Social Media Marketing Archives

The 7 Most Important Social Media Marketing Metrics

February 16, 2021January 6, 2021 by Keyhole

Let’s be honest, if you’re a social media manager, you have a lot on your plate.

Your days are likely packed with creating killer content and writing compelling copy, or fielding comments and questions from users. On top of that, you must stay ahead of the algorithms.

We get it.

With all that said, you still need to make time in your busy day for comprehensive reporting that dissects your strategy.

Why social media marketing metrics matter? 

Content social media marketing metrics 
Post reach and impressions 
Engagement counts 
Brand mentions and sentiment 

Conversation social media metrics 
Reply time Messaging 

Conversion social media metrics  

Don't get lost in the sauce

Why do social media marketing metrics matter?

At the end of the day, you have to show why everything you do matters to someone that might not be as familiar with social media marketing metrics.

As social media platforms’ value to marketers increases, platforms are adding reporting features. These features will give some insight into how your posts are performing.

However, they do tend to err on the side of giving you more data than you might need. And remember, a lot of data does not translate into actionable insights.

So, how do you avoid information overload in your own reporting, while still maintaining a solid overview of your brand traction?

This list of social media marketing metrics will help you report based on your brand’s goals. Whether it is tracking your campaigns, your daily social media management across all platforms, etc.

Content-based social media marketing metrics: Are your posting efforts working?

Social media is considered an art and a science for many reasons. Like any art form, you pour your time, effort, and soul into your content to release it into the vast social ether.

However, it takes a scientific approach to ensure that your post will cut through the noise and reach your target audience. These are the social media metrics that will measure your posts performance and success.

Post Reach and Impressions – Who is Seeing Your Content?

Social Media Marketing Metrics: Post Reach vs Post Impressions

Two of the most important social media marketing metrics to keep in mind are post reach and post impressions. These two metrics together will give you an idea of roughly how many people are seeing a given post.

While the two metrics are pretty similar in what they measure, there are some differences.

Post reach refers to how many unique users were exposed to a piece of content. Post impressions refers to how many times your target audience has seen your content appear on their screen.

There is more to it than just keeping tabs on the visibility of your posts through the various social media.

Monitoring post reach and post impressions is also a great way to assess if you are posting at the right time of day. It also helps you know if you are using the right combination of hashtags or keywords in your posts.

Also, if you run social media ads or boost posts, it is important to track both organic and paid post reach and impressions. Both sets of metrics can give you a very different picture of where you stand in your respective channels.

Engagement Counts – Do They Like Your Stuff?

Now that you have a good idea of how many people are seeing your content, you will want to know how is engaging your content. To find this out, you need to measure your engagement.

Each social media platform has their own unique ways for users to interact. However, most fall into likes, reactions or favorites, retweets, shares, reposts, comments or replies. And these are what we call engagements.

Unless you are going through a total social media crisis, engagements are a great thing.

Engagements mean that your content is leading users out of their mindless scrolling to interact with your post. In this day and age, that in itself, is a feat worth celebrating.

With few exceptions, highly-engaging content will be boosted in the algorithm. Thus, it will result in a higher post reach and post impressions.

Moreover, you can benchmark your engagement in order to see how you perform versus your competition or measure your own performance over time.

To do this, calculate your engagement rate, which converts your engagements into a single number. Then, instead of counting the various engagements from all the platforms and accounts, you can create a single metric.

Brand Mentions – Are They Talking About You?

Brand mentions are another important social media marketing metric to include in your regular reports. As this can help you understand brand awareness and sentiment. It comes specially handy to alert you of PR situations ahead.

While not as easy to measure as post reach, impressions, or engagement, brand mentions can often be more valuable.

For instance, if your brand that is being talked about positively on social media, or gaining user generated content, it will increase its digital footprint.

It is also a solid display of relevance.

Simply put: you could be earning customers without even posting anything.

As we previously stated, measuring brand mentions can be a little tricky unless you use a social listening tool like Keyhole, or other sentiment analysis tools.

You can also search your brand’s hashtag using a hashtag analytics tool or the platform search engine. This will give you a general picture of how your brand is being discussed on social media.

Among many key features, Keyhole gives you straight-forward data, making it easy to understand and report your social media presence.

Reply Time and Messaging – Keeping the Conversation Going

The social media marketing metrics we covered had to do with your content, but it is also important to monitor your direct interactions with social media users.

The interactions you have on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram can be a powerful force in sealing sales conversions, or generating overall goodwill toward your brand.

However, the opposite is also possible. A delayed or carelessly-worded reply to a user’s comment or message can cause possibly cost you a customer. It can also reflect poorly on your brand.

Here are some segmented metrics you should keep in mind when creating your regular reporting.

Reply Time

When a customer messages you directly, asks a question on your page, or comments a query under a post, it is important to get them the information they need in a timely fashion.

This attention to their needs will make them feel like you care about their particular issue. In fact, a positive customer interaction may lead to the customer promoting your brand on their social channels.

@Wayfair Thank you for the great customer service and for delivery on time. I had a problem with the console I ordered so I got another one delivered free of charge. Long story short I was able to fix the initial console and now I have two!! Thank you 🙏 #HappyCustomer
— Tala Alkhaldi (@TalaShares) December 31, 2020

Facebook displays the average time it takes for your brand to respond to a direct message, which any page visitor can see. Knowing that your brand takes a long time to respond might discourage visitors from interacting with you.

For both of these reasons, it is important to take stock of how long it takes for your team to respond adequately to a customer message. If it is taking over a day to get back to a user, it might be time to rearrange your priorities.

Perhaps creating a system to address messages once or twice daily, depending on the frequency of direct messages or post comments you are receiving.

Tone, Questions, and Comments

Social Media Marketing Metrics: Reply Time

Beyond simply taking the time to address user messages in a timely manner, it can be very informative to monitor exactly what is being said. This should include the tone of the message, and any questions that may pop up.

Take notice of repeated questions, comments or concerns from your followers. These can be an excellent opportunity to inform your content strategy.

If, for example, a smartphone repair business has customers commenting or messaging questions regarding iPhone updates. This would be a great opportunity to write a blog or long-form social media post answering that question to stir-up some engagement.

Conversions – The End Goal

This goes without saying, but by far the most important metric in your reporting should be customer conversions from your social media presence.

There are plenty of guides out there to ace your social media commerce. Making sure you keep track of those successes can be key to informing your social media strategy going forward.

Are you selling a product or service? Do you have a newsletter? Is the end goal to drive downloads?

All of these can and should be tracked. Period.

If you are not tracking conversions, then why are you spending any time on social media marketing? This is the end goal, right? Return on investment.

The cool thing is you are able to track users from the time they click on your post, all the way through to when they become a customer. You can even tell where they fall off along the way if they do not finalize a transaction.

This can all be accomplished through the use of Google Analytics and UTM tags tactically inserted in your links. We would explain that more in depth, but if you do not understand Google Analytics and UTM tags, here is a valuable resource on how to track that sort of engagement.

If you are active on Facebook or Instagram, they offer a tracking pixel called a Facebook Pixel that you can install on the back end of your website, and that allows for deeper social media analytics and reporting to be done on your Facebook dashboard.

It also allows you to get a deeper understanding of your audience from folks who have visited your page or even completed a certain action on your page. This information can help you build targeted audiences for your paid ads

Don’t Get Lost in the Sauce

Monitoring and tracking your success – or lack thereof – in social media marketing can be an overwhelming experience. However, it pays serious dividends down the line in the form valuable insights to improve your organic and paid social media efforts.

Let’s give it the dramatic terms it deserves. In a realm that often feels ruled by the iron fist of algorithms, keeping track of these metrics gives you control of your social media destiny.

There are many other social media marketing metrics that we didn’t touch upon. These include post times and follower growth rate.

Unless you have a dedicated team for social media, taking stock of the above social media metrics is more than enough to inform your strategy. The insights will be effective, and even impress stakeholders or clients.

Keyhole is a Social Media Listening & Online Monitoring Solution that helps marketers unlock data-driven business insights. Its visual dashboard is simple and shareable with your clients. Start your free trial today and get the metrics you need.

As always, if you need an intuitive and comprehensive suite of social media analytics to step up your social media marketing and crush your goals. We are here to help.

4 Tips to Find Micro Influencers on Instagram [to Boost Sales]

May 7, 2021December 22, 2020 by Keyhole

Updated on December, 2020.

Influencers have the power to win the hearts – and pockets – of consumers.

It is no surprise, then, that some of the biggest brands in the world are using influencer marketing to promote their products and services.

While influencer marketing is effective, not all brands have the budget to afford a top-tier influencer. Fortunately, there are micro influencers on whom these brands can rely.

Micro influencers are everyday consumers who possess a large social media following; generally between 1,000 and 10,000, though some have up to 100,000. Read more about Influencer Tiers.

These influencers offer better audience access and higher engagement than macro influencers (100K – 500K followers) at a fraction of the cost.

The social media platform where you can see amazing examples of micro influencer partnerships. This past year, brands like Hello Fresh and ASOS worked with micro influencers to run successful Instagram influencer marketing campaigns.

In this post, we’ll show you how to find micro influencers on Instagram. Also, we’ll demonstrate how you can use micro influencers to boost sales.

Jump Links:

Micro Influencers Should be Relevant to Your Niche

Have Specific Goals for Your Campaign

Showcase Your Product Experience with Micro Influencers

Give Influencers the Freedom to be Creative

Finding Instagram Influencers
Turn to Your Audience
Use Hashtags

Micro Influencers Should be Relevant to Your Niche

Influencer marketing can be used for achieving different goals, such as driving engagement, increasing brand awareness or boosting sales. To be able to achieve any of these goals, however, you must promote your content to a relevant audience.

This means that you must work with micro influencers who are relevant to your niche and have a significant following that is interested in that niche.

Ideally, you should find an influencer who is considered an expert in a subject that is relevant to your niche.

If you fail to do this, you won’t be able to reach your target audience and there will be no point in using influencers to promote your brand.

For example, in 2014, the world was confused when soccer-star Cristiano Ronaldo appeared in a Japanese facial fitness commercial. The commercial was a sensation, but none of that attention was focused at the product but rather at the awkwardness of this commercial.

Use social media monitoring tools to find influencers within your niche. These tools will allow you to listen to conversations and trends around your niche, and will help you identify the most influential voices around these topics.

For instance, Keyhole’s Influencer Tracking & Analytics feature, will not only help you surface influencers in your niche but also vet these accounts. This way you’ll be able to peek into the audiences and spot if an influencer has fake followers, or if their audience is truly engaged/influenced.

Influencer Marketing in 2021 - surface influencers

Wondering who are the top influencers for your brand?

Start a free trial with Keyhole and find out today!

Have Specific Goals for Your Campaign

As mentioned, micro influencer marketing can be used for a variety of goals. However, the tactics to achieve and measure these goals are different.

So it’s important to have your goals as the starting point of your campaign. This will determine how you picking an influencer to developing the campaign creatives.

If your goal is to drive engagement, then, that should be the deciding factor in choosing micro-influencers. Find influencers with a high engagement rate and use content that inspires engagement.

To promote engagement with your audiences, you can create a giveaway in partnership with the Instagram influencer of your choice. The influencer can give clear instructions of the rules, which can involve liking posts, tagging friends, or following your account(s).

If your goal is to create brand awareness because perhaps you’re working with a new product, then your focus should be on reach. The micro-influencers that you work with, in this case, should have impression rates.

Your campaign strategy should support your goal of amplifying reach. For example, contests, where your micro-influencer partners ask their audiences to share posts tagging your brand, would help grow reach.

If your goal is to drive sales, then design your campaign with the main goal of facilitating the purchase process. Also, make it easy to track the impact that your micro-influencer partner had on your sales. You can do this by providing a promo code for each Instagram influencer.

Also, if your budget allows, work with multiple micro-influencers within your niche. This will ensure higher reach within your target market and increase the chances of your customer base seeing your products multiple times.

Managing multiple influencers can be a real pain. However, if you use a tool like Keyhole you can monitor all of your influencers to gain instant access to performance insights and make sharing screenshots a thing of the past.

Keyhole will do one better and automate reports for each of your influencers with detailed performance and optimization metrics to determine your ROI.

Use Keyhole Influencer management to aggregate, compare and analyze your influencers’ impact on a single dashboard to get a bird’s eye view of your influencer strategy at play.

Start your free trial today

Showcase Your Product Experience with Micro Influencers

When consumers see a compelling product content, they become interested in trying that product.

In order to increase the impact on your audience through micro influencers on Instagram, showcase their experiences while using your products. After all, Instagram is all about inspiring experiences.

This can compel followers to buy the product or service to enjoy the same experience themselves.

For example, you can have your Instagram influencer partner use it and share their reviews about it with the audience. Or perhaps, they can make a video of your product, share stories or simply post a picture with an inviting caption.

The goal here is to demonstrate how your product is enhancing an influencer’s experience. Since the influencer has its audience’s trust, it will create a compelling argument to try your products.

In a similar fashion, the micro influencer should show their audience how your services enhance his/her experience.

Instagram micro influencer campaign: showcase your product experience

Give Influencers the Freedom to be Creative

This is perhaps the most important thing to remember when working with micro influencers on Instagram.

The reason why micro influencers have managed to grow their audience is that their audience trusts them and they know what content attracts the audience.

They know their followers, so they know the type of content that will appeal to and engage their audience.

Instagram Micro Influencer Campaigns: Creativity

Let them give honest reviews about your product and allow them to promote your brand in their own way. There is nothing more powerful in influencer marketing having an influencer that can promote your product authentically.

If you tightly control the content that an Instagram influencer shares about your product or services, there is a risk of the audience losing their trust in the influencer due to inauthenticity.

If that happens, you won’t be able to successfully promote your brand.

So instead of controlling the influencer’s creative process, get more control of the performance process. In essence, let influencers do their thing but have a clear measurement of their performance – what is working and what isn’t.

Using influencer tracking and analytics, you can have full transparency on your influencers’ performance metrics and help them get more engagement.

Now that you know how to use micro-influencers, will you promote your brand through influencer marketing?

If so, there’s a missing piece of the puzzle.

We still haven’t discussed how to actually find influencers.

Finding Instagram Influencers

Turn to Your Audience

When searching for Instagram micro influencers, you should start with your current fan base since you know that a connection already exists.

Knowing that your followers already interested in your content, you should examine their interests. For instance, look at the pictures they post, the people they follow, etc.

Then, you should analyze similarities among your fan base.

Do they all follow the same influencer or brand? Does your analysis indicate that many of the Instagram pages you’ve looked at have common content themes?

By finding these common interests, you’ll be able to create a target lookalike audience to draw connections with others like them.

If any of your followers themselves has a large following, it is an added bonus for you.

Reach out to them and recommend an exchange of service or product for a review or Instagram post.

It’ll be easier to convince them as they are already familiar with your brand.

Use Hashtags

The best method to find the right influencer is to simply search for the correct hashtag or keyword that’s relevant to the product you’re trying to promote.

For example, if you want to promote a fashion product, you can run a hashtag search for queries like #ootd or #instafashion.

You can then determine how popular an influencer is by looking at how much engagement their posts are getting or their follower count.

Are they getting likes and comments on their posts, and if so, how consistently are they posting?

It is common to find influencers who have purchased their followers and likes, and barely get any authentic engagement on their posts. Avoid partnering with these types of influencers!

Tools like Keyhole offer hashtag tracking and keyword tracking. This can help you find influencers who already have published posts with your search terms.

If the content they are posting is relevant to your niche, you can reach out to them to market your products or services.

In addition, you can track all posts that contain your hashtags in real time.

This way you can analyze the engagement levels of the audience in your niche with influencers on Instagram. Then, you can determine the impact of influencers on their audience through engagement rate insights.

The hashtag you choose to search should be somewhat specific to reveal satisfactory results. For example, if you wish to search for Persian cats, a hashtag search around #Persiancats would yield much better results than just #cat alone.

Alex of VM Interactive says that the more specific your hashtag is, the more actionable results you’ll get. Moreover, with the help of an Instagram hashtag analytics tool, you can simplify your research.

You don’t need to stop at hashtags with Instagram anymore. You can now use specific keywords relevant to your niche to pinpoint conversations related to your business and target audience.

Keyhole is an end-to-end social media solution that empowers marketers to make data-driven decisions that impact their organizations. Keyhole supports marketing strategy with enterprise-grade social listening, influencer marketing analytics, and campaign tracking. Helping marketers work smarter, not harder, Keyhole saves marketers 5+ hours a week with simplified social publishing and automated reporting.

Start your free trial today and get the metrics you need.

Social Commerce: 5 Secrets to Boost Sales with Social Media

April 23, 2021December 7, 2020 by Keyhole

You’ve probably heard about social commerce, and perhaps wondered if it’s a fad or if it’s something to start implementing. Well, we’re here to break it down for you and set you up for success, so read on.

Did you know? A long and confusing checkout process is one of the top 5 reasons why people abandon their carts. And who could blame them?

When you’ve decided to buy something, you probably want to finish the purchase process as quickly and as easily as possible. Social commerce makes that happen by allowing shoppers to finish buying things directly through social media.

In this post, you’ll discover what social commerce is and why you need it in your social media marketing strategy. You’ll also learn a few tips that can help you get started with social commerce for your business.

And of course, we’ll provide some real-life examples for inspiration.

Jump Links

What is social commerce?
– Facebook shopping
– Instagram shopping
– Pinterest shopping

Why you need social commerce?

5 social commerce tips to get you started
– Start with low-cost offers
– Use hashtags to drive product discovery
– Take advantage of UGC
– Get your timing right
– Build trust with reviews

Sell more on social

What is social commerce?

Simply put, social commerce involves selling things directly on social media. Unlike social media marketing, you’re not redirecting people to your website or product pages. Instead, you’re giving them the option to checkout right on the social media platform they’re using.

With social commerce, shoppers go through the entire purchase funnel on a single social media platform.

For instance, they may discover a tagged product through your ad, feed post, or Stories. Then, they can learn more about it on the same platform by clicking on the product tag. If they decide to buy it, they can simply tap on the “checkout” or “buy now” button to finish the purchase.

This streamlines the buying process, as it just takes a few clicks to complete a purchase. You can currently get this type of social shopping capability on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Twitter introduced the buy button in 2014 but then decided to ditch it in 2017.

Let’s discuss how each of these work?

Facebook Shopping

With 1.62 billion people using Facebook daily, the platform opens up an excellent opportunity to reach a massive audience base.

The platform now has a feature to set up a full-blown Facebook Shop to showcase your featured products. This way, people can browse through the products in your Shop and buy them on the same platform.

Instagram shopping

70% of shopping enthusiasts go to Instagram to discover new products, making the platform a great option to drive social commerce.

Instagram gives you the option to create shoppable posts, where you tag products in your photos and videos. People can click on these product tags to learn more about the product and/or buy it right on Instagram.

You can even create Shoppable Stories, but you can only tag one product per Stories post. When people swipe up it will take them to the product page.

Like with Facebook, you even have the option to set up a full-blown Instagram Shop to further promote Instagram selling. People can browse through this Shop to discover products to buy and complete their purchase without ever leaving Instagram.

Pinterest shopping

83% of Pinners have bought something based on Pins that they saw. Pinterest is the go-to destination for creative inspiration, so it’s no surprise that it also inspires buying decisions.

Taking advantage of this, Pinterest allows brands to create rich pins where people can learn more about a product. You can even create shoppable pins so people can buy the product without leaving Pinterest.

Earlier this year, Pinterest introduced a “Shop” tab that users can access from their boards. This tab showcases products featured in the user’s boards so they can easily find something to buy.

Why you need social commerce

Now you may want to know why social commerce is so important and why you need it for your business.

If you’re wondering, isn’t it enough to market your social media and send people to your website? Here’s a quick look at some of the top reasons why social commerce is so important:

Reduce friction and drive conversions

People are already using social media to discover and research things to buy. 43% of global social media users research products online using social networks. And for 13%, a “buy” button would make them more likely to buy something.

https://www.smartinsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/How-social-media-informs-purchase-decisions.png — Smart Insights: Global social media research summary August 2020

Also, according to a Facebook-backed study, Instagram fuels product discovery for 83% of users and helps purchase decisions for 80%. After seeing a product or service on Instagram, 65% visited the brand’s website or app. And 46% made a purchase online or offline.

What does that mean? People are making their buying decision on your social platform. So, giving them the option to buy directly on the platform will turn them into customers.

The goal of social commerce applications is to reduce friction and minimize the steps to complete a purchase. People can easily go from discovering your products/services on social media to buying it.

So there’s a lower risk of abandoned carts and losing a sale since the process is shorter. And you have a good chance of driving more conversions with the help of social commerce.

Enhance the customer experience

Customers using social commerce benefit from a quick and easy checkout process. With fewer steps needed to visit a brand store and complete a purchase, social shopping enhances the customer experience.

In fact, people value efficiency and convenience the most in their customer experience. And that’s exactly what social commerce offers.

https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/library/consumer-intelligence-series/future-of-customer-experience.html — PWC: Future of Consumer Experience

Improve social ROI

When you have a Facebook Shop or an Instagram Shop, people can browse through them and find products they like. This means that they’ll likely spend more time engaging with your brand on social media.

The same goes for product tags and rich pins, as people will spend time looking at the product info. And with an easier checkout option that will boost your conversion rates, you’re bound to see your social ROI soar.

In other words, you’ll be getting much more out of your investment in social commerce. Make the most of robust social media analytics tools to track your ROI and see the impact in real time.

5 social commerce tips to get you started

Now that you know how your business can benefit from social commerce, it’s time to bring it to fruition. To help you get a great start, take a look at these tips and best practices.

We’ve also provided you with a few social commerce examples of brands that got it right. So take in the inspiration.

1: Start with low-cost offers

When people browse social media, they’re not really looking for things to buy. They’re there to engage with other users and pass the time.

After all, that’s the purpose of social media. So, maybe it’s not the best time or place to bombard them with offers for major purchases and high-cost products.

For instance, you may not necessarily buy a car directly on Instagram. But you might be interested in buying accessories like dashboard cameras, car organizers, etc.

ThreadBeast, the clothing subscription service, does exactly this with its Facebook Shop. The company highlights plans that cost less than $150 and occasionally promotes a plan over $200.

Social Commerce to Boost Sales: ThreadBeast

Similarly, ensure social commerce success by luring your customers in with your best, low-cost offers first. You can include the occasional high-priced item.

However, the main focus should be on promoting things that people would want to buy immediately without much second thought.

2: Use hashtags to drive product discovery

You can’t sell stuff that people can’t see. So product discovery should be an essential aspect of your social marketing strategy.

Hashtags are crucial for driving product discovery, especially on Instagram. When you tag your posts with relevant hashtags, it allows the posts to show up in searches for said hashtags.

That means when people click on a certain hashtag, they could come across your shoppable post and end up converting. This works for Facebook too but it’s even more effective on Instagram.

On Instagram, your post could show up in the Explore page of relevant users when you use the right hashtags. So. improving your Instagram SEO with relevant hashtags will drive product discovery, which will likely end up in conversions.

Check out how Pottery Barn uses hashtags like #interiordesign, #homestyling, and #interiorinspo in their shoppable post. They also mix it up with branded hashtags like #potterybarn and #mypotterybarn.

Social Commerce - Pottery Barn Instagram

If you’re using branded hashtags like Pottery Barn does, don’t forget to monitor and measure your hashtag performance. This will help you measure your brand reach and engagement, which are essential metrics of your social ROI.

Pro tip: To find popular hashtags, use the Keyhole Market Research platform to look for trending topics and conversations. This will give you an idea of what your target audience is interested in right now.

Then come up with relevant hashtags that people are most likely to use and search based on those trends. You can also use this trend discovery and prediction feature to brainstorm content (and even product) ideas that you know people love.

3: Take advantage of UGC

People trust people more than they trust brands. In fact, 92% of consumers trust other people’s recommendations.

So it’s no wonder that 87% of brands are already taking advantage of user-generated content. 72% even believe that UGC helps them engage their customers better.

This makes sense since seeing the product on real people or in real homes can set realistic expectations. It puts the item in context and helps people picture how it’ll look in real life. So if you’re going to enjoy the full impact of social commerce, you’ll need to leverage UGC too.

H&M does a great job of implementing UGC in its shoppable posts. Most of the brand’s Instagram shoppable posts come from style influencers and real customers.

Social Commerce - H&M User Generated Content

4: Get your timing right

Timing is everything, especially on social media. Facebook sees 14.58 million photos uploaded every hour. While Instagram sees 995 photos uploaded every second. So your posts can easily get lost in a sea of posts from other users.

If you want people to notice your posts, you need to reach them at just the right time. For this, you’ll need to test out different post timings to see when you get the most engagement. Then create a content calendar and posting schedule based on these findings.

Don’t forget to use social media scheduling tools to help you get your posts out at the right time.

5: Build trust using reviews

Remember when we mentioned that people trust people?

Well, online reviews have influenced the purchase decisions of 93% of consumers. So they could significantly boost your conversions and therefore, your returns on social commerce.

Encourage your customers to leave reviews and then share those reviews through social media. You could share product reviews through your Stories for one.

Better yet, find a way to incorporate reviews into your shoppable posts. For instance, you could include an image overlay of the review on top of the product photo.

Glossier shared reviews of its most popular products through Instagram Stories. This coincided with the brand’s Cyber Week sale as it was intended to inspire purchases during the sale week.

Sell more on social

Social commerce opens up an incredible opportunity to boost your social ROI. As it shortens and simplifies the conversion process, it reduces the risk of losing a sale. In the end, it helps you drive higher conversions in the long run.

Who doesn’t want that?

While you amplify your social selling efforts, don’t forget to research trending topics and conversations using Keyhole. This will help you figure out just how to create posts that resonate with your target audience.

Top 5 Fashion Social Media Campaigns in 2020 [+ Key Takeaways]

April 26, 2021December 3, 2020 by Keyhole

Top 5 Fashion Social Media Campaigns in 2020 - Keyhole

While marketing strategies can vary from industry to industry, there’s one thing they all have in common – social media marketing is always a good idea. It can be helpful to gather some inspiration for your industry before you start putting together your own campaigns, and fashion social media campaigns are always in vogue.

Do you want your social media campaigns make a splash in style?

Take inspiration from the fashion industry, which consistently steps up and shows us how it’s done. This is why we’ve rounded up some of the best fashion social media campaigns in 2020 – to give you a starting point for your own.

Depending on the platform and the objective for your social media marketing, each of these can work well for a variety of different fashion brands and across different industries.

Ready to dig in?

Jump Links

1. DKNY
2. Prada
3. Louis Vuitton
4. Michael Kors
5. Savage X Fenty

Key Elements to a Successful Fashion Social Media Campaign

1. DKNY State of Mind Campaign: A Fashion Social Media Campaign with All The Works

In September 2020, fashion brand DKNY launched their State of Mind campaign alongside three limited edition hoodies. They announced the fall/winter fashion campaign with a video post on Instagram, teasing that #DKNYSTATEOFMIND was coming.

Best Fashion Social Media Campaigns: DKNY State of Mind

The campaign echoed promotions off-line, where messages with the same lettering were hidden around New York and London. These were also projected into landmarks, such as the Brooklyn bridge.

The Instagram posts that followed contained similar black and white lettering overtop different photos and videos. This familiarized the audience with the style before publishing photos of the hoodies themselves.

The fashion campaign was done in collaboration with influential individuals across various industries with three things in common: Creative, Passionate, and New York-based or native. All the things that the new hoodies aimed to represent.

These influencers appeared in the DKNY Instagram account wearing a custom-made #DKNYSTATEOFMIND hoodie. Each of them had their very own inspirational phrases printed on them. Here are some examples:

“Everything is cosmic dust. Knowing this helps when things don’t go your way.” – Marina Ingvarsson, NY-based stylist and model.

“I am constantly working on my dreams and desires because they are important and worth pursuing fearlessly”. – Edward Granger, NY-based Artist

Why it was effective?

Overall, the campaign goal was to inspire through the power of speech, which could be measured in both brand awareness and sales of their limited edition hoodies.

The collaboration with micro-influencers from a variety of backgrounds allowed the brand to reach relevant audiences. We tip our hat to their influencer strategy implementation. Finding and collaborating with influencers that could perfectly represent the essence of the brand was done flawlessly.

Also, in the same style as the fashion campaign posts, user-generated content began to take off. Many buyers, posted pictures of themselves wearing the hoodie and embodying the brand image.

The results: Beginning from the first post on September 14th, the hashtag #DSNYStateOfMind gathered 100.7 Million impressions with only 400 posts.

Pro Tip: With Keyhole's Social Listening feature, you can track the reach, impressions, and engagement that your campaign hashtag is having in real-time. Also, the tool can predict how your campaign will perform over time. 
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2. Prada at Milan Fashion Week: Fashion Reaches New Audiences through Social Media

You may or may not have heard of Charli D’Amelio. She is one of the most-followed people on TikTok, with 101.8 million followers. In February 2020, Prada did a collaboration with the TikTok star for Milan Fashion Week.

They invited Charli to the fashion event and provided her with plenty of wardrobe options – all Prada, of course. In exchange, Charli was expected to share videos of the event with her millions of followers.

Charli created 6-7 different videos of herself at the event dancing in her Prada outfits to different popular TikTok sound bytes, while tagging Prada.

Fashion Social Media Campaigns 2020 - Prada

This exposed Prada to a larger and younger audience, helping to grow brand awareness and potentially start generating sales through Charli’s Gen Z following.

Why was it effective?

TikTok marketing is a great way to promote your brand and work with popular influencers. Especially, if you want to create awareness among a younger demographic. And Prada did it just right.

Prada allowed Charli to promote the brand in her own authentic way: through her dance videos.

Charli’s platform is famous because of her dance videos, which show not only her talent but her unique personality, and have made the teenager a social media powerhouse.

Each video was viewed between 26.5 to 74 Million times, creating great impressions for the brand among TikTok’s predominantly young users – specifically teenage girls.

Pro Tip: Are you working with influencers for your campaigns? Use Keyhole's Influencer Management, you can get access to your influencer's performance metrics in real-time. That's right: no more screenshots, Dropbox files, or back and forth. Also, you can aggregate your influencer(s) data to your campaign metrics to create a seamless report. 
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3. Louis Vuitton’s Journey Home for The Holidays Campaign: The Power of Celebrity Ambassadors

For the 2020 holiday season, Louis Vuitton has launched a #LVGifts campaign to help present their brand as a luxury gift giving option.

Alicia Vikander is the face of their campaign, and you can see several photos of her with Louis Vuitton products on their Instagram. But that’s not it.

Also, as part of the holiday campaign, they’ve created a visually-stunning video, and embedded it on a dedicated gift-giving landing page on their website.

Best Fashion Social Media Campaigns 2020 - Louis Vuitton

The theme of the campaign and the video revolves around the small moments of joy around preparing and participating in the holidays. The theme is both relatable and heart-felt.

Of course, Louis Vuitton managed to make make it a branded experience through an upbeat, stunning videography and a luxury feel.

Boosting images of traveling (with LV-branded luggage – of course), opening the door to loved ones, sending holiday letters, etc. The LV Instagram account featured clips from the video, which garnered between 201K and 700K views each.

On their website, LV has shared a selection of photos and videos of the gifts in order to entice holiday shoppers to buy something for a loved one.

Why it was effective?

Louis Vuitton has a history of creating long-term partnerships with celebrities or “muses” – as the fashion house calls them. Previous muses include Jennifer Connelly, Selena Gomez, Emma Stone, and Michelle Williams.

These muses are more than just beautiful, famous women. All of them have outstanding careers and represent women who are at the top of their game. Louis Vuitton started collaborating with Vikander shortly before her 2016 Oscar nomination and her career has only grown since.

The result: #LVgifts created 4.4 Million impressions in less than a month, and inspired 2.7K posts from user-generated content.

Did You Know our users reported saving at least 5 hours every week when they made the switch to Keyhole? Aside from giving you top-notch analytics, actionable insights, and automatic reports, Keyhole is considered the easiest tool to use in the market. So easy, in fact, that our users do not need to re-train their whole team or go through lengthy set-up processes.

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4. Michael Kors’s #WatchHungerStop Campaign: Fashion with A Cause

In October 2020, fashion brand Michael Kors partnered with World Food Programme – a branch of the United Nations which aims to improve food security and nutrition – for a philanthropic campaign.

Every year, Michael Kors launches a campaign for Watch Hunger Stop every year. This year, however, the brand emphasized the importance of the initiative to provide school meals to children as food insecurity has escalated due to the pandemic.

Best Fashion Social Media Campaigns: Michael Kors

Each post throughout the series garnered thousands of likes, increasing awareness about WFP and its mission. Also, Michael Kors donated 100% of the proceeds of these LOVE t-shirts to the World Food Programme.

To announce this campaign, Michael Kors created colorful graphics for their Instagram account showcasing their new LOVE t-shirts, created specially for this cause.

There is one big game-changer to how MK approached the campaign this time. This year, Micheal Kors featured its own employees – who shared their reasons to volunteer and support this campaign for years on a dedicated landing page.

Why was it effective?

Cause marketing has shown to be increasingly effective, particularly when it comes to brand trust and loyalty. So, partnering with a charity whose values align with your own brand is a great way to both give back and build trust.

Using its employee’s authentic voices, Michael Kors demonstrated how the company as a whole deeply cares about this cause. This candidness evoked ‘warm feelings’ in its audience – which according to studies is the secret sauce to the effectiveness of cause marketing.

The results: 3.7K posts (mostly user-generated) gathering 894.5K impressions.

Pro Tip: If your campaign is gathering a lot of UGC content, you are doing something right. However, make sure that you are monitoring UGC to spot negative posts that could go viral and hurt your brand. With Keyhole Alerts, you can get notified when there is a negative UGC post, if your hashtag is going viral, or if an influencer has mentioned your brand or campaign. Being a step ahead of the good and bad mentions can help you amplify positive publicity or avert a crisis.

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5. Savage X Fenty Show Vol. 2: The baddest, sexiest, most savage experience

The Savage X Fenty Show Vol. 2 streamed on Amazon Prime on October 2nd. In order to create hype around the show, the brand teased its audience with both social media posts and with a trailer for the show.

Best Fashion Social Media Campaigns - Savage X Fenty

The posts leading up to the show described the unique features of the show with a “warning” visual image preceding the cast member that embodied the features. For example, the bold content warning preceded an image of drag queen superstar Gigi Goode.

The trailer showed viewers the impeccable production of the show and boosted the celebrity-packed music performances (Bad Bunny, Rosalia, Lizzo, etc.) and cameos (Bella Hadid, Demi Moore, Willow Smith, etc).

The month preceding the show had acquired over 14,000 posts, showing the hype and anticipation for the show.

On October 2nd, when the show started streaming on Amazon, both the brand, influencers and the audience took to social media to discuss the show. Creating millions of impressions in a single day.

The brand promoted the individual products on social media posts by using clips and images from the show. Also, consumers could buy items from the show on a dedicated landing page.

Why it was effective?

On one hand, the Savage X Fenty campaign is the pinnacle of entertainment – flashy, star-studded, and impeccably choreographed. On the other hand, it succeeded in changing constructs of beauty in a way that relates to a wider audience.

Previously, the lingerie industry policed and created an exclusive construct of beauty, femininity, and sexuality: rail-thin, toned and lighter-skinned models prancing down the runway wearing high heels. Eventually, this became boring as this model failed to adapt to more inclusive perceptions of body image and sexuality.

On the other hand, Savage X Fenty not only embraces all bodies as beautiful and sexy but also celebrates how every body’s unique sexual expressions.

The brand has received praise for its commitment to diversity. The cast represents influential people from all genders, body types, ethnicities, abilities, etc., without resorting to tokenism.

As consumers, the SavageXFenty campaign and show enabled us to see ourselves – our bodies – portrayed in a sexy, flattering light. We can see how a lingerie product looks on a model with the same body type as us, go on the website and buy it directly.

The results: The hype created by the show far exceeded expectations. The hashtag #SavageXFentyShow was trending on social media during and up to a week after the show.

Key Elements to a Successful Fashion Social Media Campaign

If you want to create your own fashion social media campaign – or a stylish campaign, – there are a few key elements that you need to pay attention to in order to ensure your campaign is successful.

We’ve listed out each of these items below so you can learn more about each one and check them off your list before your next big launch or campaign.

1. Photography

The first thing you really need to focus on is photography. Original images are absolutely essential to a fashion brand and any brand that is trying to show its creativity or uniqueness.

Your photos should mix product-focused content as well as selling the lifestyle that people who shop your brand could be living. In visual social media platforms inspiring your audience is essential.

While smaller fashion brands might have a limited budget, investing in great photography should be a priority.

2. Video

Incorporating video content into your fashion branding is also a great idea. Use video to tell stories to your audience, sell followers on your brand mission, further strengthen the lifestyle your brand is selling and more.

They say that if photos are worth a thousand words, video must then be worth 1.8 million words. And with so many ways to create quick, easy and cheap video content, you definitely want to get your words out there.

Take

3. Graphics

Designed graphics are another great way to promote new campaigns, whether you have a designer create illustrations or simply pull your photos into a more unique design.

Other types of graphics can also be useful in your social media campaigns. For instance, consider how you can use infographics to showcase all of the parts of a product or all of the products on a model all in a single, creative graphic.

Remember, take a look at your social media content metrics to determine which type of content works best for your audience. For instance, Keyhole will breakdown your content type by engagement and frequency of use:

4. Color

Color psychology is important to understand, especially for fashion brands who rely on being heavily visual. You want to use colors that convey the right messages and speak to your audience.

For example, red conveys power, orange conveys motivation and yellow conveys cheerfulness. Be purposeful in the colors you choose for your campaigns and ensure they represent the messaging you’re going for.

5. Fonts

While most of your marketing will likely focus exclusively on your brand fonts, sometimes it’s a fun challenge to switch up your fonts for specific campaigns.

Similar to colors, fonts also have meanings and can create different connotations. Serif fonts are stable and professional. Sans serif fonts are more modern. Script fonts can be either playful or elegant.

Pay close attention to the fonts you utilize in your campaign’s messaging, web pages and graphics to ensure they’re giving off the right vibe.

6. Influencers

Working with influencers is a great way to get the word out about your fashion brand, products, and campaigns. You’re able to reach even wider audiences with native, organic content. That’s why influencer marketing is here to stay.

Collaborating with an influencer is a great way to showcase what your products look like in someone’s real life, and leverage the connection influencers have with their followers. People love buying things that those they know and follow online recommend.

Be sure to do your research when considering an influencer campaign to find the people best suited for your brand and whose audiences most closely align with your own.

7. Copy

While the fashion industry focuses mostly on the visual aspect of their products, copy is still an inherently important part of any campaign.

The visuals bring your audience in, the copy sells. Make sure you align your messaging with your campaign’s goals and objectives. Be enticing. Make your product sexy.

Writing quality copy will help your campaign generate more awareness, clicks and conversions, so be purposeful in your writing.

8. Your Objective

Every fashion social media campaign you create should have one singular objective. You don’t want to fit too many main messages into one campaign.

Determine what your campaign’s selling point is and hone in on that. Make sure all of your photos, videos, graphics, colors, fonts, messaging, and more sell this one goal or objective.

Your objective could be brand awareness, generating traffic to your website, selling a product, promoting a nonprofit, etc. But whatever you choose, you need to highlight that single objective and that objective alone.

In order to determine if you are meeting you objective, focus in the metrics that match your objective. For instance, if your objective is brand awareness, look to reach and impressions. If your goal is creating a consumer base, look at your follower growth. And if your goal is to engage your consumer base, look into your engagement rate.

9. Track Your Results

As you can see from the examples above, using hashtags to track the impact of your social media campaign is crucial. Otherwise, how do you know if your efforts were effective or not?

To make tracking and reporting easy, take advantage of the many hashtag analytics tools out there. For this post, we used Keyhole’s hashtag tracking and analytics.

If you want are looking for fashion-related hashtags in particular, we have just the thing.

Build Your Own Successful Fashion Social Media Campaign

Ready to create your own successful campaign? Gather your assets, write your copy and get ready to launch.

Take advantage of social media tracking and analytics tools to measure the performance of your campaign.

Keyhole helps marketers make data-driven decisions while streamlining their social media management efforts. On top of campaign tracking, influencer marketing, and social listening, you can also schedule and publish your social media posts, all in one platform.

Our customers report that Keyhole saves them 5 hours a week on gathering and reporting data, which translates into over $7,000 saved every year.

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The Top 15 Hashtag Analytics Tools in 2021

May 6, 2021December 1, 2020 by Keyhole

Top Hashtag Analytics Tools for 2021 – Updated in December 2020

In a world with an overflow of information, setting up a social media marketing can be just the beginning of a complex process.

It involves consistently monitoring and evaluating your audience’s needs and preferences. Then, adjusting your efforts according to the gained insights.

Hashtag tracking can make this process much easier, effective and it allows you to report your performance accurately – it’s basically a marketer’s dream.

Without the use of hashtags, monitoring and evaluating your efforts is worse than finding a needle in a haystack. Imagine if you didn’t know what a needle looks like.

Sounds challenging, doesn’t it?

Well, this process is made extremely easy with the hashtag analytics right tools.

Luckily for you, there are a bunch of tools on the market created to make things a whole lot easier for you.

We will talk about the tools that can make your social media efforts more effective a bit later in this article.

First, let’s cover the very reason these tools exist in the first place:

Jump Links to the 15 Hashtag Analytics Tools:

1. Keyhole
2. Hashtagify
3. Agorapulse
4. Brand24
5. Union Metrics
6. TweetBinder
7. RiteTag
8. Sprout Social
9. Display Purposes
10. Twubs
11. Socialert
12. Mention
13. BrandMentions
14. Pixlee
15. Talkwalker

Hashtags and Their Significance

You’ve heard about hashtags, right? Of course, you have.

In fact, we bet that you’ve not only heard about them, but you use them quite often as well. They have literally changed the way we talk in the past decade.

But, whether you use them or not is not even our question: in this post, we will not talk about the “if” – we will talk about the “how.”

To learn more about the uses of hashtag analytics. Visit our Hashtag Analytics page.

By now, you might wonder what can be so complicated about #HowToUseHashtags that we have decided to dedicate a whole article to the topic.

Believe us, you are in for a surprise.

Hashtags Analytics and Social Media Marketing

Hashtags are essential for creating a successful marketing campaign, as they label the content and are used to increase brand recognition.

They also empower social media users to efficiently structure data, filter out all the irrelevant information and get exposed only to the content they are interested in. So, companies can make sure that they are reaching their target audience, and not wasting their efforts.

Apart from helping you get discovered, dedicated hashtags can also give you a real-time overview of the user-generated content as it is shared on social media, and conversations pertaining to your brand and products.

Using hashtags is a win-win situation for both brands and audience because it helps audiences find your content when they are looking for it, and they help you find user-generated content that pertains to your brand.

Start with generating the right hashtags, and then start to track your efforts.

The problem is that not all companies and social media users fully leverage the power of hashtags. This puts them in an unfavourable position since they are not taking advantage of the opportunity to optimize their campaigns to get better results.

However, it is important to note that these companies do not track their marketing efforts not because they do not want to. Rather, they don’y track because they are either not aware that they can, or they do not know how to do it.

If your case is similar to the ones we mentioned – do not despair; all you need to start is a detailed, comprehensive overview of the available tools and the way you can use them.

Which is where we come into play.

The Need for Hashtag Analytics Tools

Occasionally, a new trend emerges in the market and creates both opportunities and issues. As a result, a need for products that will enable users to use the opportunities and give them solutions for the problems they face arises as well.

The good news is that along with the demand for solutions, the supply increases as well. So, the likeliness of finding the perfect tool for you increases.

The bad news is that, in situations when one is faced with endless options, making the right choice is much harder.

It can be confusing when every emerging tool promises you stellar results, and not many of them deliver on their promises. To help, we decided to do the hardest part of the job for you: list the most legitimate hashtag tools, break down their features, and the results you can expect.

What Can Hashtag Analytics Tools Do For You?

Using hashtag analytics software, you can make sense of the performance metrics for your hashtags, and how audiences react to them.

Monitoring your results in real-time allows you to discover the best practices in your industry. Allowing you to tweak the content to appeal more to your target audience, which of course, translates to better results.

Basically, the need for using hashtag analytics comes down to the following several points:

Discover current trends in your industry
Track your hashtag supported marketing campaigns and analyze the audience’s engagement
Track the positive and negative mentions containing your hashtags (sentiment analysis), and react accordingly
Gain insight into the current brand awareness levels
Identify influencers relevant to your business as your potential brand ambassadors

Although most of the tools currently available will give you these basic insights, not every tool will be suitable for your individual case.

Let’s take a brief look at the differences.

Top Hashtag Tracking Tools

Out of the many tools available on the market, we picked the 15 hashtag analytics tools that have the best track record so far.

Let’s dig into the details!

1. Keyhole

Keyhole is the front-runner among social media analytics tools for a reason: it provides in-depth data analysis in an easy to understand manner.

It is an all-in-one solution that:

Tracks of your campaigns’ reach and impact in real-time
Monitors the brands in your industry and your top competitors
Notifies you of both the positive and the negative mentions of your brand
Gives you valuable consumer insights such as sentiment and demographics.
Allow you to social listen to keep up with trends
Surface the most influential accounts and posts

All of the insights above, no matter how advanced, are presented in simple reports. So simple that everyone can understand, regardless of their previous experience – which makes them practical and actionable.

Also, Keyhole makes the setup process so easy and intuitive that you won’t have to retrain your whole team!

Keyhole trackers can help you set your listening efforts up for success by allowing you to filter and combine search terms to get as granular as you want.

You can also aggregate hashtag tracking results for instant competitive analysis, as well as benchmarking your campaigns. Your comparisons include metrics like posts, reach, engagement and impressions. As well as the share of voice, sentiment and the top posts.

Don’t believe us? Start a 7-day free trial and you’ll see exactly what we mean.

Pricing starts at $79/month

2. Hashtagify

Top Hashtag Analytics Tools - Hashtagify

A very user-friendly hashtag tracking tool, Hashtagify allows you to quickly find relevant hashtags connected to a particular keyword you enter.

You can check the popularity of each hashtag of the results, displayed in a mini report. It’s also possible to save your searches if you login.

While the starter kit is very affordable, it offers very limited features.

Pricing: Starting kit priced at $29/month

3. AgoraPulse

Primarily, AgoraPulse is a platform that simplifies social media presence management. Its secondary use is to track your performance on your social platforms, making it a useful hashtag analytics tool.

A great feature is that it shows you all conversations connected to your pages on different social media platforms in a single dashboard. Making it easy to follow and react to all comments and brand mentions.

With AgoraPulse, you can also track the number of times your content has been shared, its reach, as well as influencers who could potentially be beneficial to your brand.

Pricing starts at $79/month

4. Brand24

A social media monitoring tool, Brand24 tracks and analyzes the mentions of your dedicated hashtags across various forums, websites, blogs, social media platforms etc.

The data is gathered and presented in a comprehensible chart, which gives you a glimpse not only of the performance of your hashtags, but also of the influencers that have been talking about your brand as well.

Pricing starts at $49/month

Did you know that Keyhole users have reported saving at least 5 hours every week?
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5. Union Metrics (Previously TweetReach)

According to Union Metrics, marketing is art + science. They couldn’t be more correct! Union Metrics is an easy to use tool that gives you an insight into the exposure and impact of your tweets, along with the discussions around your brand.

Its simple interface and affordability makes it suitable not only for businesses, but for individuals who want to get a glimpse of their position in the Twitter’s universe as well.

Pricing starts at $49/month

6. TweetBinder

A hashtag tracking tool for anyone who wants to analyze hashtags on Twitter and Instagram campaigns, TweetBinder provides historical and real-time data on the two platforms.

This allows you to research the users interacting with the hashtags to see their reach and overall influence. TweetBinder groups similar conversations and allows you to filter the results to gain a better perspective of the current situation.

Pricing starts at $54.99/month

7. RiteTag

A hashtag monitoring tool, RiteTag allows users to check which hashtags they should use to make their content as discoverable as possible.

It shows the trending hashtags, popular accounts that use them, and evaluates the hashtags you use rating them as great, good, unused or overused. It is a simple and self-explanatory tool that anyone can use.

The only problem is that just like other low-cost and free hashtag analytics tools, it is mainly focused on showing the use frequency of a particular hashtag, rather than digging into actual analytics.

Pricing: Hashtag suggestions start at $49/year

8. Sprout Social

A well-known social listening platform, Sprout Social promises to improve communication between businesses and their customers by offering solutions related to:

Social media management
Customer Care
Data and Intelligence
Employee Advocacy

Pricing starts at $99/month

9. Display Purposes

Hashtag analytics tools: Display Purposes

If you are looking for a hashtag tracking tool that can analyze your campaigns and produce extensive reports on the impact of your hashtags, Display Purposes is not for you (nor is any other free tool).

However, if you wish to find relevant hashtags for your photos that can bring you greater reach, then look no further.

Incredibly simple to use, Display Purposes will show you the best hashtags for your needs weighted against various factors such as location, language etc.

Also, junk and generic hashtags are filtered out, which leaves you with only those that give your photos an actual chance to be seen.

Pricing: Free

10. Twubs

For Twitter enthusiasts, Twubs is a particularly useful tool. That is because it’s both a hashtag directory that aggregates all keywords related to a particular topic, as well as an engagement tracking tool.

Twubs enables you to follow and analyze the conversations related to your brand. Also, it allows you to register your own hashtag and create a related landing page, which you can use to host chat sessions and to display discussions from the Twitter chat.

Pricing: Freemium

Did you know that influential marketing professionals, like Neil Patel, have praised Keyhole for being the easiest-to-use tool in the market? It’s so easy and intuitive, in fact, that you won’t need to re-train your whole team.

Check for yourself on your free trial!

11. Socialert

Another reliable tool that allows you to monitor your hashtags, Socialert also allows you to track keywords and accounts.

This tool gives you insight on the impact your hashtags have across different social media platforms, and find active users that you can use to spread the word about your brand. All of this information can help you find out the preferences of the public, and create more engaging posts.

Pricing starts at $24.95/month

12. Mention

Created to help businesses understand their online presence, Mention allows users to track brands, competitors, and/or industry topics.

The platform covers information available in over 40 different languages and exports the gathered data in segmented and understandable reports.

Aside from monitoring mentions and hashtags across various platforms, Mention also allows you to track users and their activities. This can help you find potential influencers to reach a wider audience.

Pricing: Starting at $49/month

13. BrandMentions

BrandMentions is a complete Social Media Analytics tool, which can do brand monitoring, reputation management, business intelligence to competitor spying.

This tool provides you with relevant information and important metrics pertaining to your brand awareness campaigns.

Pricing starts at $99 and goes up to $299/month

14. Pixlee

Even though Pixlee is best known as a UGC and influencer platform, it also gives insightful hashtag analytics.

Its free Instagram Analytics tool gives you weekly reports on your hashtag statistics, with analysis that extends to both your own content, and user-generated content.

It also has social listening features that allow you to monitor conversations about your brand and helps you identify influencers.

Price: Contact Pixlee for pricing.

15. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a marketing tool that allows users to analyze their performance on various social media sites in real time, follow the trends in the industry, and later optimize their performance according to this information.

The tool uses sources in 185 languages and is equipped with an automatic translation which makes it easy to follow data coming from different parts of the world.

Another useful feature is the text and image recognition which allows users to get insights based on the position of their logo on social media.

Pricing starts at $9,000/year

Final Notes

If you read the list and all the descriptions of the tools we covered, then you probably noticed that most of them offer similar features. The difference is the details they provide and the corresponding price tag.

But, which one should you choose?

If you are an individual, who wants to increase his or her reach, then we suggest you start with the free tools that mainly show you a way to get on the social media “map”.

If you are a business, on the other hand, a free, basic tool won’t do. Why?

Well, if you want to improve your performance, optimize your offerings and improve your communication with your customers, you will have to pay for a tool that offers more features and provides more detailed reports.

Believe us, the cost will be inconsiderable when you compare it to the value that gathered insights bring to your business.

However, note that every business is different, so ultimately, no list or article could tell you with complete certainty which tool will fit your needs best. However, if you want to find “The one tool” for you, the best thing you could do is try out a couple of tools and see for yourself which one you are the most comfortable with.

In fact, most of the tools available on the market are aware of this fact, which is why they offer free trials.

So, go ahead and test the waters with a couple of these tools. Afterwards, you can decide if this is the one, or perhaps you’d rather find another tool to “bathe in”.

Keyhole is a real-time brand, campaign, and influencer social listening tool that provides profile and hashtag analytics for Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Get started for free here.

The Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools [Updated for 2021]

May 7, 2021November 19, 2020 by Keyhole

Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools in 2021 - Keyhole

This Social Media Monitoring Tools List has been updated as of November 2020

Social media monitoring is the act of paying attention to what is being said on social media. That is, what is being said about your brand, your campaign, your competitors, your product, tending topics, etc.

In recent years, we have come to understand that social media monitoring is your brand’s first line of defence against a potential crisis.

Also, proper social media monitoring can give you a better understanding of your audience’s wants, improve your customer service, keep tabs on your competitors and find opportunities to raise awareness.

In a world where 340 million tweets are posted every day, it’s impossible to keep track of what’s being said without some help. And this is where social media monitoring tools come into place.

Social media monitoring tools allow marketers to do the following:

Get quality audience data.
Take relevant actions, based on the data collected, to keep or build a good reputation and drive ROI.
Save time, as all your social media analytics are available to you in one platform.

But which social media monitoring tool is the best for your brand?

It can be tough to pick one — with so many enticing promises from each solution.

What you need is a resource that provides you with quality insights about each tool.

Well, look no further; here’s a guide showing you the top 25 best social media monitoring tools that are worth considering:

Jump Links:

1. Keyhole
2. BrandWatch
3. Glean.info
4. Digimind
5. Google Alert
6. Hootsuite
7. Falcon.io
8. Meltwater
9. Mentionlytics
10. Sprinklr
11. Mention
12. NetBase
13. Nuvi
14. SharedCount
15. Social Mention
16. Brand24
17. TalkWalker
18. Awario
19. ZoomSphere
20. Sprout Social
21. Iconosquare
22. Followerwonk
23. Audiense
24. Tailwind
25. Union Metrics

1. Keyhole

Brands like Google, Alibaba, L’Oreal, H&M, and Mashable, trust Keyhole’s analytics. Keyhole is a social media analytics solution allowing you to track hashtags and keywords to monitor relevant conversations online.

Keyhole’s social analytics dashboard gives you an instant rundown of what your brand’s health looks like. So, you don’t have to look too deep before seeing key analytics like total impressions, engagements, impressions, and posts.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Social Analytics Dashboard

Looking for a tool that allows you to tap into your customers’ minds, gives key information on your brand, and turns raw data into actionable insights that inform your strategy and accelerate critical decision-making? Then Keyhole might be exactly what you need.

Best of all?

Not only does the tool allow you to track @mentions and customer conversations across social media, blogs, and forums. It will also give you key analysis into relevant topics, sentiment analysis, demographic breakdown, and surface the top influencers in the conversation.

Also, Keyhole was designed to best position our clients to succeed, and in any business knowledge is power. This include knowing your audience and your competitors.

With Keyhole, users can monitor all their competitors at the same time, getting key benchmarking metrics as well as competitive intelligence to help them beat the competition.

The best part is how easy Keyhole makes your life. Neil Patel describes it this way: “This tool (Keyhole) does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.”

Now, on top of planning a data-driven strategy, managing your social media campaigns, influencer marketing, and social listening, you can also schedule and execute your social content strategy with Keyhole’s Social Publishing.

Pros: The data reports are comprehensive, but also simple and easy to understand. It’s an affordable tool that keeps everyone in the know about ongoing conversations, brand health, and competitor performance.

Price: Starts at $79 USD per month. You can view various plans and pricing here.

Ready to test Keyhole for yourself? – Start a Free Trial

2. BrandWatch

BrandWatch is a social listening & analytics tool that helps you dig out relevant data from blogs, forums, as well as social media and news or review sites. Basically, this tool tells you what/how your customers talk about your brand online.

BrandWatch - Social Media Monitoring Tools

You can use BrandWatch to get an overview of your brand mentions’ volume and compare it with competitors. Also, you can monitor brand sentiment in real time, and find out who your audience (demographic) is and what topics they are interested in.

It also provides a data visualization tool that lets you bring your data to life. That is, your data can be represented in the form of graphs that make hard stats and numbers easy to understand.

Pros: A flexible, highly customizable social listening tool. The data visualization feature makes data easy to understand and share.

Cons: There is a steep learning-curve in getting the software running properly. Also, the loading time is reportedly slow.

Price: Varies based on mentions per month and historical data access.

3. Glean.info

Glean.info is a market intelligence and social media monitoring tool that gets audience data from social media sites, online news, blogs, message boards, forums, and photo/video sharing sites.

Similar to Keyhole and BrandWatch, this tool also lets you see your share of voice on social. That is, the percentage of your brand’s mentions against that of your competitor’s.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Gleaninfo

Here’s what gets even more interesting: Glean.info alerts you when your brand gets mentioned on a fake news site.

They monitor new posts on 2,000 fake news sites and alert you as soon as your brand gets mentioned; this helps you handle bad press before things get out of hand.

Pros: Integrated access to social media insights. Customizable alerting system.

Cons: Fairly expensive, so may not be accessible for everyone.

Price: Varies based on the number of services you need and keywords you want to track. The price for one service starts at $299 USD per month.

4. Digimind

Digimind is an intelligence software that provides a beautiful visual representation of your brand’s social performance.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Digimind

This tool also allows you to monitor your own social media posts and run competitive analysis. That is, checking how your brand and/or product stacks up against industry rivals.

The platform gives you an understanding of your brand’s online reputation, as well as relevant consumer insights.

You’re also able to access your data via Digimind’s mobile app.

Pros: Monitors thousands of internet sources to collect brand intelligence.

Cons: Users reportedly find it difficult to backtrack and find previous stats and information. Also, it can become time-consuming to go through all the posts to find relevant information.

Price: To request a custom quote, contact Digimind directly.

5. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is super useful for you if you’re looking for a basic monitoring solution.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Google-Alerts

It scans through the web and tells you when your brand or product gets mentioned.

You can choose which sources you want to be receiving alerts for — whether blogs, news sites or forums —and the languages you want to get alerts for.

Pros: An easy and free to use mention tracking solution.

Cons: Only contains basic functionalities so it’s not the most well-rounded tool.

Price: Free.

Did you know that Keyhole users reported that the automated analysis and reporting save them at least 5 hours every week?

Start your free trial today

6. Hootsuite

Hootsuite isn’t just a social media management software; it also monitors relevant conversations on social media, and provides relevant insights.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Hootsuite

Aside from tracking key topics and brand mentions. You can also analyze your performance on social media and measure your results against competitors. This can help spot trends, patterns and optimize your social media presence.

With Hootsuite, you can separate conversions from your paid and owned media, and filter out conversations by keyword, language and location.

Pros: Manage your entire presence on social platforms from one place.

Cons: Higher price than other alternatives. Lower-tiered packages do not include social listening, analytics or benchmarking.

Price: $29 USD – $599 USD per month.

7. Falcon.io

Falcon.io is an all-in-one social management tool that helps you plan your content calendar and manage your inbox across different platforms. Also, you can create and schedule ads, and monitor your brand’s impact on social.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Falcon.io_

The platform was built to assist social media marketers with social listening, customer engagement, content marketing and audience management.

Its social listening feature allows you to keep tuned into online conversations and trends, track your campaigns and discover top influencers that are engaging with your brand.

Falcon.io supports all the major social media such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter, and makes their sentiment analysis available in multiple languages

Pros: Intuitive user experience. Great social listening functionality.

Cons: It comes at a hefty price, so it is not available to smaller businesses.

Price: Essentials available at $129 USD per month. Contact Falcon.io to inquire about their custom packages/pricing for larger organizations.

8. Meltwater

From tracking brand mentions to monitoring campaigns in real time, Meltwater gives you a rundown on conversations about your brand on social media.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Meltwater

Meltwater’s AI engine helps you listen to relevant social media conversations, and gather historical audience data to make more informed marketing decisions.

Moreover, the platform enables you to dig deeper into your audience insights. Allowing you to discover the exact segments that are engaging in conversations related to your brand, and identify significant influencers among them.

Similar to other tools on this list, Meltwater offers a social media management functionality. It enables you to plan and schedule posts and engage with your audience via a centralized inbox.

Pros: A great tool to identify media contacts and influencers in your industry.

Cons: Pricey, especially considering the limited number of users for the cost you pay.

Price: Contact Meltwater for pricing.

9. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a web and social media monitoring tool that can track both mentions and keywords across websites, news sites, social media, community forums, etc.

Mentionlytics - Top Social Media Monitoring Tools

It tracks relevant information pertaining to your brand, competitors, products, etc., and presents it in a user-friendly dashboard.

The platform also uses its “Social Intelligence Advisor” to give you data-driven advice and insights. For example, the most important mentions, best posting times and identifying trolls.

Pros: The interface is user-friendly. Speaking of friendliness, Mentionlytics’ customer service has a great reputation because of their promptness and effectiveness when responding to customer questions.

Cons: Users reported some difficulties using the keyword search, which led to getting irrelevant results.

Price: Basic plan starts at $39 per month and packages can go up to $299 per month.

10. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a powerful social media management tool that also provides a social listening feature.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Sprinklr

The Modern Research feature helps you gain broad, historical and deep real-time views of global conversations, topics, and influencers driving your market – all in one place.

Like many other similar tools, this software helps you benchmark your social media performance against your competitors. Even more, they help you track crises before they arise so that you are able to make informed decisions.

Pros: Great for social listening as well as to moderate comments/messages across different social media profiles and inboxes.

Cons: Paid-ads performance has to be manually added, as it doesn’t get automatically pulled and inserted into the reports. Advanced features can get pricey.

Price: Contact Sprinklr to request a custom quote.

11. Mention

Mention helps you monitor online conversations and track mentions of your brand, product, industry, or campaigns.

This keeps you on top of important conversations around your business so you’re able to join in on these conversations when it matters the most.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Mention

Mention enables you to filter the conversations you want to monitor by language, source and date. Also, you can refine your alerts by adding or removing certain keywords.

You can then, visualize your marketing data, and automate your reports to share the results with key stakeholders in your business easily.

Pros: It’s easy to set up and use to find relevant conversations and brand mentions all over the web.

Cons: Tracking campaigns can be difficult to set up without extra support from a support rep. Limited functionality for lower-tier subscribers.

Price: Paid plans start at $25 per month and plans range upwards of $450 per month.

12. NetBase

NetBase provides many customer experience features, which include social media monitoring. It uses a natural processing language engine to generate an accurate understanding of human language across 199 languages.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Netbase

The NetBase LIVE Pulse solution gives you real time insight into trending topics, top terms/hashtags, allows you to set and track goals, integrate paid metrics, and more.

In NetBase’s own words: “You will gain a deep understanding of customer preferences, passions, and behaviors to drive your customer experience initiatives and make smarter, faster business decisions.”

Pros: Great tool for keeping on top of brand health and customer sentiment.

Cons: Steep learning curve – training might be required. Also, the price can get steep if you require in-depth data.

Price: Plans are customized – contact to learn pricing options.

13. Nuvi

From social media publishing to monitoring, Nuvi takes care of it all for you.

Nuvi is a robust customer experience management solution – their Listen tool allows you to monitor more than just hashtags. It helps you monitor keywords, URLs, topics, social media handles and more.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Nuvi

This tool allows you to spot trends and identify opportunities to increase your reach, as well as build better experiences for your customers.

Nuvi also gets you audience data from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, VK, Stack Overflow and an ever-updating list of 3 million+ blogs and RSS feeds.

Pros: Relatively easy to use. Good sentiment analysis with accuracy of up to 80%.

Cons: Unable to collect and analyze historical data.

Price: Contact Nuvi to discuss a unique plan.

14. SharedCount

SharedCount tracks popular content in your industry. Just insert a URL into the tool and it will show you how many shares the content has gotten so far.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Sharedcount

This tool also allows you to analyze URLs in bulk and export them as CSV files.

Pros: Provides an easy way to analyze the popularity of your content through URLs.

Cons: As of 2020, it only works with Facebook and Pinterest.

Price: $40 USD per month to upwards of $640 per month

15. Social Mention

Social Mention is a real-time social media analytics tool. It collects and compiles user-generated content (UGC) from the web into a single platform.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Socialmention

Let’s say we want to see the audience data around the #ArtificialIntelligence hashtag; Social Mention provides you with instant, data-rich reports about what’s going on around your query.

It also shows the ratio of positive to negative sentiments, the percent of reach, and the strength of your searched term on social media.

In addition, it gives you insights on the passion around your query; that is the likelihood that users will keep talking about your query repeatedly.

Pros: A social analytics tool that’s free to use. Helps to predict future engagement based on existing data.

Cons: Sentiment score is not always reliable, and the interface is outdated.

Price: Free.

Pro tip: Knowing your own audience is great, knowing your competitors is even better. All of the social metrics you need to understand (and beat) your competitors with Keyhole’s Comparisons feature.

Try Comparisons Today

16. Brand24

Brand24 is another social listening tool, that makes brand reputation management simpler and easier.

This tool lets you track mentions, and even gives you a visual representation of ongoing conversations about your brand using a Discussion Volume Chart.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Brand24

Like most of the top social listening tools, Brand24 allows you to dig deep into your reports to analyze sentiment to determine whether your brand was mentioned in a positive or negative context

Also, it helps identify key influencers in your industry. It makes it easy for you to join in on conversations across various channels, directly from the platform.

Pros: A user-friendly tool that simplifies social listening. Customized alerts for brand mentions make it easy to stay on top of online conversations about your brand.

Cons: It may be hard to accurately predict customer sentiment and the historical data is not very reliable.

Price: Starting at $49 USD per month.

17. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a social analytics platform that enables you to monitor brand sentiment and oversee your overall brand health.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Talkwalker

The Conversation Clusters feature provides you with AI-based data that lets you find hidden connections between trending conversations, discover conversation drivers, and understand the core customer needs that start and move conversations in a particular direction.

Talkwaker also gives you a 360 view of your owned and earned social media content, including your brand, product or competitor mentions offline.

You can use the tool to detect emerging themes, identify market gaps and serve more relevant content and offers to your customers.

This lets you understand the best influencers for your specific brand or product. All these help you account for what exactly comms bring to the table at your organization.

Pros: Real-time social monitoring and rich social insights.

Cons: Large amounts of data make it hard to master and prioritize what insights are important. The price is also inaccessible for many businesses.

Price: Starts at $6000 per year.

18. Awario

Awario is a web monitoring tool that crawls 13 billion pages everyday to get important data about your audience.

These insights include number of mentions, sentiment analysis, top influencers across different channels, and status/progress analytics.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Awario

It also offers a social media customer support service that lets you be there right when your customers need your help.

Providing you with an intelligent alert system, the tool lets you know as soon as an important conversation starts gaining traction.

This helps you prioritize customer support requests based on the impact they can have on your business.

Pros: Great for monitoring brand mentions and keeping track of online conversations. Possible to track unlinked brand mentions all over the web.

Cons: A steep learning curve. Also, the price can escalate quickly.

Price: $29 — $299 USD per month.

19. ZoomSphere

ZoomSphere is an all in one social media management tool comprising a scheduler, workflow manager, social media analytics, reporting & benchmarking, Facebook leads manager, and mentions monitoring.

The tool provides over 150 different metrics related to all the major social networks. It also provides you with competitor analysis so you can see how you rank compared to your competitors.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Zoomsphere

The tool allows you to collaborate with your team, and set when and where to publish your social media posts.

Pros: Covers various social channels. Shows customer interaction history and helps you benchmark your performance.

Cons: The social listening feature doesn’t include sentiment analysis.

Price: Different pricing for each tool. Social Media Analytics costs $89 Euros per month, Social Media & Web Monitoring – $149 Euros per month. For more information on pricing, see https://www.zoomsphere.com/pricing.

20. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media monitoring tool, helping brands to better understand their audience and inform their social strategy with actionable insights.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Sprout Social

Their social dashboard feature gives you an instant rundown of what your brand’s health looks like by showing basic analytics like total impressions, total engagements and total link clicks.

Sprout Social’s social listening feature gives you an overview of the keywords and hashtags your audience associate your brand or product with.

It also allows you to monitor sentiment and set up alerts for when critical conversations start gaining traction on social media.

Pros: Robust analytics. And it allows you to respond to mentions/messages directly from the platform.

Cons: The standard licence doesn’t include the social listening feature.

Price: $99 — $249 USD per month.

Creating accurate, download-friendly reports that you can share with your team just didn’t seem like enough, so we made them fun to use and incredibly easy to interpret.

Get your first Keyhole report today.

21. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a social media management, analytics & scheduling platform for Facebook and Instagram.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Iconosquare

As most other social media management & listening tools, it gives you an overview of your stats and performance across Facebook and Instagram via a unified dashboard, helps you plan and moderate conversations across your different accounts, and enables you to schedule and publish content automatically without having to babysit your content promotion all the time.

Pros: Easy to use once it’s set up. Allows you to track certain feeds/hashtags and automate giveaway entries.

Cons: Works with Instagram, Twitter and Facebook only. The set-up process can be a pain.

Price: Starts at $29 USD per month. Custom plans available.

Platform-Specific Tools

22. Followerwonk (Twitter)

FollowerWonk is a great social listening tool for brands that want to dig deeper into their Twitter audience data.

Followerwonk - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools

You can find out anything with this tool: from who your followers are, where they’re located and the times they mostly tweet – to the most relevant influencers in your industry or niche.

Their most used feature is the Twitter bio search. FollowerWonk provides you with Twitter profiles that are all valid, current and refreshed every 30 days.

Best of all? You’ll get all the info that interests you packed in amazing social graphs that allow you to immediately benchmark your Twitter performance and identify opportunities for improvement..

Pros: Allows you to analyze your presence & your competitors’ presence on Twitter. Also, it helps you understand who your followers are, and enables you to find the most suitable influencers and estimate campaign reach.

Cons: Supports only Twitter.

Price: Paid plans start at $29 USD per month.

23. Audiense Connect (Twitter)

This is a tool from Audiense that provides you with detailed information about your Twitter audience. Audiense also provides a social insights platform.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Audiense Connect

From creating your own custom Twitter DM chatbots to tracking your performance on the platform, the Connect tool does a great job helping you understand your audience.

Pros: A good tool for companies that want to enhance their Twitter marketing through real-time audience insights.

Cons: The free plan comes with very limited features. It only supports Twitter and can get expensive compared to other platforms that support different social media platforms.

Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $79 USD per month.

24. Tailwind (Pinterest and Instagram)

Tailwind is known as the number 1 Pinterest/Instagram social scheduling tool. Aside from scheduling posts, italso allows you to discover content ideas, monitor conversations, amplify your reach, and analyze your performance on Pinterest and Instagram.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Tailwind

An interesting and unique feature is Tailwind Tribes, which allows you to connect with like-minded people and content. This can help you grow faster and “activate your community”.

You can also automatically optimize your posts to publish when your audience is most active on Pinterest and Instagram. More importantly, this tool provides rich analytics that help you monitor conversations and analyze your performance.

Pros: Simple, user friendly interface. Low learning curve.

Cons: Platform-specific. The Instagram tool is still not as developed as the one for Pinterest.

Price: $9.99 USD per month per platform.

25. Union Metrics (Twitter)

A social intelligence tool for Twitter, Union Metrics gives you insight into trending conversations, brand mentions, campaign performance, competitor data, and historical data to inform your decision-making.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Union-Metrics

The platform offers a couple of free tools, including the Twitter Snapshot, which allows you to generate quick reports on recent Twitter activity related to a topic/keyword. You’ll be able to measure the potential reach and impressions to gauge the virality of your posts.

Used by over 300,000 marketers, the software helps you monitor posts about your product, brand or industry in real time. This way you’re getting the full gist of relevant stories as they unfold.

Pros: Clean, clear reports. Very easy to find top hashtags and contributors.

Cons: Doesn’t integrate with many platforms – it supports only Twitter.

Price: Starts at $49 USD per month.

The Final Verdict

With so many social media platforms available, it can be a nearly impossible task for marketers to measure their brand performance, without the help of third-party tools that simplify social media management & listening.

Thankfully, there are a number of social media monitoring tools that automate the process and provide analytics about your audience, brand and campaign performance.

These tools can also allow you to keep track of trending topics, ongoing conversations, and respond to negative sentiment in a timely manner – before things get out of hand.

So now you know which are the 25 best social media monitoring tools out there. All you need to do is pick the one that suits your marketing needs and budget.

Start Your Free Trial Today

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword + hashtag analytics and profile analytics across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Get started for free here.

Social Media Marketing 101 for Small [and New] Businesses

March 19, 2021November 17, 2020 by Keyhole

Congratulations on being a new or small business owner! You are making our communities healthier, and in return we want you to succeed. So, we made this Social Media Marketing 101 guide just for you.

Social media can be a powerful (and affordable!) way to drive brand awareness, engagement and customer retention. We know it and you know it – otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this blog.

What you may not know is how to get started and make social media work harder for your small (or new) business. In this social media marketing 101 guide, we’ll give you the information you need to build a simple but effective social media strategy today.

Read on.

What Is Social Media Marketing and Why Do You Need A Social Media Strategy?

Simply put, social media marketing is using social media to drive awareness and promote your brand. A social media strategy is a blueprint that consists of the following:

1. The WHO: Who you’re targeting
2. The WHAT: What you’d like to achieve
3. The WHERE: What channels/social media platforms are you going to use
4. The HOW: Everything you plan to do on social media
5. The WHEN: How often/when do you plan to post
+ Bonus Tips

Having a strategy gives you clarity It also helps you avoid the dreaded posting just for the sake of posting (we’ve all been there). And what is the result?

You’ll get where you want to be much faster.

Social Media 101: Let’s Get Strategizing

Now you know what a social media marketing strategy is. You also know the 5 questions you need to answer to have an effective social media strategy. What’s next?

This wouldn’t be a social media marketing 101 guide if we didn’t go through each one of the steps into a little bit more detail.

So, keep reading.

The WHO: Get to know your audience

There’s only one rule in marketing (social media marketing included) you need to follow: in everything you do, you need to think customer-first.

To create content that really lands, you need to get to know your audience very well. Which pages do they follow, what kind of posts do they engage with, what conversations they are having online?

Social media can be a very powerful tool to connect with your customers if you use it correctly. What do we mean by “correctly”?

Simple. Use social media to start conversations and build relationships and show people how you can solve their problems. Leave the “me! me! me!” talk out of your social media content.

If you’re wondering, “Do I get to talk about myself?” – we know, we know, you gotta do it from time to time. Then, do it in a way that shows how you can serve your customers and the value you provide.

Instead of just talking about your product, you could create a brand voice that your audience can connect with. For example, Casper responds to conversations about its brand with clever comebacks that make the brand memorable and likeable,

Casper Twitter: Social Media Marketing 101

The What: Set Your Objectives

It’s very important for you to know what you want to achieve to be able to create relevant content and a roadmap that supports your goals.

You can have different goals, including: lead generation, sales, website traffic, brand awareness, engagement, improving PR, building a tribe of supporters and so on.

However, when creating a marketing strategy for small businesses, it’s very important to pick one, single goal (hate to break it to you – but yes, you have to walk before you run).

“How?,” you’re probably wondering. Easy, identify where your marketing needs the most improvement and what area, when improved, will have the biggest impact.

Once you’ve made progress towards your initial goal, you can expand your social media marketing 101 strategy to get more goals and reach for the sky.

The Where: Pick The Right Channel(s)

At this point, you know who your target audience is, what they’re interested in, and what you’d like to achieve. Next, you need to pick the best social media platform for your business.

All the knowledge you’ve gathered by this point will help you determine which is the best platform or platforms to use.

For example, if you’re a beauty brand you’ll probably use YouTube and Instagram – maybe even work with an influencer. If you have an interior design studio you’ll probably go for visual platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr. If you own a B2B business you’ll likely find your audience on LinkedIn or even Instagram.

Take some inspiration from Glossier. The company focused on Instagram to build their brand and create a following. Fast-forward 6 years and the company went from $0 revenue to $100 million.

Glossier Instagram: Social Media Marketing 101

As you can see, every step of your strategy relates back to the first step: knowing your audience. It’s also important to note that you don’t have to do it “right” the first time. Get started, then measure the results and keep experimenting until you get the results you want.

Remember, there’s no shortcut to social media success. The best practices shared in this social media marketing 101 guide are only a starting point. Once you’ve started using social media for your new or small business, collect the initial data and tweak your strategy to further improve the results.

The How: What Are You Going to Post and Do on Social Media

Determine what kind of content you need to create to generate engagement. Ideas (and insights) are everywhere: so social listening is important.

Listen to the conversations your customers are having online, track your competitors, and follow certain hashtags to keep up to date with the latest trends. You can do this manually, or you can use social listening and analytics tools that automate the collection of audience insight.

Keyhole, for example, allows you to track brand mentions, sentiment and conversations your audience are having online. The tool delivers aggregated insights to make better decisions, manage your PR and spot opportunities to connect with your ideal clients, all in one place.

Don’t let a small budget interfere with creating awe-inspiring content. Make use of the available tools out there to make eye-catching posts, or even create videos on your own.

The When: How Frequently and When Will You Post?

Finally, let’s discuss frequency.

Objectively estimate your capabilities: how many *quality* posts per week can you create? Quality and consistency are more important than quantity. What you don’t want is to be active every day this week and completely silent the next.

Above all, your post should always be consistent with your brand. Each post must contain your brand logo, font, and color, as this will play a huge role in making people familiar with your brand. Achieving this is more manageable using a logo maker that offers customizable templates for social media posts.

Once you know how many pieces of content you can create and publish per day/week/month, you need to find the optimal times to post. You’ll find various online sources that give you the best time-windows to be active, but we don’t recommend that.

Not because we don’t want to help, but because “optimal timing” is one of those things that doesn’t have a generic answer. Instead, you’ll need to find out what works for your audience and business by testing different times and tracking audience engagement.

To save time, stay consistent, and make tracking and optimizing your schedule easier, we strongly urge you to schedule your posts in advance.

Bonus Tip: Double-Down on Hashtags

We’ll end this social media marketing 101 guide with a reality check: sometimes you’ll have to pay to get engagement and that’s okay – but we’re not talking about the fake kind.

Every time the algorithm changes, your organic reach may go down. Especially, when people are using social media for new businesses, so you might need to use ads to drive awareness (and conversions) faster.

However, there’s another way you can get your brand in front of the right people – by joining the conversations they’re already having.

Track and analyze hashtags to learn what appeals to your customers and what kind of content they engage with and want to consume. Use relevant hashtags to appear in these conversations, in front of the people who are already interested and talking about those topics.

Fir example, Full Circle Brewing uses hashtags in their posts to ensure those who are looking for craft beer in their area can find their brand.

Full Circle Brewing hashtags: Social Media Marketing 101

We hope you found all the information you need to leverage social media to promote and grow your business. Don’t overthink it and start as soon as possible! After all, there’s no better teacher than your own posts’ performance/audience engagement.

Keyhole gives helps marketers make data-driven decisions while streamlining their social media management efforts. On top of campaign tracking, influencer marketing, and social listening, now you can also use Keyhole’s social publishing and scheduling, all in one platform.

Saving marketers an average of 5 hours a week on gathering and reporting data, Keyhole saves marketers over $7,000 every year on reporting. Start your free trial today and get the metrics you need to get the most out of your social media strategy.

Twitter Analytics: Your Guide to Drive Traffic and Boost Sales in 2021

March 19, 2021November 10, 2020 by Keyhole

Twitter Analytics Guide – Updated in November 2020

Marketers are constantly in search of actionable insights to improve their social media strategies, and a guide to Twitter analytics is in order.

You’ve likely turned to how-to blogs, attended webinars, and subscribed to newsletters for newer and better social media insights.

And while these are all great resources, the most valuable insights are most often found directly within your social data.

Twitter Analytics are the perfect example.

When your goal is to grow your Twitter audience, there’s so much to be learned from the people who already follow you—but most marketers ignore their Twitter Analytics because they feel they don’t need them.

If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to Twitter Analytics, this guide is for you. We’ll discuss:

The basics of Twitter Analytics
The benefits of tracking Twitter Analytics
The key Twitter Analytics metrics
The best-available Twitter Analytics tools

Without further ado, let’s dive in…

Jumplinks:

Twitter Analytics Explained
Why Twitter Analytics Matter
How to Use Twitter Analytics
Twitter Analytics Metrics and Features You Should Know
A Sidenote on Twitter Ads Metrics
The Five Best Twitter Analytics Tools for Your Business in 2021
1. Keyhole
2. Sprout Social
3. Union Metrics
4. Hootsuite
5. Buffer
Stop Ignoring Your Twitter Analytics

Twitter Analytics Explained

While Twitter isn’t the most popular social platform out there, it’s still the go-to platform for live conversations about news, TV, and sports.

There’s a reason it’s such a status symbol to be verified on Twitter.

It took businesses almost a decade to figure out “how to Twitter” effectively, but marketers finally learned that Twitter isn’t an advertising platform—it’s a conversation platform.

Once you start truly engaging with your audience, you unlock an indispensable business intelligence tool: Twitter Analytics.

Twitter Analytics, originally launched in 2014, is Twitter’s native analytics dashboard where you can track your Twitter performance and unlock insights about your audience.

With Twitter Analytics, you can track top tweets, impressions, profile visits, mentions, followers, and more.

So why should businesses spend valuable time digging into their Twitter Analytics?

Why You Need A Twitter Analytics Guide

Analyzing your Twitter metrics will give you an answer to the following questions—all of which are key to boosting traffic and sales.

1. Learn what your audience wants

Twitter removed data about audience demographics in early 2020 but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn about your audience.

You can dive deeper into the kind of products, content, and copy that resonate with them the most by looking at your engagement rate, mentions, and social shares.

By looking at your top content, you can make educated guesses about what made a particular tweet stand out among thousands of other tweets that showed up on your followers’ feeds at that very second!

For example, you may find your audience responds more to tweets with videos than plain text.

The more data you analyze, the easier it will be to notice behavior patterns and see what exactly makes your audience tick.

2. Learn when to tweet

This one’s simple:

To enhance engagement, find out when your customers are online, and post during those specific time windows.

While Twitter has added features like Top Tweets and Moments to help great tweets linger on timelines for longer, the reality is that most tweets have a short lifespan.

It’s safe to say that getting the timing right is an indispensable part of the entire Twitter success puzzle that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Twitter Analytics can help you figure out the best time to post so that you can build an optimal tweeting schedule.

3. Track your performance over time

Not only can you track your content performance at the level of individual tweets, you can also track your overall account performance over time. This will allow you to conduct a Twitter account audit.

Depending on how long your account has been active, Twitter can give you potentially years of data—allowing you to see which time periods were most effective for your account.

Then, you can match up your content plans or campaigns from those time periods to determine what strategies worked best for your account—whether it was an influencer campaign, a hashtag campaign,

Now that you’re convinced tracking your analytics are worth it, let’s start by showing you how.

How to Use Twitter Analytics

To access Twitter Analytics, start by logging into your Twitter account. Then, click the More… menu, followed by Analytics.

Boom, you’re in.

You can also access Twitter Analytics directly at analytics.twitter.com.

Once you’re logged in, you’ll see Twitter Analytics organizes your stats into four sections: Home, Tweets, Videos, and Conversion tracking.

The first section is your Twitter report card, which gives you an overview of your monthly performance, as well as top-performing tweets and top influencers within your network.

The Tweet activity dashboard will show metrics related to the performance of past Tweets: impressions, engagements, engagement rate, link clicks, retweets, replies, and more.

The Videos dashboard allows you to track the performance of your videos, including metrics on video views, completion rate, total minutes viewed, and retention rate.

Finally, the Conversion Tracking dashboard allows you to track website and mobile app events based on a tag you’d install on your website or app.

There’s a lot to dig into here, so let’s break down the most important metrics.

A Guide to Twitter Analytics Metrics

Tweets

On the Home dashboard, Twitter will tell you how many tweets you published in a month. This can be helpful to make sure you hit your daily content publishing goals.

Profile visits

Twitter also gives you a monthly total of your profile visits, which is the number of times people visit your profile and feed.

Tracking this over time is a good indication of whether people take the step beyond simply interacting with one of your tweets to check out if you’re worth a follow.

Followers

Twitter Analytics also gives you a monthly breakdown of how many followers you gained or lost, as well as your current follower count.

While growing your follower count is great, it’s best to focus on metrics that more directly impact the bottom line, like engagements and link clicks. It doesn’t do much good to gain followers if they don’t interact with your content.

Top Tweet

A top tweet is your most-viewed tweet within a single month.

There are two ways a top tweet can amplify your success.

First, analyzing your top tweet allows you to find out what makes content relevant and valuable to your audience.

And second, since you are certain that this particular tweet resonates with people, you may want to consider promoting it to give it a further boost. If you’re going to pay to boost your content, you may as well boost the best content, right?

Top mention

Your top mention is the @ mention of your account that received the most engagements.

Why should you care?

A Twitter user who’s already interacting with your brand – and gaining lots of attention for it – may serve as a great influencer or ambassador.

It will, also, give you a hint as to what type of content you can create that will generate the most buzz from your audience (whether it’s positive or negative).

Top Follower

Twitter Analytics also shows you the top follower with the highest follower count that started following you within the month.

This follower may also serve as a potential influencer or collaboration opportunity.

Top Media Tweet

Similar to your Top Tweet, your top media tweet shows off your photo or video tweet that earned the most impressions within the month.

Impressions

Twitter impressions are the number of times a tweet was seen on someone’s Twitter feed.

You can access impressions at the account level over a time period, or at the individual tweet level.

Impressions are a measure of reach, allowing you to see what type of content earns you the most eyeballs.

Engagements

Twitter engagements are the total number of interactions with a tweet, including clicks on any element of the tweet, retweets, likes, replies, or follows.

From the Tweets dashboard, Twitter will also break down your engagements by:

Engagement rate
Link clicks
Retweets without comments
Likes
Replies

These metrics are available as daily totals, monthly totals, and monthly averages.

However, engagements on their own don’t tell you much, because they’re often correlated with impressions—tweets that are shared and seen more are going to be interacted with more.

That’s where engagement rate comes in handy…

Engagement Rate

Divide your Twitter engagements by your impressions. This will give you the engagement rate.

This is the rate at which people interact with your tweet or tweets.

Engagement rate is extremely useful when it comes to understanding what drives people to interact with your brand. This is especially true if you’re interested in driving traffic and sales directly from Twitter.

Analyze the tweets that earn the highest engagement rates and think about what made them successful. Was it a hashtag? A question? A video?

Website & Mobile App Events

By installing a conversion-tracking tag on your website or mobile app, you can push back data on website and/or app conversions back into your Twitter Analytics dashboard.

This tracking tag is vital for any paid Twitter ad campaign, as your tracking tag will build up an audience base to whom you can target your ads.

A Sidenote on Twitter Ads Metrics…

While Twitter technically splits its Twitter Ads campaigns from its main Twitter Analytics dashboards, it’s important to know which metrics are available to advertisers, should you decide to go the paid route.

The campaign dashboard is accessible at ads.twitter.com. If you haven’t set up an ad campaign yet, you’ll have to do so before you can access any analytics.

The campaign dashboard allows you to track impressions, engagement rate, results, and cost-per-result.

Results

What are Twitter results? They certainly sound like something we should be aiming for…

Results is a generic term for the campaign objective you set for your ad campaign. They can be a measure of:

Reach
Video views
Pre-roll views
App installs
Website clicks
Engagements
Followers
App re-engagements

Cost-per-result

Perhaps it goes without saying, but the cost-per-result is your Twitter ad spend divided by the number of results you achieved.

It can be thought of similarly to cost-per-acquisition or cost-per-conversion.

A Guide to Twitter Analytics Tools for Your Business in 2021

While the native Twitter Analytics platform can be an important (and free) tool in your digital marketing toolkit, the platform certainly has major shortcomings.

It’s extremely limited in how you can access the data. You may want to get more fine-grained than daily data, and you may want to more easily access data on your audience—especially when it comes to identifying potential influencers.

Here are the top Twitter analytics tools that will give you more powerful insights into your Twitter data.

1. Keyhole

Social Media Tools - Social Sentiment Tools - Keyhole

Keyhole is the go-to influencer marketing, social listening and social media analytics tool for individuals and companies looking to understand what topics and types of posts attract their audience’s attention.

Keyhole’s real time hashtag analytics and keyword tracking feature enables users to:

Monitor and manage social conversations and brand sentiment
Identify top influencers
Find trending topics
Track and aggregate events and campaign data
Research live and historical data
Analyze your competitors
Easily share in-depth reports with your team

Ultimately, Keyhole empowers users to optimize their content and posting schedule, plan more engaging future campaigns, and make more informed decisions about their brand’s social media strategy.

Price: Keyhole starts at $49 per month, but you can try it out first with a 7-day free trial.

2. Sprout Social

While it’s best known as a social media management tool, Sprout Social also offers a Twitter analytics solution.

Using Sprout Social, you can find your top performing content and compare your stats to your competitors.

Sprout Social also has social listening and engagement features that make it a popular choice among marketers.

Price: A Sprout Social subscription starts at $99 per month.

3. Union Metrics

Union Metrics offers comprehensive visual reports which make it easy to understand and digest your Twitter data.

With Union Metrics, you can track keywords and conversations, find contributors and top influencers. Also, it allows you to estimate the potential size of any Twitter conversation, and perform competitive analysis.

Price: Union Metrics starts at $49 per month.

4. Hootsuite

No list of social media tools is complete without mentioning Hootsuite.

Mostly used as a social media management tool, Hootsuite can also be used to assess one’s social media activity and impact, track and boost responsiveness. Also, it brings all social media platforms together into a single custom report that can be easily exported and shared within your organization.

Price: Hootsuite starts at $29 per month.

5. Buffer

Buffer is another social management tool built in a similar way as Hootsuite. On top of Twitter analytics and attractive reporting dashboards, it also has robust publishing tools

Price: Buffer’s analytics tools start at $35 per month.

Stop Ignoring Your Twitter Analytics

Social media platforms like Twitter give organizations access to incredible amounts of data. When accurately collected, organized, and analyzed, these can be turned into an invaluable strategic asset.

If we sum up everything we talked about in this exhaustive Twitter analytics guide, we can determine five ways social listening and Twitter analytics can help you elevate your business:

Understand what your customers want and need
Find trending topics to drive future campaigns
Identify potential partnerships and influencers
Analyze brand sentiment and reduce your crisis response time
Keep an eye on the competition and keep ahead of the game

In short, Twitter analytics tools can help in the quest of giving your Twitter data a purpose and turning it into actionable insights that you can use to make well-thought business decisions and come up with a competitive marketing strategy.

Keyhole can help you take your Twitter analytics analysis to the next level. To get started with Keyhole, try a free trial today.

Keyhole helps marketers make data-driven decisions that impact their organizations. On top of campaign tracking, influencer marketing, and social listening, now you can also publish and schedule your social media posts on the Keyhole platform.

Keyhole saves marketers an average of 5 hours a week spent gathering and reporting data, which translates to over $7,000 in savings every year. Start your free trial today and start to work smarter, not harder!

We Analyzed A Million #Halloween2020 Social MediaPosts – This Is What We Learned

November 12, 2020November 9, 2020 by Mariana O'Connor

Despite restrictions, Halloween made a splash this year, at least on social media. There were over 963.7K posts with the hashtag #Halloween2020, which resulted in 5.5 billion impressions this past October, showing that people were still excited about the beloved holiday.

But most importantly, what are people talking about?

#TrickorTreat

192.4K Posts and 589.9M Impressions (September – October 2020)

Remember how exciting it was to be a kid on Halloween? Getting your costume ready, staying up late, and getting to eat more candy than you could all year?

Those were the days!

This year, however, people were on the fence about it. Recent polls show that at least 38% of parents planned on allowing their kids to trick or treat this year, while for 31%, it’s a hard pass.

Curiously, 62% of poll respondents said that they would be handing out candy this year, while only 23% said they would go trick or treating. And well, having extra candy around is not such a bad thing.

Some candy brands came to save the day – and their profits – by finding creative ways to ensure that kids get a trick or treating experience this year.

Contender 1: Mars Wrigley

Mars Wrigley created a completely online experience with Treat Town. This new app – created in partnership with Disney Parks – would allow users to engage in various Halloween-themed activities including virtual trick or treating.

The confectionery giant also partnered with the National Safety Council in creating a guide for parents to safely participate in Halloween.

Using their hashtag #bettermoments to promote the app on social media was a questionable decision. It is quite difficult to track a hashtag that most people would use in a context that is completely unrelated to your brand.

The #bettermoments hashtag is quite popular with topics such as pain, breakups and suicide prevention. These associations are the exact opposite you’d want as a candy brand.

Lesson learned – hashtag choice is crucial when using social media to track and measure your campaigns.

Alternatively, Mars Wrigley’s sub-brand Skittles used the #DareTheRainbow to promote two campaigns: a giveaway – with AMC’s The Walking Dead – and a zombie-prank challenge, resulting in 1.4 million impressions.

The beloved brand Snickers played it cool this year. After all, being voted as America’s most beloved Halloween candy gave the brand enough bragging rights.

After a contentious battle between Snickers and Reese’s – Snickers took the crown. And the results were surprising, considering the number of Americans with peanut allergies has tripled since the 90’s.

What about the second runner-up?

Contender 2: Hershey’s

Hershey’s did not disappoint this year, by going all out and creating a robot-operated door that travelled to various American neighborhoods and offered a contactless trick-or-treat experience.

With little promotion, the #REESESDOOR hashtag gained about 385.3K impressions, and the story was picked up by many US publications. A single post from a TikTok influencer had over 35K impressions.

And despite gloomy expectations, recent data shows that candy sales have climbed 13% from last year. Halloween chocolate purchases alone are up by 25.3%.

Arguably, the increase in candy purchasing might have little to do with trick or treaters, and more to do with treating ourselves after a hard-knock year.

While many might miss out on the trick or treating fun, parents and non-parents alike are not letting the holiday go to waste and are bringing the spook home. Data proves that you don’t need a party or trick or treating to partake in the festivities.

“Halloween Decorations”

279K Posts and 915.8M Impressions (September – October 2020)

Halloween Decoration posts have been incredibly popular in social media, and also 53% of survey respondents indicated that they would be decorating their homes.

In terms of spending, decorations and costumes have the highest total expected spending this halloween ($2.6 billion each).

It isn’t too surprising. Halloween decorations are one of the safest ways to go all out when celebrating Halloween.

Out of 27.7 million Halloween social media posts, this neighbourly shout-out and this COVID-inspired house decoration were among the tweets with the most engagements in October.

And the Halloween decorations brand that is killing it on social media is none other than Home Depot.

Contender 1: Home Depot

Halloween 2020 Social Media - Home Depot

That’s right, Home Depot mentions acquired 1.4 billion impressions in the past two months. In case you haven’t heard, their 12 ft. skeleton became the most coveted decoration this year.

Once social media posts started to go viral, sales went through the roof. Even with a hefty $300 price tag, Home Depot quickly sold out of the big-boned decoration. People wanted them so bad that ebay auctions were going for over $800.

So what does giant skeleton envy have to teach us?

Aside from tremendous entertainment, there are a few lessons we can get from the 12 ft. skeleton’s success.

First, visibility and impact – it is really hard to miss and ignore a gigantic skeleton in plain sight. With more than half the world using social media, if your product makes a visual impact, there is a chance that people will post about it.

Halloween Social Media Lessons - Home Depot

Second, exclusivity – after selling out for good, the skeleton became even more desirable. Home Depot was very hushed about how many skeletons they sold, and simply communicated that they would no longer be available.

Let’s be honest – we have a primal instinct to want what we can’t have. Indicating that your products have limited availability will make them more desirable to consumers.

“Halloween Makeup”

138.9K Posts and 688.5M Impressions (September to October 2020)

Speaking of desirability, most industries can only wish to have the social media success that makeup has had. In fact, it was the makeup industry that helped us realize the power of influencer marketing.

But is it successful across all social media platforms?

YouTube

YouTube has been the largest social medium for makeup-related content with the success of makeup tutorials.

To exemplify the power of YouTube and makeup influencers look no other than James Charles’ Halloween makeup video featuring Kylie Jenner.

The video has over 12 Million views, and it was engaged with over 818K instances. And while few brands could possibly afford a celebrity or mega influencers, collaborations with different influencers based on your budget can make a huge impact.

But what about other platforms?

Instagram

Instagram has become another great medium for cosmetic brands. The brand Anastasia Beverly Hills was a pioneer in turning its focus to Instagram over YouTube.

The brand amassed a 20M following on Instagram, leveraging short videos to create mini tutorials featuring their products and using contests to boost engagement.

This year, one of the posts gathering the most engagement (77K) was French makeup artist Marion Moretti’s post. While she showed her stunning The Mask rendition, she also invited engagement both online and offline.

Moretti, made sure to tag all of the makeup companies she used for her look, and even created her own hashtag (#camelloween2020) to encourage user generated content.

TikTok

A new great opportunity for cosmetic brands, and really any brand, looking to use social media as a way to showcase their product is TikTok.

Elf cosmetics launched the contest #eyeslipsface in October, asking TikTokers to “give face” while using their commissioned song. The catchy song and giving TikTokers the freedom to be creative paid off: the #eyeslipsface has over 6.6B views.

So what can we learn from cosmetic brands’ success on Halloween?

Like any makeup guru will tell you – “when in doubt, keep blending.” Not blending into the background, but blending different elements together to make them cohesive.

Make sure you blend your content and strategy with the medium you’re using. Fit is everything in social media and every platform has its own metrics and formulas.

For example, Instagram can help consumers discover your brand and make decisions about your products. On the other hand, TikTok will help you connect with a younger audience and encourage engagement with your brand.

As for influencers, fit is even more important. In order to be successful, it is important to be authentic. So, influencers will have control over the message and the audience.

Find an influencer that will be able to deliver his/her message about your brand in an authentic manner. Also, pay attention to their followers and determine whether this is the audience you want to reach.

“Halloween Costume”

1.9M Posts and 9.3B Impressions (September to October 2020)

Which leads us to Halloween Costumes – in our humble opinion – the true spirit of Halloween.

Bear with us now..

Humans around the world and history have used costumes as a way to celebrate their cultures. For example, Jewish people wear costumes for Purim, during Carnival people dress up in the Caribbean, Venice and Switzerland.

We wear costumes to create the fantasy of inhabiting a new persona. For a day, we get to absorb the positive attributes of our character. Clinging tights on any given day might make many men feel emasculated but that wouldn’t be the case if it’s part of a superhero costume.

There is an important insight from this. Thinking about consumption has enormous psychological implications. More often than not, people consume a brand because of what it makes them feel about themselves, not necessarily for the benefits of the product.

In many western cultures, Halloween is the day to dress up in costume. And today, sharing your costume in social media has become the norm.

This is why an average $3.4 billion is spent on Halloween costumes every year. Men spending $96 on average, while women spend $77 – which is surprising, since women usually pay the pink tax.

So what costumes were popular for Halloween 2020?

According to Freightgeist – Google Trends report on Halloween costumes – the top 10 Halloween costume searches are as follows:

Witch
Dinosaur
Harley Quinn
Rabbit
Clown
Angel
Fortnite
Devil
Ninja
Spiderman

Which leads us to the Halloween costume social media post with the most engagement for October

Which leads us to pet costumes, Americans spent about $440 million to dress up their furry friends. And this trend continues to grow by about 16% each year.

While popular human costumes are witches, princesses, villains and superheroes. These are the 5 most popular animal costumes:

Pumpkin
Hot Dog
Superhero
Cat
Bumblebee

This year, posts featuring cats with the #Halloween2020 was among the most popular this year, whether it was costumes for cats, or black cats. In fact, the Instagram account Meowed by 9GAG had a great month on Instagram: total engagements were 19M – that’s 11M more than September.

So is the real winner of #Halloween2020 the noble cat? At least those cats that had the patience to be dressed up and photographed by their owners.

Halloween Social Media Pet Costume Stats

The greatest contender is of course, the dog. While dog costumes are not among the top posts of #Halloween2020, there are fewer dog costume posts (21.8K) than cat costume posts (39.2K).

Dog costume posts, however, had 126.8 M impressions in the past two months, making them the true social media winner of this Halloween.

If you’re wondering why, just look at this picture and try not to smile! If you’re wondering why, just look at this picture and try not to smile!

So what did social media teach us about Halloween in 2020?

This Halloween taught us that even when facing curveballs and adversity, new opportunities can be created. Not only for marketers but also for people who want to continue enjoying their favourite holiday.

The most creative brands – and people – have one thing in common: adaptability. All the brands we mentioned were able to get a good perspective on the situation to understand what people really wanted and then created a solution.

Practicing social media monitoring and listening can help identify trends and inform our process to create opportunities. It also allows us to track our performance and adapt as needed.

Both in marketing and in life, we can take this important lesson into consideration. Pay attention to what is happening, inform yourself as best you can, and be ready to create your own solutions.

Do you have any 2020 lessons you’d like to share with us? We’d love to hear from you!

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that helps marketers make decisions by gathering with social media data. Try Keyhole for free with a 7-day trial.

About The Author

Mariana O’Connor is heading content and email marketing at Keyhole. She has a Masters degree in Marketing from the Schulich School of Business. When she’s not reading or writing about the latest marketing trends, she is usually out and about, working out, learning a new skill or watching RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Features

Resources

Why do social media marketing metrics matter?

Content-based social media marketing metrics: Are your posting efforts working?

Post Reach and Impressions – Who is Seeing Your Content?

Engagement Counts – Do They Like Your Stuff?

Brand Mentions – Are They Talking About You?

Reply Time and Messaging – Keeping the Conversation Going

Reply Time

Tone, Questions, and Comments

Conversions – The End Goal

Don’t Get Lost in the Sauce

Micro Influencers Should be Relevant to Your Niche

Have Specific Goals for Your Campaign

Showcase Your Product Experience with Micro Influencers

Give Influencers the Freedom to be Creative

Finding Instagram Influencers

Turn to Your Audience

Use Hashtags

What is social commerce?

Facebook Shopping

Instagram shopping

Pinterest shopping

Why you need social commerce

Reduce friction and drive conversions

Enhance the customer experience

Improve social ROI

5 social commerce tips to get you started

1: Start with low-cost offers

2: Use hashtags to drive product discovery

3: Take advantage of UGC

4: Get your timing right

5: Build trust using reviews

Sell more on social

1. DKNY State of Mind Campaign: A Fashion Social Media Campaign with All The Works

Why it was effective?

2. Prada at Milan Fashion Week: Fashion Reaches New Audiences through Social Media

Why was it effective?

3. Louis Vuitton’s Journey Home for The Holidays Campaign: The Power of Celebrity Ambassadors

Why it was effective?

4. Michael Kors’s #WatchHungerStop Campaign: Fashion with A Cause

Why was it effective?

5. Savage X Fenty Show Vol. 2: The baddest, sexiest, most savage experience

Why it was effective?

Key Elements to a Successful Fashion Social Media Campaign

1. Photography

2. Video

3. Graphics

4. Color

5. Fonts

6. Influencers

7. Copy

8. Your Objective

9. Track Your Results

Build Your Own Successful Fashion Social Media Campaign

Hashtags and Their Significance

Hashtags Analytics and Social Media Marketing

The Need for Hashtag Analytics Tools

What Can Hashtag Analytics Tools Do For You?

Top Hashtag Tracking Tools

1. Keyhole

2. Hashtagify

3. AgoraPulse

4. Brand24

6. TweetBinder

7. RiteTag

8. Sprout Social

9. Display Purposes

10. Twubs

11. Socialert

12. Mention

13. BrandMentions

14. Pixlee

15. Talkwalker

Final Notes

1. Keyhole

2. BrandWatch

3. Glean.info

4. Digimind

5. Google Alerts