Using Social Data to Optimise Our Communication Strategy

By Perri Robinson

The digital space is a noisy one and to stand out companies must think creatively. One way in which you can differentiate yourself from the market is by using a social media monitoring tool to dig for data that can be used to help optimise your communication strategy, ensuring it’s both relevant and timely.

To use social media data, we don’t have to be analysts. Today, there are a ton of tools out there which can present social data in a simple and easy to understand format! For the purpose of this blog, we’re focusing on how to uncover social insight by using a social media monitoring tool.

Content themes

When it comes to content, there’s no one size fits all approach, but we could be here all year trying to find our audience’s sweet spot and by the time we do it’s likely to have changed! Trial and error can be costly; thankfully the use of a social media monitoring tool removes the need to follow this inefficient approach.

Social media monitoring tools can help us make sense of messages that are resonating by analysing conversations and filtering them by sentiment.

The use of a word cloud can also give us insight on the messages and trends associated with our brand. We can use this data to replicate or avoid themes loved or loathed by our community within our content marketing strategy. This helps us optimise communications based on what our audience wants to hear and not what we want to say.

Top tip: Don’t forget to also take a look at key themes being said about competitors using a social media monitoring tool. Their weaknesses could become ours, same goes for their strengths!

Post when our audience are active

Similarly to content themes, the best day/ time of day to post content depends on our audience and the channel they’re active on. A social media monitoring tool is needed to take note and report engagements such as media exposure, sentiment, geographic spread and reach. But if this sounds like too much work, we could always use Meltwater’s engagement tool ‘viral post’ feature. This figures out the best time for us, so we can maximise engagement!

Making use of advocates

Trying to increase engagement can be a struggle for many companies, which is why it’s baffling that so many companies forget to use their most engaged community members to influence others to have conversations too! Brand advocates and employees should be our first point of contact when it comes to optimising our communication strategy. Don’t be afraid to share campaigns and content with them and ask them to do the same amongst their community.

Having brand advocates promote our content is the easy part; it’s finding them amongst the social noise that can be a hassle. The top followers feature is perfect for discovering our brand lovers. Find out more about how you can build an employee brand ambassador strategy to help endorse and optimise your content further in our previous blog post!

Want to learn more about how you can use social media monitoring data more creatively? Get in touch with us here, we’d be happy to spar out some ideas!