Figuring out if you're ready

Because social media tools are so easy to use, you might think that marketing through them is just as intuitive. The hard work of social media marketing is not in figuring out how to put up a post, though. Consider these questions:

• Is your company ready to hear your customers' unvarnished feedback? A company's first role in a social conversation is to listen, but hearing customers complain about the products, services, or policies you worked so hard on can sting. You need to have a procedure for responding to complaints and train your employees to avoid becoming defensive. Rising to the bait of a customer who just had your product fail is one of the worst things you can do for your corporate image.
• How can your social media campaign add value? Adding real value to the ongoing conversation about your brand is important in all communication channels, but social media users have an especially high expectation of your contributions. People stop listening immediately if all you offer is publicizing your product.
• Are you committed to the ongoing work of producing content? Part of the attraction of social media to its users is the freshness of the content they can find there. If you can't make the time or don't have the budget to produce new content on a regular schedule, your social media marketing efforts will fall flat.

Going for it

It's great to be prepared and have a sophisticated plan for your social marketing efforts, but it's possible to overthink it! In the grand scheme of things, all your business really needs to get started in social media is the willingness to listen. Stop talking and listen. You must give up your need to control the conversation and be willing to be a part of it. When it's your turn to talk, be authentic — celebrate your successes and own up to your failures. If you let people see how genuinely awesome you really are, the rest will take care of itself.

Inspector

An inspector is a window that overlays another window in Social Studio. Usually you see an inspector slide in from the side of the screen. It shows you details when you click an item. (Skip ahead to Figure 13-7 to see an example of an inspector.)

Other apps in Marketing Cloud have similar tools to let you dig into detail information about something you see on the screen, but only Social Studio calls this kind of tool an inspector. Look for the term in the app's documentation and training materials.

Topic profiles

A topic profile is a collection of keywords or phrases that interest you. When you configure a topic profile, the system returns all mentions of your keywords from any sources on the social web that Social Studio tracks. Social Studio tracks more than 100 million sources, including blogs, forums, video sites, and news sites.

You can set up groups of related keywords so that you can use the same groups in multiple topic profiles. Similarly, you can set up reusable groups of sources to include or exclude from your topic profiles.

Figure 13-1 shows a topic profile that is the basis of a dashboard in the Analyze module. It searches for two keyword groups: Brand and Camping.

You can use the results collected by a topic profile in an abstract way when you're analyzing your brand's perception online or as a practical to-do list when you're engaging with your customers on social media.

If your topic profile returns results in which your keywords appear too far from each other, you can use the proximity feature. For example, a post that mentions your product name in one sentence and then coincidentally mentions the word support in the next sentence is probably a false positive for your customer service listening. However, if you set up a keyword with your product name, the word support, and ~3 (tilde and 3), that tells the topic profile to return results only if your product name appears within three words of the word support.

You can also set up your topic profile to exclude posts that include particular words. When you're first setting up your social presence, though, you'll probably want to include all matches from your topic profiles just to make sure that you're catching everything. Until you're overwhelmed with data that is more than 80 percent noise, you can just scroll past the false positives.

You create topic profiles on the Admin screen. You can also create them in the Engage or Analyze modules, if you are at least a Full User in the workspace.

You can edit a topic profile in the Edit Topic Profile inspector, shown in Figure 13-2.

In our experience, a good way to start is to listen for these important topics as you design your first topic profiles:

• Customer service: Use keywords such as support and service. Remember also to listen for negative words that people might use when they're having a problem, such as fail and sucks.
• Lead generation: Use keywords such as looking at and recommendations in addition to your product name or the name of the product category.
• Competitive insight: Listening for information about what your competitors are up to is less about choosing keywords and more about pulling information from the sources that your competitors make available.

Marketing Cloud offers a spreadsheet of sample keywords for these and other topics. You might eventually create a lengthy list of words for each topic, so using a starter list can make your job of choosing keywords much easier.

Workspaces

The day-to-day work of social media marketing through Social Studio happens in a workspace. A workspace is a tool that limits user access to only certain accounts and makes sure they don't accidentally post to the wrong account. When you set up a workspace, you add users and social media accounts to it to control who has access to what.

Figure 13-3 shows a selection of workspaces set up in the account.

A workspace has the following features:

• You add users to the workspace who will be working together. You can add a user to multiple workspaces.
• You associate certain social accounts with the workspace so that workspace members can publish from there. You can associate a social account with multiple workspaces.
• You associate certain topic profiles with the workspace, which gives members of that workspace access to only the content they should work on.
• Each workspace offers a calendar that members of the workspace can use to schedule events.

You might set up a separate workspace for each product in your product line. Alternately, you might set up a separate workspace for each business unit in your company. Another possibility is a workspace based on a geographical area so that a team can collaborate on communicating with customers in a particular country. Any group of users in your account who work together and use the same calendars and social media accounts is a good candidate for a workspace.

To use a topic profile, you have to associate it with the appropriate workspaces. Use the following steps to add an existing topic profile to your workspace:

1. From your workspace, click Add New.

   The Add Topic Profiles window appears with a list of all topic profiles in your account.

2. Select the topic profile whose results you want to import to the workspace.

3. To add the topic profile to the workspace, click Add Topic Profiles.

   A message appears to tell you when the import is complete. The topic profiles you added then appear in the list.

Users and roles

In Social Studio, as in other Marketing Cloud apps, you assign roles to users to control what functionality they can access. However, Social Studio has a different approach to controlling user access than other Marketing Cloud apps: You can't override the role's permissions for a particular user. In addition, a user has two tiers of roles: User role and Workspace roles.

User roles control how much access a user has to see, add, and change content. The available User roles follow:

• Basic users are the most restricted. They can see the content in their workspace, but can edit it only if they created it themselves or if the creator of the content shared it with them.
• Full users are the default type of user. In addition to creating and editing content, they can also create workspaces, topic profiles, and social accounts.
• Super users can do everything full users can. In addition, a super user can administer users, register social media accounts to use in the workspaces, create workflow approval rules, and more.

Workspace roles control the user's access to the tools in a workspace. A user can have different Workspace roles for each workspace, but the User role always stays the same. The available Workspace roles have the following names:

• Limited members can
  • Use the social media accounts for which the admin has given permission
  • View content, the calendar, and analytics
  • View the content they create themselves, plus anything shared with them
• Contributors can
  • Use all the social media accounts in the workspace
  • View all the content in the workspace
• Admins can
  • Perform the same activities as a contributor
  • Manage users, accounts in the workspace, and settings
  • Create approval rules for content

Analyze

The Analyze module contains the tools that you use to review what social media is saying about your brand. Analyze can retrieve data about your own social media accounts: your own posts, and the comments, likes, and direct messages you receive. It can also let you dig into the results of a topic profile, which broadly listens for all mentions of the keywords that you configure it to look for.

Figure 13-4 shows the Analyze module when you first open it.

The Analyze module has two tabs: Dashboards and Workbenches, described next.

Dashboards

Dashboards provide an at-a-glance performance summary over a specified time period. This tool is for business users, such as executives, whose job description doesn't include dedicating hours to digging into social data to identify market trends. This tool gives the casual viewer a quick overview of what's going on with the brand. Figure 13-5 shows a dashboard.

Workbenches

Whereas the Dashboards tab gives the high-level executive view, the Workbenches tab offers the nitty-gritty analyst view. Somebody who is trying to discover the story of what is happening with the brand online will find ample material in the workbenches.

Each card on the workbench shows a count. The count represents either all the activity on one of your accounts or the results of a topic profile, depending on how you set up the card. In either case, you can click the filter icon on the card to open the Filter inspector. Here you can apply filters to reduce the count and make it more manageable.

You can segment your filtered data set by clicking any data you see on one of the cards and choosing how you want to segment it. For example, Figure 13-6 displays two parallel rows, each of which represents a separate segmentation of the original data.

In the top row, the analyst segmented the original dataset by hashtag. The resulting bar graph shows a bar for each hashtag that appears in the data. The analyst then clicked the #nto bar to further segment the data by sentiment. Finally, the analyst clicked the red section of the circle graph to segment the negative posts by the words that appear within them.

In the second row, the analyst took the same initial data set and segmented it by country. The analyst then segmented the data from the United States to see whether the posts appear on the work queue of anyone in the company.

Engage

The second aspect of social marketing to cover is engaging with the people you find by paying attention to the social networks. You may have people on your team whose entire job is spending the day in the Engage module of the application, participating in the online community to establish trust and help create brand advocates among your customers. Customer service organizations often make use of this module.

You use topic profiles in Engage to display all the activity directed at your accounts. You review the posts and determine whether they require a response. Figure 13-7 shows the Engage module populated with social marketing activity. Engage updates the information from the accounts every 30 seconds.

You can click an entry in one of the columns to open the Post inspector. In the Post inspector, you can view the post and do work on it, such as reply or forward it to someone else.

In addition to just the text of the post, the Engage module shows useful information that you can consider as you choose how to respond. For example:

• Twitter Author Influencer Score: A number between 0 and 100 that shows how much influence the commenter has on Twitter. This score appears for Twitter posts only.
• Sentiment indicator: A smiley or frowny face to indicate, at a glance, whether the tone of the post is positive or negative.
• Author labels: A classification of the intent of the post. For example, a post in which the author is looking for help using your product receives the Support Seeker label.

The Engage screen contains a panel of quick action icons from which you can perform actions such as replying, liking, and direct messaging in response to a post. In addition, you can set up macros that complete multiple common actions with a single button click. For example, you could set up a macro that sets the priority of a post to high and assigns a reply to a particular user in your customer support organization. Whenever you find a post that needs these two things, you can activate the macro with a single click.

Publish

When you first open a workspace, the Publish tab is what you see by default. However, we waited to discuss it until the end of the chapter because, conceptually, you should do this part last. Just as you wouldn't barge into an ongoing conversation at a dinner party and just start talking, you shouldn't jump into contributing to the social conversation until you've spent some time getting the feel for the room.

Now that we've discussed listening and engaging with people who are already talking about you, we're ready to address the idea of putting your own posts out there. The Publish module is where the people who create your outbound social communication do their work. Figure 13-8 shows what you see when you open the Publish module in a workspace.

Along the left side of the screen, note the following tabs (represented with icons):

• Create
• Calendar
• Drafts
• Performance
• Tasks
• Shared Content

Create

The Create tab, shown in Figure 13-9, is where you create content. The options for controlling the post may vary slightly, depending on the social network to which you're publishing.

Use the following steps to create a post:

1. From any tab in the Publish module, click the Create Content button.

   If you want to schedule a post for the future, you can instead start from the calendar and click the date on the when you want to publish the post.

2. Select the social media channel in which you want to post.

   The editor window appears.

3. In the Post To field, choose which account or accounts you want to publish the post to.

4. In the Content field, compose the post.

   You can use the buttons below the field to add images, video, and other media besides just text. The buttons available vary depending on which social media network you chose in Step 2. A preview of the post appears on the right side of the screen for you to review.

5. In the Label field, enter labels.

   Later, you can aggregate analytics data based on the values you enter in this field.

6. In the Scheduling field, choose whether to publish the post immediately or schedule it for the future.

7. (Optional) Complete any other fields that you want to use in the inspector.

   The other fields vary depending on the social media network.

8. Click Publish Now (if you chose to publish the post immediately in Step 6), Schedule (if you chose to schedule the post in Step 6), or Save as Draft.

If you chose a publish date in Step 6 but then click the Save as Draft button in this step, the system will not publish your post until you reopen the draft and click the Schedule button.

Calendar

When you schedule a message to publish, it appears on the calendar on the date you scheduled, as shown in Figure 13-10. The color-coding on calendar items indicates the social account that will publish the message. You can use the buttons in the upper-left corner of the window to see the day, week, or month view on the calendar. You can also choose to see the items in a list instead of on a calendar.

If you click a post, the Post Details inspector appears, overlaying the calendar on the right. The inspector includes the body of the post as well as details about its status and schedule. Figure 13-10 shows an example of a Post Details inspector for a post scheduled to appear on Twitter.

Performance

After you've published some posts from your workspace, you can see performance information in the Performance tab, shown in Figure 13-11. This tab gives you a high-level view of how many posts you've published on each account, how much interaction those posts have received, and more. You can also export some reports from this tab. Of course, you can get even more analytical information in the Analyze section of the app.

Shared content

Other users and workspaces can share content with you; if they do, you find it on the Shared Content tab. Shared content can be a valuable resource for increasing engagement with tried-and-true posts. Figure 13-12 shows the Shared Content tab.

Each piece of content on this tab tells you how many times the post has been published and how much engagement the content inspired from the social network. By leveraging successful posts in multiple channels, you can get the most out of your content.

Use cases

Although companies find many creative uses for their social media accounts, we mostly see two kinds of use-cases: customer service and social media marketing.

Listening and analytics

Regardless of your use case, you want to make sure to listen before you engage. These ten tips offer ideas for improving your listening plan:

• Research where on social media people are talking about you. You probably already thought of places such as Facebook and Twitter, but don't forget about Snapchat, TripAdvisor, and Yelp. The nature of your business will heavily influence where you find people talking about you.
• Identify industry influencers. If you can't find anyone talking about your brand, you might need to find the influencers in your industry and invite them to comment on your brand. You can find trusted influencers creating content related to even the most specific topics.
• Listen for social selling opportunities. Be on the lookout for people who are looking for recommendations or even people who are displeased with your main competitor. You don't want to miss a chance to send your sales team an opportunity.
• Keep an eye out for nondirect brand mentions. People might be talking about you even if you don't see your company's name in the post. Look out for misspellings, abbreviations, or general talk about the industry that doesn't include you by name.
• Connect social to the broader business. The best businesses break down silos and have all parts of the company working together. Social media does truly affect your entire organization, so get different departments involved in using social media for support, selling, and growing a community.
• Create categories to organize mentions. Over time, the number of keywords you track and, we hope, the number of discussions about your brand will grow. You need to categorize the information coming in through your social listening program so that you can act on it appropriately.
• Draft analytics reports to help shape future marketing endeavors. As we just mentioned, your successful foray into social media can soon have you drowning in data. Reports and other automation can take some of the heavy lifting so that you and the other humans on your team can focus on making decisions based on the data.
• Be customer focused, not channel focused. You're using Twitter and Instagram instead of a phone, but you're still talking to a person. Use your social engagement to get to know your customers, their needs, and their relationship to your company in a genuine way.
• Automate what you can, but keep the human element. The tools available through the Social Studio can help you manage the flood of data coming in from across the Internet, but you never want your customers to feel like they're talking to a machine.
• Draw meaningful conclusions about your customers from sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis is a tool that automatically judges the customer's attitude about your brand from the kind of words used in the message. Although sentiment analysis is sophisticated nowadays, it's not perfect. Sarcasm, for example, is difficult for the tools to detect. Make sure to check a sample of the messages to make sure you're getting good information from your sentiment analysis.

Engaging your community

When you're ready to join the conversation, use these ten tips to improve your social engagement:

• Empower employees to be social brand advocates. Your staff is knowledgeable about your product and enthusiastic about its success. Encourage your co-workers to represent your brand on social networks and make it easy for them to do so. Keep a list of fresh links and short messages that employees can customize and post to their own circle of friends.
• Put Share buttons in strategic places. A few years back you couldn't miss seeing social icons everywhere you turned. Now, companies are becoming more selective about when they advertise their social presence. You might show off a social network icon to announce that you've just joined. Always tell users the benefit of connecting with you, for example, if you accept support requests or offer special deals through a particular channel.
• Humanize the brand. Own up to mistakes, give a behind-the-scenes glimpse, and show your personality. In an increasingly social world, people expect to have a much more intimate view into the companies they work with. Let them see that your company consists of people who care about helping them succeed.
• Grow your audience the right way. Having a big number of fans looks good on the surface, but it doesn't tell the entire story. You want fans who are engaged and looking forward to interacting with your brand. Provide useful content on a regular basis, have respect for your customers, and respond to comments in a timely manner. It might sound old-fashioned, but it works.
• Be mindful of oversharing. You want to stay on top of recent developments in your field and in the world around you, but posting too much can be a real annoyance to your fans. Test your campaigns to see what frequency works best and then create a publishing calendar that your whole team uses.
• Don't feel compelled to always jump in. A well-timed comment on the news of the day may delight your social media followers, but your company probably doesn't need to register an opinion on every celebrity faux pas. Even when the topic is your own company, you sometimes may be better off to let your community of online advocates speak up on your behalf.
• Aim for transparency. Especially on social media, customers want to feel as though they are involved in the real-life happenings in your company. Authentic communications, such as your CEO soliciting feedback online, can go a long way.
• Help customers become experts. People like to be seen as an authoritative source of knowledge, and if you can help your social media followers to become experts on your company, you will have built brand advocates. Answer questions and offer resources to help your interested followers.
• Engage intelligently with positive feedback. Always thank those who say nice things about you, and look for opportunities to elevate their status in return. For example, you could promote their latest blog post or offer to feature them in a case study. Social media users — and people in general — care about their friends' opinions. It's worth your while to cultivate positive reviews.
• Deal with negative feedback swiftly and skillfully. Also thank those who say bad things about you, and make sure to ignore any name-calling so you can stay focused on the issues. Don't delete complaints, even if the social network allows it: Deleting negative comments can make your company look like it has something to hide.