to learn more about your products and services while promoting them. Ideally, consumers will also follow links you share.
  • Those using the hashtag will draw attention to their posts, possibly earning more followers.

As a bonus, you can run a promotional contest. For example, the person who creates the most-shared post using your hashtag will win a prize at the end of each month.

Everyone loves to win. Just watch engagement steadily rise.

Example: #WinnersFabFinds

Winners, a popular Canadian apparel store, uses #WinnersFabFinds across all social channels. Both catchy and unique, Winners promotes the brand hashtag both online and in-store. Another great example of effective hashtag marketing.

With more than 4,500 posts, here’s what #WinnersFabFinds looks like on Instagram:

Customers share content, while Winners gets original pictures of them enjoying products.

Measure any hashtag you want, including brand hashtags, using Keyhole.

When a high volume of users include a specific hashtag in their posts, it “trends.”

Social media platforms have different ways of displaying trending topics. For example, trending topics on Twitter displays on the top right side of the screen, and Facebook has a trending section on the top-right corner of your screen:

see what's trending on twitter

Constantly changing in real-time, a trending hashtag can last for days or mere minutes.

When you see a trend that relates to your business, don’t hesitate to engage in it with relevant content.

Why They Successfully Engage Audiences

By sharing content through a trending hashtag, it’ll be seen by a group larger than your contacts and followers.

In a sense, your audience can be limitless — anyone who clicks on the trending topic can see your post. And if that post is witty, original or informative, the shares it generates will further boost impressions and comments.

Example: #CollegeIn5Words

When #CollegeIn5Words trended on Twitter, Denny’s Diner furthered its reputation as a company with a funny social media presence.

Being funny in this situation has its benefits, as Denny’s earned an enviable amount of likes and retweets. Not to mention all the replies it received, with people tagging their followers to share a laugh.

3. Chat Hashtags

Popular on Twitter, you can use chat hashtags to discuss a topic with users who are interested in the subject matter.

This is a form of hashtag marketing that calls for users to be directly engaging with a brand or an individual.

There are a plethora of industry and audience specific chat hashtags.

Chats are typically held at set times, sometimes involving one user asking questions and others giving their thoughts.

You can also start and promote your own, giving your brand more exposure. Make sure the hashtag is short – encouraging meaningful conversation is key, so it’s best not to deeply cut into Twitter’s 140-character limit.

Why They Successfully Engage Audiences 

People want to talk about topics they’re passionate about, so Twitter chats can give you access to a receptive audience. With a popular chat hashtag, that audience is already established and waiting to be engaged.

What’s more, contributing to a Twitter chat can boost engagement by letting you:

  • Connect with like-minded individuals. Many people may be interested in your company, but not know about it. Using a chat hashtag is a way of informing them about your ideas, as well as your products or services.
  • Demonstrate your expertise on relevant topics. If people are invested in a certain subject, they want to know more about it. Sharing your content can spark meaningful conversations.

Example: #TMLTalk

During every Toronto Maple Leafs game, #TMLTalk is a trending topic. The team with the NHL’s largest fan base interacts with supporters using the hashtag, encouraging them to share opinions and content.

During every Toronto Maple Leafs game, #TMLTalk is a trending topic. The team with the NHL’s largest fan base interacts with supporters using the hashtag, encouraging them to share opinions and content.

Fans are passionate – giving them an online forum helps them interact with fellow enthusiasts.

Organizations such as news sites can also use the hashtag to share stories and earn clicks. Meanwhile, the Maple Leafs organization gains another way to build, and communicate with, a dedicated audience.

4. Content-Reflecting Hashtags

Content-reflecting hashtags don’t have to be trending or even popular, per se. They’re not specific to your brand, either.

They’re simply tagged words that relate to a posts’ content. For example, a tweet about social media ads may contain “#digitalmarketing.” A post about a tourist attraction may include the city’s name, and so on.

Why They Successfully Engage Audiences

Think of content-reflecting hashtags as a way of optimizing content for search. Audience members may stumble upon your posts when looking for the words you tag.

This is useful for companies that:

  • Sell physical products
  • Operate in a set location
  • Participate in events
  • Share posts about niche topics that don’t trend or necessarily merit a brand hashtag

Content-reflecting hashtags become valuable when consumers perform general searches to find a certain item or learn more about a given subject. Being an early result can certainly earn you a click, reply or follow.

Example: #CleanEating

#CleanEating is a popular Instagram hashtag that carries over onto Twitter and other social platforms.

For example, here’s a typical post that would be associated with the hashtag:

Although it’s dominated by pictures of home cooking, a health foods store or restaurant could certainly leverage the hashtag to potentially earn comments or clicks to their website.

If used in conjunction with a location hashtag, an in-person visit also wouldn’t be out of the question.

5. Call-to-Action Hashtags

The goal of a call-to-action (CTA) hashtag? Encourage the online community to perform a specific action involving your brand.

It’s a traditional marketing concept that’s applied to social media.

A CTA hashtag usually starts with a verb, such as “share” or “talk.” Then, it should have a few short words that give additional instruction.

For example, a mental health organization may have a hashtag called “#TalkAboutMentalHealth.”

When a CTA hashtag gains traction, you’ll see posts across social platforms involving people taking appropriate action.

Why They Successfully Engage Audiences 

Social media users follow CTA hashtags because they:

  • Feel like they’re contributing to an important cause.
    • Going back to the mental health example, people would follow such a hashtag because they feel as though they’re challenging the stigma of certain illnesses.
  • Think the action is genuinely fun. Who wouldn’t want to take a silly picture or share an interesting story?
  • Earn a sense of participation. If your friends are posting with a certain hashtag, it’s natural to want to contribute.

That being said, a CTA should be doable. You likely won’t engage your audience by encouraging an action that’s almost impossible.

Example: #ShareACoke

Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke campaigns harnessed the power of a fun CTA and became a wildly-successful hashtag marketing initiative.

Creating cans and bottles that read “Share a Coke With …” followed by a name, the company encouraged social media users to post pictures of themselves sharing the drink with friends and family.

Generating almost 700,000 Instagram posts, here’s a look at an example:

Generating almost 700,000 Instagram posts, here’s a look at an example:

Like a brand hashtag, this particular CTA campaign benefits the company and individual users. The users get to share content with a wide audience, while Coca-Cola gets original images of satisfied customers and potentially increases sales.

These five hashtag marketing techniques are shown to boost engagement by encouraging consumer conversations, making your content more searchable, expanding your reach, and more.

Implement them in your social media marketing strategy to see how effectively they work for you.


Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free.

The Top 16 Facebook Analytics Tools for Marketers

Top 16 Facebook analytics Tools

Updated on September 2019: this new Facebook Analytics tool list covers now 16 tools

A range of Facebook analytics tools competes for the same market, forcing marketers and community managers to decide between similar products.

It’s difficult to avoid this decision — essentially every brand and business has target markets active on social media’s most popular network. Thankfully, diverse costs and capabilities can make it easier to choose.

Looking at prices and differentiating features, learn about the top 20 Facebook analytics tools:

Jump Links to the 16 Facebook Analytics Tools:

1. Keyhole
2. Brand24
3. Brandwatch
4. Buffer
5. Mention
6. Cyfe
7. Facebook Insights
8. Oktopost
9. Quintly
10. Rival IQ
11. SharedCount
12. Social Bakers
13. Sotrender
14. Sprout Social
15. Sumall
16. Unmetric

1. Keyhole

keyhole dashboard - instagram tools
keyhole dashboard - sentiment analysis - audemars piguet
keyhole - optimal post time - audemars piguet
keyhole - optimal number of hashtags - audemars piguet

Use Keyhole to get data and optimization strategies for any public Facebook page, whether it belongs to you or a competitor. Inputting the page’s name will reveal metrics surrounding fan growth, engagement by post type and best times to post based on engagement. A unique feature, the tool also calculates the ideal length of your updates by character count.

To better understand your own page or the competition’s strategies, you can export these data points — and more — in PDFs and Excel spreadsheets.

Give Facebook account tracking with Keyhole a shot here

Price: Starts at $179 USD per month

2. Brand24

brand24

Try Brand24 to track metrics surrounding conversations across Facebook. It gives a stream of your company’s mentions, but the tool’s analytical value lies in the measurement of these mentions. For example, it quantifies sentiment and the influence of individual users. It also has a discussion volume chart, illustrating spikes and drops in mentions. This helps you visualize the popularity of events and social campaigns.

Price: $49 – $399 USD per month

3. Brandwatch

brandwatch

Use Brandwatch to analyze a page’s fan base. Able to track data pertaining to any public page, the tool offers audience analytics such as gender, location, profession and interests. Along with mention volume and sentiment, the tool monitors what audience members are sharing to uncover popular topics. You can use this information to inform your Facebook content strategy, possibly giving you more ideas to post about.

Price: Contact Brandwatch to discuss a unique plan

4. Buffer

buffer

Try out Buffer if you need a scheduling tool with complementary analytics. It informs your Facebook strategy by offering basic post metrics, such as engagement, for updates you make through the tool. Based on this data, Buffer identifies your top post each day. To replicate its success, you can model future updates on its content type and posting time.

Price: From $50 USD per month

5. Mention

mention

Sign up for Mention to access its library of historical data, which updates every minute. In a variety of charts and graphs, it illustrates page analytics such as sentiment, engagement and demographic information — ranging from age to ethnicity. Like some other tools on this list, you can access data for any public page.

Price: Free – $600+ USD per month

6. Cyfe

cyfe

Consider Cyfe if you want a customizable analytics dashboard. Along with finance and general web metrics, you can add and remove more than 50 Facebook widgets from your dashboard. These widgets track page metrics, post stats and demographic data. For example, you can see how your fan base has grown and engaged with you, as well as information such as their interests.

Price: Free – $89+ USD per month

7. Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights - Top 20 Facebook Analytics Tools

Stick with Facebook Insights if you’re uncomfortable using or paying for a third-party tool. Available for each page you manage, it has basic — yet essential — metrics such as page likes and actions. Differentiating between paid and organic, you can get standard post data — reach, impressions and engagement. It also offers fan demographic information, including gender, location and language. Due to its range of metrics, some tools on this list integrate with Facebook Insights instead of offering unique data points.

Price: Free

8. Oktopost

oktopost

Quantify the financial impact of your social media strategies using Oktopost. The tool tracks conversions while identifying channels and messages that drive financial actions on your website. For example, it allows you to confidently say “this new customer came from our latest Facebook post.” Oktopost also uses engagement data to pinpoint the best posting times, allowing you to publish through its dashboard.

Price: Contact Oktopost for custom pricing

9. quintly

quintly

Try out quintly to measure your pages against competitors. You can access Facebook Insights through the tool, which will allow you to start comparing and contrasting pages. It visualizes stats — such as engagement — from these accounts in single graphs. These sorts of features make quintly a go-to tool for competitive goal setting.

Price: Starts at $300 USD per month

10. Rival IQ

rival IQ

Use Rival IQ — another competitive benchmarking tool for Facebook — to track opposing brands and measure your performance against theirs. Prioritizing growth, the tool records how audiences change on weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual bases. By giving you access to historical data, you can correlate audience size fluctuations to major events and business cycles. This pinpoints when rival are expanding their fan bases.

Price: $199 – $499 USD per month

11. SharedCount

shared count

Take SharedCount’s name literally. Answering more than a billion requests per month, the website tracks the social like, share and comment counts of content pieces. To see these stats, simply paste a URL into the search bar.

Price: $40 – $640 USD per month

12. Socialbakers

socialbakers

Try Socialbakers if you need a comprehensive dataset above all else. The features include custom benchmarking and competitive analysis, allowing you to create groups to track your Facebook performance against. The tool also differentiates between paid and non-paid content when measuring post performance. And of interest to companies with a worldwide presence, Socialbakers can segment data by individual brand and country.

Price: from $200 USD per month

13. Sotrender

sotrender

Collect metrics from any public page in a single dashboard with Sotrender, allowing you to measure your performance and research competitors. On top of audience demographic information, the tool offers data such as post reach and impressions. You can see how these metrics vary between update types, including ones that have photos, videos and just text. Using the numbers it tracks, Sotrender makes suggestions about when to post and which kinds of media to use.

Price: $50 – $390 USD per month

14. Sprout Social

sproutsocial

Choose Sprout Social to monitor the numbers behind different Facebook pages in one dashboard. As well as an inbox that brings messages from all pages into a filterable stream, you can access data visualizations for post metrics such as impressions and engagements. The platform also tracks page data, including fan growth. You can export these analytics to PDFs and CSVs.

Price: Custom pricing for Analytics Suite

15. SumAll

sumall

Connect unlimited Facebook accounts to SumAll. This feature, along with reports to which you can add your logo, make it an ideal analytics tool for social marketing agencies. SumAll focuses on goal setting and completion, charting your progress with standard growth and engagement metrics. You can set the tool to send emails summarizing this data, helping you stay on top of different accounts you handle.

Price: Free

16. Unmetric

unmetric

Use Unmetric to guide your growth strategy through its reporting and historical analysis features. Containing Facebook Insights data, it emails you Excel and PowerPoint reports depending on the frequency you set. The metrics can be up to four years old, helping you find out how well past strategies worked for you and your competitors. Unmetric also separates paid from organic numbers when analyzing posts for standard metrics such as engagement.

Price: Custom pricing

The Final Verdict About these Facebook Analytics Tools

Some platforms should appeal to you, but the choice ultimately depends on:

  • Getting features that help grow your Facebook footprint
  • Measuring the metrics you value
  • Staying within your budget
  • Receiving a positive user experience

Use this list of 16 Facebook analytics tools as your guide to, at the very least, simplify the research and decision processes.

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. Get started for free.

Top 25 Social Media Analytics Tools: The Definitive Guide

Top 25 Social Media Analytics Tools

[Updated in July 2019, for a brand new Social Media Analytics Tools comparison]

Did you miss our previous blog on the 27 Hashtag Analytics strategies? No worries, you can read it here: https://keyhole.co/blog/hashtag-analytics-27-actionable-strategies/

It can be a daunting task.

You’ve asked everyone and every query tool for the best social media analytics tools and you’re still unsure which to use. And you don’t have the time and money to waste using a tool only to find out later on that it doesn’t suit your needs. Whether you’re asking other marketers or searching on Google, it can be quite confusing — with every brand making enticing promises.

How do you know which of them would deliver on their promise? A good complete guide is a great place to look.

Here’s a guide showing you the top 25 social media analytics tools, and how they work:

Read moreTop 25 Social Media Analytics Tools: The Definitive Guide

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