The social media is where the action is today as the channels are always abuzz with conversations, posts, tweets, and updates. There is, consequently, a golden opportunity for companies to assess their brand image as there could be many people who might be talking about the brand, either positively or negatively.
“Social media is like a cocktail party,” says Sebastian Majewski, senior communications officer at the Gates Foundation. Majewski concedes that social media could generate a lot of noise and hence the challenge lies in identifying the qualitative mentions within the humungous amount of data that is generated.
This is where social media monitoring comes into focus.
Social media monitoring can be split into two parts: social media listening and social media measurement. Social media listening refers to the part where the brand mentions are tracked on the basis of keywords while social media measurement analyses how this makes an impact on your business.
Why Radian6 could be a top choice for organisations?
Radian6 is a platform that helps an organization to monitor the conversation and retrieve results across all channels and from over 150 million sites and sources that include blog posts, comments, Facebook updates, mainstream news, tweets, forums, photo and video sharing sites.
Let’s discuss the features of Radian6 a little in detail to understand why this could be a great tool for organizations to manage their brand presence in the social media web.
Analysis dashboard: Radian6 comes equipped with an analysis dashboard as well as a summary dashboard. The analysis dashboard helps you track the brand mentions through Topic Profile. You can set up the keywords, including the commonly misspelled ones, along with the filter for language and region. The organization needs to invest time and effort in setting up the right kind of profile because the results shown on your widget dashboard depend on the kind of profile generated.
Let’s look at the types of widgets that Radian6 offers in this dashboard and the way they collate data:
- Conversation Cloud: The top 50 keywords from the profile are displayed in a cloud. The bigger the word display the larger is the result from that particular word. The conversation is also interactive in the sense that it lets the user click on a particular keyword and analyse the data further.
- River of News: This widget displays posts that have the brand mentions in the order of newest to oldest. You can view the post with the source link that takes to the platform from where the post originated. You can also sort the results by certain parameters like the post with the most number of comments or by the number of followers on Twitter.
- Topic Analysis: The widget helps you to monitor the sheer number of mentions of your brand or even that of your peer. This also provides social media metrics like the sentiment of the comments, demographic analysis, language processing, etc.
- Topic Trends: This widget is useful to get a graph of the brand mentions at any particular point of time. This is particularly useful during crisis monitoring. You can analyse the graph on the basis of sentiments and track if an unusual upward curve for a negative sentiment is a cause for worry.
The summary dashboard: As the name suggests, this dashboard summarizes the data collated by the analysis dashboard. You can tell how your brand is performing at a glance and even send out quick reports to team members.
Social Studio or Engagement Console: It is not enough getting information about the brand mentions if an organization cannot act upon it in real-time. For instance, if a brand is seeing a sudden spike in negative comments, it helps to get down into the field, find the core reason and act upon it in real-time to mitigate the sentiment loss. In a similar fashion, you can build up on a positive environment for your brand by responding promptly to a positive comment.
Workflows in Engagement Console: One can create workflows by tagging posts to assign to a team member, add source tags, Set a Priority and define Engagement and Classification levels.
The one drawback in this system is that one needs to invest considerable time in setting up the tags to get it all working in order.
Also, the fact that the Analysis dashboard is a desktop app while the Engagement Console is a web-app could seem imbalanced to the user.
Over 55% of the Fortune 500 companies now use Radian6 and all of its accompanying tools for their Social Listening and Engagement needs.
These include agencies that track their client’s mentions and monitor crisis campaigns as well as companies who want to build and improve upon their brand through better and responsive customer care, using the tools provided by Radian6.
As we can see, the insights derived from the social media can be leveraged to suit the requirements of the user. The social media web is constantly evolving and any organisation that wishes to remain in the forefront must pay attention to the growth graph shown across the social web, leverage insights and, if needed, take corrective measures in real-time. Measuring the performance is as important as being in tune with the verbal and non-verbal cues. Hence, we believe that a platform like Radian6 is the need of the hour.