Have you ever tweeted an airline or an airport with a question or concern? In this week’s Loudpixel Hangout, the team is talking about the rise of mobile customer service and the industry that could set the standard for everyone.
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Using social data to target consumers is nothing new, but how do you feel about syncing your finances to your social media accounts? That’s the latest push from American Express, and they’re hoping you’ll buy into it. In our latest Hangout, the Loudpixel team discusses the pros and cons of the Link, Like, Love program from AMEX which links your social accounts and credit cards to give you targeted deals.
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OK, so you’ve decided to take the reins and blast full speed ahead with the social media portion of your marketing campaign. Great. Feeling overwhelmed? That’s completely normal. There are multiple theories around how best to connect with a social media audience. We’ve talked previously about targeting your audience by producing relevant content that spans several platforms, but perhaps the trickiest element of creating a successful social media presence is timing. For example, let’s take a closer look at the most optimal tweeting times.
Researchers seem to be in favor of tweeting in Eastern Time. In fact, we usually tweet during the obvious commute times (7:30-8AM CT/8:30-9AM ET; 4:30-5PM CT/5:30-6PM ET), but what about the rest of the day? There are plenty of tools featuring scheduling tips for both Twitter and Facebook posts—but beware; we found in testing that different tools may provide different scheduling suggestions. For example, Timely, a tool that will examine your previous tweets to determine the best posting times in relation to audience reach, suggested that we tweet at 10AM, 11AM, 2PM and 3PM Eastern Time. On the same day, Crowdbooster suggested that we schedule tweets for 5PM, 9PM, and 10PM Eastern Time.
The truth is, none of these companies explain in detail how they come up with these determinations (for obvious reasons), which only furthers the idea that there is no set formula in social media. We’ve actually tested all of these times on a weekday, and have not found significant response during just one or two time periods. The one thing we do notice is that our strongest or most relevant posts are (naturally) the ones that receive the highest response. Our conclusion: always make relevant content a priority, experiment with posting times (perhaps with the exception of obvious commute periods) and, eventually, determine what works for you and your audience.
Aside from the timing suggestions, the tools below are pretty handy when it comes to basic scheduling components. We believe in getting help where you can and encourage you to check out these recommendations. If you’re on Pacific Time, scheduling a tweet for 7:30AM Eastern Time the day before might make your life a smidgen easier.
Crowdbooster: This tool provides relevant metrics, recommendations, post scheduling, weekly account summaries, and support via community, email, live chat, and phone for your Facebook and Twitter accounts. The Personal account (one Twitter account, one Facebook account) is free while the Professional (10 total accounts; $39 per month) and Business (30 total accounts; $99 per month) are available at a cost.
Hootsuite: The ad-supported version of this tool is free and allows you to schedule posts for multiple accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The Pro Version ($5.99 per month) is ad-free and allows you to track metrics, collaborate with additional users, and schedule a higher number of messages in bulk.
SproutSocial: This software can do all that Hootsuite does and more, but there is no free version. While SproutSocial has the capacity to suit the needs of larger corporations (the Premium Version is $899 per month), they offer a Small Business Version for $39 per month. This version allows you to schedule posts across multiple platforms, analyze your social media data, and target potential customers/followers.
Timely (Twitter only): This relatively new and free app will not only schedule your tweets, it will pinpoint your most optimal posting times. Timely reviews responses generated by your previous tweets to determine when you will most likely drive engagement.
Image via Earl37a
The Loudpixel team discusses Pinterest’s decision not to release its finished API just yet.
The issue: third party developers can develop on a platform’s API more quickly than the internal team, but this may cause issues for the platform later on when the internal team wants to build out its own features.
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Twitter caused waves this week when it acquired Posterous. Our team got together to chat about how startups and aquasitions are changing our business and marketing culture. Should we continue to invest our time and money building content and businesses in the backyards of free tools that could go away at any time?
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It’s all in how you tweet it.
Can a Twitter boost save your business? Maybe not, but it certainly couldn’t hurt. Most people have a misconception about the relationship between Twitter followers and success. Your company may be a worldwide brand but its Twitter account only has a few hundred followers. While the number of followers a Twitter account boasts is not necessarily related to the quality of the product, it does say something about the commitment to social media integration. And, let’s face it, social media is key to any current marketing strategy.
So how do you put yourself out there?
Search for Twitter accounts relevant to (or not) your field of business that have a successful Twitter following. Don’t take this too literally. If you are a local t-shirt manufacturer, you don’t need to seek out the Fortune 500 t-shirt company’s twitter account, but you may want to research other local, successful textile manufacturers and connect with them. You can search accounts by interest, so jot down a list of keywords that tie into your product. Also, remember that Twitter can be a great platform for business opportunities, so, in the case of the local t-shirt manufacturer, think about following the Twitter accounts of larger retail outlets where you could potentially display your product.
Consider the celebrity endorsement. Celebrity is a relative term. You may not have the pull to get Hugh Jackman to model your t-shirt via Twitpic, but what about the hometown hero that could put you on the map? “Celebrities,” of both local and international fame, usually have a significant amount of Twitter followers, so the potential reach of that one tweet is an important factor. If you don’t have the connections to seek out the big dogs (like Hugh Jackman), then there are plenty of outlets like SponsoredTweets and Adly that will hook you up with an endorsement. Just be prepared to shell out some cash.
Stay connected and observe. As with all things, trends on Twitter are constantly changing. There are currently over 100 million active users and Twitter reported in March 2011 that it receives an average of 460,000 new accounts per day. Recently, Twitter launched Twitter Stories, a collection of stories about people who used Twitter and saw radical change through their communication efforts. Take a look. You just might get inspired to fire up your account.
Well, we’ve spent almost ten months working and reworking our Levee conversation analysis dashboard, and we’re finally ready to release it to the world. Loudpixel is now accepting beta partners for its Levee brand analysis dashboard.
The dashboard is set up to accommodate the two sides of social media monitoring—day-to-day tracking of individual issues and opportunities and deeper insights and measurement based on overall conversations and trends. It’s important to note that Levee was built to make human analysis easier; it works with existing data aggregators, rather than competing against them.
If you’re interested in Levee, learn more about the launch, watch a Levee demo and get in touch to learn more.
In a perfect world, everything can be accomplished by the touch of a button. Alas, this world is far too complicated to rely on buttons—it requires the human touch in order to keep things running smoothly.
This is the case with social media analysis. While computerized monitoring tools can provide solid quantitative data, they are often unable to pick up on the humanistic side of social media responses. For example, a data source may read, “I’m so glad I spent 10 bucks on this awesome movie….right…” as a positive post. However, most humans would classify this as a sarcastic comment. Monitoring software can easily misread sentiment in sarcasm, ambiguity, and may likely incorrectly categorize simple positive or negative posts.
Sentiment is just one aspect of social media analysis that can skew product perception when it is solely computerized. As we’ve reiterated time and time again, human review is necessary in order to guarantee accuracy of information and to fully utilize the capabilities of whatever software you choose to employ. These online tools are essential for securing data quickly and efficiently, but in order to get the most out of your monitoring program, you’ll also need a good pair of eyes.
The race is on to find the perfect social media monitoring tool. A number of big players, including SAS, IBM and Microsoft, have entered the playing field to compete with some of the original players, such as Radian6, Biz360 and Scout Labs.
But the fact is, no single tool is perfect. Whether dealing with the difficulties of Facebook privacy issues, capturing accurate sentiment, filtering out spam or trying to pull in the most relevant conversation data for the brand or organization, no tool can do it all. The perfect technology solution for social media monitoring simply does not exist.
This means that users of such tools need to be extremely critical of the conversation data they’re using. While the tools are powerful—and a great start to drawing insightful conclusions—users need to be checking for irrelevant posts, constantly updating keyword search strings, considering the best approach to tracking sentiment (human vs. automated), keeping an eye out for content duplication and watching some conversations (brand Facebook walls, for example) more closely on a manual basis.
Don’t blindly trust your conversation data. To use a simple metaphor, post data should be approached like a garden—weed daily and apply regular maintenance to avoid becoming overrun with content you don’t want.
When it comes to social media measurement and reporting, automated sentiment is often viewed as a miracle technology—one that saves time by replacing the need for any human intervention. But it’s important to look at this technology with a critical eye before accepting automated sentiment results as fact.
There are a few problems with the nature of natural language processing, which is behind automated sentiment. Even if a technology claims to truly understand the English language, it is still difficult for it to understand sarcasm, misspellings or slang—which are all prevalent across social media posts. I should also note that Biz360, one tool that tracks social media posts, pulled down it’s automated sentiment tracking for Twitter because there are not enough characters to give context for proper processing.
To show a firsthand look at how posts are being categorized through natural language processing, I took a quick look at posts related to “girl scout cookies” (a timely topic). The following are just a few examples of posts that ended up with the wrong categorization.
Marked as Negative:
Marked as Positive:
While the tools for conversation analysis are improving at a rapid pace, it’s important to remember that human analysis is still an important part of the research process.
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