How Long Do You Have With Salesforce Social Studio?
Before you start the search for a Salesforce Social Studio alternative, let’s see how much time we have left.
From August 1st, 2022, the option to renew the Social Studio subscription will no longer exist. The social media management platform won’t be receiving any new updates either in terms of feature improvements or updates. But if your subscription is still valid, you can keep using the tool till the end of your contract or November 18th, 2024.
This is what Salesforce said in an official release – “Starting November 18, 2024, or the end of your contract, whichever comes sooner, you will no longer be able to access the Social Studio application, and all associated customer data will be deleted once your contract ends in accordance with our Trust and Compliance Documentation. If the Order Term for your Marketing Cloud Social Studio Product(s) extends beyond November 18, 2024, Salesforce will reach out to you directly to discuss your options.”
Salesforce, however, can change this retirement date at any point. This makes it even more important for businesses to keep a few alternatives ready up their sleeves before the tool completely vanishes.
What Happens When Social Studio Vanishes?
When Social Studio is gone, businesses using Salesforce Service Suite will no longer have access to social media conversations. Even their customer service teams will not be able to respond to these messages and conversations; there will be a void in Salesforce Service Suite.
Now, a lot of customers will continue to reach out to your business on social media via mentions, tags and direct messages. As a business, due to the lack of Salesforce’s social media suite, you will start to experience challenges in responding to these interactions or listening to your audience. This can result in a drop in your social media response rate and losing out on time-sensitive market insights.
That’s exactly why you need to start looking out for a Salesforce Social Studio alternative like Radarr.
But before we deliver that, let’s look into some of the aspects you need to keep in mind for selecting an alternative to Salesforce Social Studio.
What to Look For in a Salesforce Social Studio Alternative?
Native Integration With Salesforce
This is clearly the most important feature you’ll need from the alternative — native integration with Salesforce. Native integration allows you to access all the available data about customers in one look. And because the data is centralized, you’ll be saving a lot of time.
With centralized data, your social media support team can trace social interactions back to customers. They’ll know all about customers’ previous queries or issues they faced. This will allow the support executives to anticipate the customers’ requirements in a better way.
Multiple Social Media Platform Support
If your business is present on multiple social media platforms, you need to take care of the conversations on each platform. And you won’t be integrating a different tool for a different social media platform.
Your alternative must have the capability to bring all your social conversations to one platform. Otherwise, you are not just wasting resources but will also end up missing out on a lot of messages.
Social Listening Capabilities
Social listening is one of the most overlooked features of a Social Media Response tool. It allows you to keep up with industry trends and discover new sales opportunities. With social listening, you can track your competitors by listening to what your audience is saying about them.
Aside from your competitors, you can find the pain points of your target audience or customers. You get to know what’s working for your customers. And more importantly, what you should avoid to serve your ideal customers better.
It is one feature that must be there in your social media response tool!
Analyze Sentiments Behind Social Media Conversations
A social media response tool is not limited to listening to online conversions and giving timely replies. If it has a sentiment analysis feature, it can do a lot more.
With sentiment analysis, you get to know what a customer felt when they mentioned you or posted a comment. And when you know how they feel, you can reply to them in a language and tone that appeals to their feelings.
Why Radarr is the Best Alternative to Salesforce Social Studio?
The following are some of the reasons why Radarr is the best alternative to Salesforce Social Studio for social media monitoring, listening, analytics and sentiment analysis.
Easy 2-Way Integration and Authentication
Radarr has a 2-way integration with Salesforce. Meaning you can pull the required fields from Salesforce to the Radarr Social Media Response tool. This makes it convenient for the users (your social media and support team) to access data and take quick action.
You can integrate Salesforce with Radarr in just four simple steps:
Login to your Radarr account and add your Salesforce client id, key and domain
Authenticate your Salesforce account
Map your status
You are good to start syncing data
Fetch the Salesforce Tickets
Radarr and Salesforce integration allows fetching the tickets on both platforms in real time. This enables productive collaboration between support and sales teams.
Radarr automatically fetches and syncs all messages to Salesforce once the social platforms have been authenticated on Radarr and the Salesforce data sync option has been enabled. You can also apply filters if you do not wish to sync all messages to Salesforce.
Push Radarr Social Media Response Tickets to Salesforce
Salesforce has a robust ticket system that allows you to capture every request that needs customer service. It allows you to manage these tickets properly, enabling you to provide quick resolution.
Social media is one of the prominent channels where customers complain and come looking for help. Radarr’s social media response integration with Salesforce allows you to push all the complaints and queries to Salesforce, where you can manage every support request.
Manual and Automatic Pushing to Salesforce
Data collected by the Radarr social media response tool can be very insightful for your social media growth. It tells you about customers’ satisfaction levels and how they are engaging with you on social media. By pushing this data to Salesforce, you keep your records fresh and relevant.
You can push data to Salesforce both manually and automatically based on certain criteria. To do it automatically, you need to create rules and set triggering events.
Accurate Analytics With Status Mapping
The data in the Radarr social media response tool is mapped with relevant object attributes to provide you with accurate analytics. You can add more than one set of criteria and rules for the status mapping of the data.
Status mapping matches the data from one database to another and facilitates data management tasks. Mapping bridges the gap between two different systems so that you always get accurate results at your end.
Social listening, monitoring and sentiment analysis capabilities
Radarr leverages a powerful machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithm to process millions of online conversations every day. It is able to not just help you tune into the conversations your audience is engaging in, but also monitor their health and run an in-depth sentiment analysis on the same.
This gives you a better understanding of how your audience perceives the brand, how your marketing and advertising campaigns are working and actionables to optimize them for better results.
It’s Time We Move On!
Social media is the most important channel to cater to your customers. It’s a place where you can make good relationships with your customers. And Salesforce Social Studio did a good job helping businesses manage their social media presence.
But with its retirement, it’s time we move on to a more advanced tool. Because the sooner you get your hands dirty with an alternative tool, the more time you’ll have to master it.
Radarr is one of the best alternatives for the Social Studio tool, allowing you to manage conversations from multiple platforms, listen to what your audience says, and understand the emotion behind those conversations.
Learn how to use psychology to create empathetic content.
Businesses today are creating many pieces of content to share with their audiences. These range from social media posts to email newsletters to in-depth articles and more. In fact, according to eMarketer, a whopping 60% of marketers create at least one content piece each day, if not more.
Over time, content that started out as a means of educating the masses has now become dull, robotic, and monotonous. To add to it, everything feels like a sales pitch with no real value for the audience.
As a result, businesses are now seeing lower engagement rates across all channels.
By understanding ways to create empathy in content and creating an empathetic content marketing strategy, businesses can improve their performance numbers.
In this article, we will look at how you can create empathetic content and empathy marketing examples to help you improve your marketing plan.
What is empathy in content, and why do you need it?
Content and emotion go hand in hand to be termed as successful. In line with this sentiment, we can define empathy in content as the ability to create content that addresses audience pain points and provides the best solutions on their journey.
Research conducted by Salesforce spoke about how 90% of a buyer’s journey is done before they get in touch with a company’s sales representative. So, the onus of inducing empathy in the pieces being put out is on the marketers.
But why do you need to create empathetic content?
To put it simply, instilling empathy in content minimizes monotony and makes it more readable. It improves your brand’s storytelling, which allows passive visitors to develop an emotional connection with the brand.
A greater connection can also lead to the content’s increased shareability and it will greatly impact the brand’s recall value.
How to add and create empathetic content?
Below is a detailed step-by-step guide to how you can add empathy to your content across all marketing channels.
1. Identify the key formats of content you need to create for your audience
When you segment content formats according to the interests of your audience, it is easier to create content that drives results. However, when you have multiple formats to produce, it can be difficult to keep track of your work and identify opportunities to improve.
To instill empathy into your content, identify the content formats you need first. These include social media posts, articles and blog posts, case studies, infographics, videos, carousels, e-books, whitepapers and more.
The next step is to segment them based on audience preference. For example, if your audience prefers infographics on LinkedIn and Reels on Instagram, you will have to create and repurpose the content to cater to your interested audience. The key to success is to make your content formats flexible and scalable, as well as to keep your eyes peeled for new opportunities.
One of the top empathy marketing examples is LinkedIn. They create empathetic content not only in the form of posts on their platform but also have e-books that teach people to create content for their platform to get higher engagement and create a stronger impact.
2. Understand the intention behind a topic of interest
Before creating a content strategy, a fundamental step is to consider the intent behind your audience’s interest. If you do not know what your audience wants, it is difficult to know what content to create and in what format.
You can accomplish this by looking at things like use cases, retention and customer service metrics, and other performance indicators. Of course, referring to multiple metrics simultaneously can be overwhelming. So, it is best to narrow down on a few key metrics that seem workable to manage and important to address and develop your strategy based on that.
Further, savvy players know better than to write on only trending topics. They understand the importance of sentiment analysis in marketing and use it to gauge why their audience is interested in one topic over the other. Sentiment analysis also allows marketers to gauge what emotions they associate with each topic.
Knowing these intricate details, regardless of your industry, can help you address user intent and get a leg up on your competitors.
A well-executed example of this is Headspace’s social media. They are so in tune with their audience’s wants and needs that they cater to their requirements in different content formats in a carefully crafted manner.
3. Understand your consumer’s psychology
Robert Plutchik, an American psychologist suggested 8 primary emotions that he called the ‘Plutchik wheel of emotions’. These include:
Rage
While you do not want your potential customers to feel this emotion for your brand, you can use it effectively to get a conversation going. Some helpful use cases for anger are breaking stereotypes or sharing thought-provoking messages.
Vigilance
The industry that uses this judiciously is the tech industry when sharing features or teasers of their upcoming gadgets. Work on hyping up any approaching releases or events you may have by stirring up anticipation in your audience.
Ecstasy
Spark joy in your audience by creating campaigns that highlight the benefits of using your products or services. You can achieve this by sharing offers and discounts with them for their continued patronage or for signing up for your services.
Admiration
You can evoke this emotion by building trust with your buyers. Businesses that stress on data security, charitable affiliations and more tend to build a sense of admiration in their audience and generally receive a positive response to their marketing campaigns. An example of a beauty brand that does it well is LUSH. Their YouTube series called “How It’s Made” gives their consumers an insight into their values of ethical sourcing and the use of organic products.
Terror
Synonymous with fear, marketers can bring out this emotion in consumers by running limited-time deals for visitors. A proven example of this is sharing your e-books for free for a limited time to build your customer base and then turn them into gated content pieces.
Amazement
When was the last time you rewarded your audience for their patronage? Use surprise as a trigger by running contests, giveaways or even a shoutout on your social media accounts.
Grief
Avoid trying to evoke this emotion in your audience since you do not want your brand to be associated with any negative emotion. An exception to this could be when your content is related to bringing awareness to social causes.
Disgust
This is an emotion you absolutely want to stay away from since it can have damaging effects on your brand. Take Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi ad as an example. It has been 5 years but people have not forgotten how repulsive and tone-deaf the commercial was. Even Dove missed the mark with their glaringly obvious racist campaign.
Alternatively, you can use this emotion in your content pieces when trying to highlight the current situation of the industry and how your business can mitigate the effects. Still, it is a very tricky emotion to navigate, so it is best to steer clear of it.
4. Create a narrative with an end goal
While writing content, you often want to draw in emotional responses from your readers. This can be a challenge, especially when you are writing a content piece that is meant to be educational.
It is a non-negotiable that you understand your target audience so you can connect with them. But you should not forget about the goal behind your content. You want to get people to a certain place, whether it is to convert them to a customer or simply create brand awareness.
Try writing content that is straight to the point and thorough. You can also tweak the content in a way that makes it sound more like a story and less like a tutorial. This will make it easier for people to read and it will help them remember the information. While it is important to not just copy what other companies are saying, try to model your content pieces on their most effective pieces of content.
Test different ideas and formats, but do not stray too far from what you originally wanted to accomplish.
5. Make use of smart tools
When you are drafting your content strategy, your goal is to reach your target audience, regardless of the industry you are catering to. It is important to understand their situation so that you can better relate to them and instill empathy in your content.
One of the best ways to do this is to make use of smart tools that will help you understand your audience. These tools include apps and software that can help you gain more insights about your customers.
One such tool is Radarr’s sentiment analysis platform that uses AI and machine learning to process the content and conversations online, to uncover hidden insights such as emotions – whether the netizens feel positively or negatively about a topic, or do they feel too neutral to take a desired action.
6. Design visuals that add to your narrative
Using visuals is an important part of any content you create. Whether it is a quote you want to include, relevant pictures, or videos, this will help your narrative stand out. This can be a great way to improve how people perceive your piece. Visuals are also a great way to enhance user experience and will greatly improve the effectiveness of your piece.
As a result, visitors will remain on your pages for a longer duration. This can serve you well when it comes to session duration and engagement.
By using an image analytics tool, you can gauge if your chosen visuals are evoking the intended emotions in your audience.
When it comes to creating stellar yet empathetic visuals, Nike is one of the top players. Their visual content strategy is almost unbeatable. From using regular people to athletes and celebrities, their content comprises social proof in all forms, with a visual aid to support their cause.
7. Develop new opportunities to engage with your audience
Establishing a healthy relationship between you and your audience is an important piece of the puzzle when building a community around your brand. By keeping lines of communication open and by creating opportunities to engage with your audience across platforms, you are increasing the chances of your community growing.
If you are worried about algorithms messing with your marketing plan, email newsletters are still one of the most effective ways to reach your audience. These newsletters should be short, educational and entertaining. Additionally, they should have a call-to-action at the end to get people to engage with you.
Other splendid avenues to communicate with your audience include:
Social media platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn
Blogs and articles
Webinars and offline meets
A perk of actively interacting with them on these platforms helps you get privy to their pain points and requirements.
Marketing and advertising that tugs at the heartstrings is an excellent way to garner attention from your target demographic, as well as get them to act on your message.
You can think of empathetic content marketing as a secret tool — one that, when used correctly, can be powerful. When used effectively, it can be a potent means of increasing sales and encouraging consumer loyalty.
If you want to use emotion successfully in your marketing, you first need to understand your audience and know which emotions will resonate most with them. Once you have this information, align it with your overarching marketing goals and you will be on your way to using empathetic content marketing effectively.
Social media moves at an unmatched pace. The expectation of users and their online behavior is ever evolving. This changing behavior leads to changes in social media algorithms, which keep marketers searching for new ways to stand out in the overcrowded marketplace – this is where the importance of keeping up with social media trends comes into play.
In July 2022, the number of social media users was more than 4.7 billion. And the average time a user spends on social media is almost 2.5 hours. With so many users spending so much time on social media platforms, it becomes a marketing channel that businesses cannot compromise with.
To engage with more potential customers on social media, it’s essential for brands to take proactive actions and keep up with the trends. As we are getting close to the end of 2022, here are some social media trends for 2023 that’ll help you convert more potential customers.
Let’s jump right into it!
What Are the Social Media Trends for 2023?
While there is no way to gauge how social media will evolve owing to technology advancements, here are seven social media trends for 2023 that you need to follow:
1. Sentiment Analysis
As a business owner, it’s fine to be obsessed with numbers and metrics. But this doesn’t mean that you start treating your customers as data points. If you’re engaging with these customers on social media, you must ensure they feel emotionally connected.
Your content will not be quite effective if your audience cannot relate to it on an emotional level. And to connect with them on an emotional level, you first need to assess what they feel about your brand. This is where sentiment analysis comes in.
Sentiment analysis allows you to determine what your customers feel about your brand and how they perceive your products or services. It gives you the context of people’s conversations on the social space about your business.
Using a sentiment analysis tool like Radarr, you can go beyond just following any popular trend. You can identify the underlying aspects of these trends and understand how your audience engages with them. Then you can pick the trends that actually interest them.
Long story short, with social listening, you get to know what makes your customers happy or angry. And with this knowledge, you can tailor your product or services to serve them better.
Let’s be honest; there’s hardly anyone who doesn’t enjoy watching short-form videos. With the rise of TikTok and then Instagram coming up with the reels option, it’s pretty clear that short-form video is the future of social media platforms.
And it didn’t stop at Instagram, platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Snapchat also identified the potential of short-form videos and developed algorithms that rewarded short videos with more reach. According to a report published by the Search Engine Journal, short videos receive two times more engagement than images.
Moreover, short-form videos grab users’ attention for a more extended period ensuring that they get the whole message out of the content. A HubSpot report ranked short-form video #1 for lead generation and engagement. More than 50% of marketers believe short-form videos are more likely to go viral.
All these stats substantiate that short-form video content is the future of social media!
For most businesses, a major share of the marketing budget is spent on social media campaigns. In a survey, half of the marketers agreed that they spend 50% of their marketing budget on social media ads. This number is expected to go higher in the year 2023.
And this investment in social media ads is wholly justified, given the opportunity to engage with an exponentially increasing user base. There has also been a substantial decline in organic reach, making ads necessary for businesses.
But your customer acquisition cost (CAC) will skyrocket if your ads are not optimized. You don’t want your ads to appear in front of users who don’t need your product. With social listening, you can construct detailed buyer personas to create better ads keeping your budget in control.
Social listening tools like Radarr allow you to gather actionable insights from your audience’s online conversions related to your business. It also analyses their interests and current industry trends in real-time, which helps make your ads more effective.
4. Engagement > Likes
As marketers, we spend a lot of time creating valuable and conversion-worthy content but get disappointed when it does not get enough views or likes. Is it worth getting influenced by the number of views/likes?
Think about it. What would you do with thousands of extra views if none of those viewers wanted to know more or take the next step? This is why the engagement your post generates is a far more critical metric than just the number of views or likes.
And not just views. You should prioritize engagement over the number of followers you have. Prioritizing social media engagement over followers means you are going for quality over quantity.
You can have quality followers, maybe fewer in number, but they’ll consistently engage with your content and will buy more from your brand. It’s better than having thousands of dispassionate followers who don’t pay attention to what you’re saying, let alone buy from you. These followers reduce the conversion rate and ROI of your content and campaigns.
Moreover, the current algorithms of almost every social media platform boost content that generates good engagement.
When you engage back with these customers, they find it easy to ask for doubts. This way, you’ll be able to use social media as a customer support channel too, where you can clear basic queries from the users.
User-generated content is becoming an increasingly important part of social media content marketing. The rise of UGC has completely changed the dynamics of the conversations brands used to have with their customers.
Over the past five years, the number of searches for “user-generated content” has increased by 58 percent. Moreover, the brands that use user-generated content witnessed a 20% growth in the number of visitors returning to shop.
Now, you might ask, where does this UGC content come from? It can come from anywhere — your customers, brand loyalists, or even employees. Customers who share unboxing videos or praise-filled posts are the most prominent cohort for increasing conversion.
User-generated content also takes your brand authenticity to a whole another level. Customers are very selective about the brands they interact with. And they love to interact with brands that post authentic content, and what’s more authentic than UGC from your customers?
We’ll discuss more on authenticity later in the blog.
Coming back to user-generated content, here’s how La Croix, a sparkling water company, uses it.
When you look at the social media account of La Croix, you’ll see that it’s filled with user-generated content. They repost everything from photos of young adults to fan art.
And though the content comes from people with different backgrounds and tastes, La Croix doesn’t fail to maintain a consistent brand look. On scrolling through their account, you’ll see sunny landscapes, bright colors, and smiling faces.
With Radarr, you can identify accounts that are actively talking about you or something related to you. You can then find content that goes on your social media. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be an appreciation photograph. You can share reviews, testimonials, and anything your audience finds attractive.
6. Crisis Management Becomes a Must-Have
You don’t know what kind of crisis will hit your brand at what time. It’s that unpredictable. Therefore, it is a must to have a social media crisis management strategy in 2023.
So what crisis are we talking about? Sometimes your business lands in a situation where you took an action that offended a lot of people (not just customers). It can affect your brand negatively if you don’t resolve it immediately.
For example, Sephora, a French skincare company, found itself in a crisis when SZA (a famous musician) reported an instance of racial profiling. And when something negative comes from a celebrity, it brings a lot of attention to your brand.
Here’s the tweet:
Twitter users instantly came out to her defense, and many of them reported that they faced something similar.
Sephora was quick to recognize the negative impact this tweet brought to their brand and apologized to SZA publicly. They also mentioned how seriously they took these complaints and promised to address the situation immediately.
From no angle, Sephora looks great in this situation. But because of their crisis management strategy, they were able to not only apologize quickly but also show how they care about their customer’s experience.
How well you sell on social media is determined by your understanding of your customer’s personal motivation to use social media. Around 57% of people say that they increase their spending with a brand when they feel truly connected with them.
And how do you truly connect with the audience? There are three key elements you need to take care of — transparency, empathy, and authenticity.
90% of customers believe that authenticity is one of the most critical factors they search for in a brand to like and support them. Even marketers (more than 80%) agree that authenticity is crucial for their brand success.
Gone are the days when you could bombard people with promotional content. Anyone could do that. But staying authentic with your content while staying focused on your social and business goals is a different story altogether.
In 2023, your brand authenticity on social media will help you sell more!
8. Social Media Shopping
You’re scrolling Instagram, engaging with the photos of your friends, celebrities, and influencers. While doing so, you come across a sponsored post showcasing a gaming chair that you know is perfect for you. On these posts, there’s a view products button that takes you to the product page where you can buy it. Buying products via social media is called social shopping.
Ever since the pandemic hit us, eCommerce has been on the rise. And social media platforms have figured out a way to help customers find and buy items without having to leave the platform.
According to a report by Accenture, social media shopping is expected to grow at a 3x speed compared to traditional eCommerce in the next four years.
You can treat social media as a secondary channel to complement your website or eCommerce store. Your business can promote the products on social networks, targeting the customers who’d be really interested in the products.
If you want to sell to a younger audience, there’s no better place than social media for it. More than 35% of social media users aged 15-22 used the “buy” button.
Be it Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, you can sell on any of these platforms. And very soon, as social media shopping expands, these platforms will add new features to make it easier for users to shop. The easier it is for your audience to shop, the more sales you can get.
If you want to increase your sales, don’t underestimate social shopping in 2023!
Keep Up to Date With the Latest Social Media Trends in 2023
Keeping yourself up to date with the latest trends will ensure that you keep getting better results on your social media efforts.
However, you need to follow these trends strategically. Otherwise, you’ll end up overspending on social media marketing.
It’s best to first understand your audience and then jump on to follow these trends. You can use Radarr to understand your customers and determine how they feel about your business.
Experiment with these Instagram Story ideas to get more views and engagement.
Unable to increase your followers or establish a robust presence on Instagram? Well, you’re not alone and that’s why we’re sharing some Instagram Story ideas that will help you unlock a wider audience reach and at the same time truly engage the platform’s users.
While everyone else is talking about the content to post on Instagram, hashtags and running ads, we think Instagram Stories need to have an independent place in your marketing strategy.
To put things into perspective, each day, more than 73% of Instagram users watch stories. It is one of the fastest ways for them to consume content rapidly as they follow hundreds of accounts – personal connections and brands they’re interested in.
However, think about how you usually browse through Instagram Stories. The rapid scroll action often ends up with consumers missing the point when it comes to what the brand has to say and that can be a lost opportunity to truly engage an audience.
This is where your Instagram Story ideas need to get creative and we have done some groundwork for you!
Before getting started though, let’s look into some key Instagram statistics that prove the channel is worth the effort.
Instagram Statistics 2022
Instagram is expanding its set of features and content formats continually, giving businesses an opportunity to experiment with different marketing and advertising strategies. The ever-expanding user base also adds to the reasons why businesses should be using the platform.
According to Instagram’s global advertising audience reach statistics, there were at least 1.440 billion users on Instagram worldwide in July 2022
In 2022, 58% of marketers intend to use reels and stories to engage their target audience
70% of users regularly view Instagram stories to consume content and interact with accounts
On the platform, more than 100 million photos are posted every day
Each month, 130 million users tap on messages about sales
The engagement rate for business accounts with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers is 0.93%
Every day, 4.2 billion Instagram posts are liked by users
Instagram is used by more than 25 million companies to market their goods and services
Users who view branded stories make up 67%
81% of Instagram users use the app to look up new goods and services
On Instagram, 90% of accounts follow at least one company
According to the most recent Instagram statistics, 83% of users utilize the network to find new goods and services
When they view advertisements on Instagram, 50% of Instagram users get more interested in a brand
Instagram ads can reach a total of 1.39 billion users (including Story ads)
Women make up 47.2% of Instagram’s global user base
Men make up 52.8% of Instagram users worldwide
Now that you know the potential of Instagram, let’s look into the different Instagram Story ideas that can help you reach a wider audience.
Instagram Story ideas to get get more views and audience engagement
There are numerous ways to use Instagram Stories owing to the stickers and other interactive add-ons the platform has to offer. But here are some of our favorites:
1. Add Eye-Catching Quotes
Quotes are succinct, to the point, and shareable above everything else. Motivational, intriguing, amusing, business-related, or pretty much anything else. Find a quotation that suits your brand on the internet, then copy it and enter it into your Instagram Story.
2. Use Countdown Stickers
Your viewers can be informed of the specific time your next post, live broadcast, product release, or other events will occur by using a countdown sticker on Instagram Stories. By this, your audience is aware of what you are counting down to. Specify the date, time, and title. Additionally, your followers may share the countdown on their stories and create an alert to be notified when it ends, increasing your engagement.
3. Request Suggestions
You can get ideas for new content and learn which of your solutions your customers prefer by asking them what they want from you. The ‘ask me a question’ sticker is the best suited for this Instagram Story idea to not just boost engagement, but also garner insights for key business decisions.
4. Ask Questions
Instagram Stories should contain a compelling call to action that entices your audience to engage with your content in significant ways. Use question stickers to engage with your followers and maybe carry out some unofficial market research. Adding a question sticker is the best method to engage in conversation on Instagram Stories. Respondents can be contacted directly via DM, or you can use their messages in your upcoming story. The basic call to action is simply asking questions, which encourages participation from your followers.
5. Drive traffic with the Link Sticker
The link sticker, a recent update to Instagram Stories, is a fantastic opportunity for you to direct your followers on Instagram to your other online properties. The link sticker was created to take the place of the previous swipe-up link feature and makes it simple to include external URLs in Instagram Stories. You can use this sticker to point people to your most recent website, blog, or even online store.
6. Reshare UGC
As consumers start engaging with your brand, they may also tag you in Instagram Stories uploaded on their accounts. Don’t let them go unnoticed; reshare them on your Instagram Story with a cute sticker to thank them for the word of mouth promotion. It is also a great way to make your customers or followers feel acknowledged.
7. Conduct a poll
Another Instagram Story idea we really love is conducting polls. Since polls require people to pay attention to the content, it stops them from scrolling past stories too rapidly. You can add the poll sticker and create a series of Instagram Stories to get inputs or opinions from your target audience.
8. Create a quiz
Similar to a poll, if you want your target audience and followers to pay attention to the content on your Instagram Stories, conduct a quiz. Walk them through a series of questions and option-answers that they can engage with to reach a conclusion – this could be something as simple as a shoutout to the person who gets the most number of right answers on your business account!
9. Create Short tutorial and Hacks
Tutorials have two functions – they demonstrate how to use your product to prospective buyers, and they assist current users in utilizing it more effectively. Include brief tutorials in both your Instagram Story Highlights and your Stories so that followers may watch them whenever they want. Answering and demonstrating solutions concisely promotes the brand’s credibility.
10. Show people behind the brand
Not just personal brands should be personalized. Give each member of your team a chance to shine by having them introduce themselves, their role, and a humorous tidbit in their own words. To offer your viewers a flavour of your company’s culture, you can combine this Instagram Story idea with others and ask a teammate to take over a story or document their day behind the scenes. This kind of story might also help recruiters find your business more appealing. For instance, Consider conducting an office tour.
11. Consider influencer collaborations
Another Instagram Story idea that can help boost the engagement on your account is collaborating with popular influencers. Similar to employee account takeovers, you can have influencers take over your account stories for a day, sharing their experience with your products, their day to day topics or their visit to your studio/ office/ workspace. It’s a great way to draw attention from the influencer’s followers as well and gain more followers!
12. Conduct an AMA
Show your audience how transparent you can get with them and how willing you are to share information with them. Open up an AMA to get questions from them and share answers to the queries you receive on the Instagram Stories that follow. Make sure you save these answers in highlights so that followers can refer to them at a later time.
13. Start a chain
Use the ‘add yours’ sticker on your Instagram Story to get users to contribute and create a series of posts around a topic. For example, if you’re a swimwear brand, you can ask them to add their beach pictures in your collection – this not just gets you more UGC, but also gives them a chance to get discovered by other accounts.
14. Go live
Another way to boost your account engagement using Instagram Stories is to go live. You can use different occasions like product launches, events and others to start a live session wherein your audience can join in to ask questions and see you answer them all in person. This also helps increase face time of your audience with your brand, leading to higher trust in what your business has to offer.
15. Share positive reviews
Most businesses use Instagram Stories to share promotions or pictures of their products; that’s exactly why users tend to scroll through them rapidly like flipping a book. Break the chain and get them to consider these products you share by sharing customer reviews and testimonials on them.
16. Use interactive stickers
From getting them to rate something on a scale of 1-100 with a swipe of heart or using festive/ occasion-based stickers, get creative on your Instagram Stories. These interactive stickers unlock a whole new audience reach for your account owing to the purpose and goal they’re built for. For example, the Christmas Stickers that are going to come up and show under trending as soon as December kicks in.
17. Share Job Postings
Finding and keeping staff costs money. If your viewers are also your ideal candidates for employment, you can think about posting a hiring announcement on Instagram Stories. Draw in top talent from those who are already enthusiastic about what your brand has to offer.
18. Add a location
If you’re attending an event or are opening a new store, don’t just announce it on your Instagram Story. Use the location sticker to get indexed and discovered by users in the area – this is a tried and tested Instagram Story idea to drive location-specific engagement.
19. Add some music
Just like a background score on the main character’s entry, add some personality to your Instagram Stories. This not just makes your Story a lot more engaging, but also helps it get discovered by those who have shown interest in the same music.
20. Use hashtags
Instagram also allows you to add hashtags to your Story. But at the same time, it is important to know that you can’t add too many of them as it may look all too spammy! Make use of the hashtag sticker to add the most relevant hashtag (phrase) to your story – this acts similar to how hashtags work in Instagram posts.
Turn your Instagram Stories into an engagement channel
Instagram Stories offer an untapped opportunity to businesses and accounts. But they often get used to only reshare what gets posted on the feed – posts, carousels, videos and Reels; we recommend having a complimenting strategy leveraging the Instagram Story ideas above!
But the true hack to getting the most out of Instagram Stories, is to stay consistent with your efforts and continually experiment with the content you share on them. It’s also important to analyse how your target audience interacts with it and optimize your strategy accordingly.
You can do this with the help of smart social media analytics tools like Radarr that come with listening, monitoring and sentiment analysis capabilities to help you create an Instagram marketing strategy that actually work.
Social media presence is not about posting and ghosting. If you really want to turn social media into a channel to reach your target audience and grow your business, you need to be as serious about the platforms as you are about tax audits. Yes, we’re talking about social media audits.
More often than not, social media marketers create monthly calendars to keep their profiles and pages alive. While they do include content based on thorough research, what a lot of them miss doing is an audit on what works and what doesn’t – this includes the sentiment a post may generate, the type of images that do well, the formats of social media posts that the audience engages with the most and so on.
Simply put, a social media audit tells you more than just the reach of your efforts on a platform and your best performing posts, so you can double down on what works the best for your business.
In this article, we’re going to deep dive into social media audits and how to conduct one. But we need you to remember that social media audits can look different for different businesses, based on their goals and objectives.
What is a social media audit?
A social media audit refers to the process of going through all your efforts on social platforms to assess if they have been contributing effectively to your business goals and objectives. It includes looking into the amount of effort and time invested on the social media platforms, evaluating their performance with the help of pre-defined KPIs and identifying opportunities to optimize them for better results.
In simpler terms, a social media audit is the process of analysis that highlights which social platforms work the best for your business, what type of content and campaigns resonate with and engage your audience, what you can do to make them better as compared to your competitors and similar accounts – removing all the guesswork from your social media marketing efforts.
Social media audits are typically conducted monthly, quarterly or yearly based on the focus a business has on the marketing tactic. They are like a reporting mechanism that comes added with actionable insights for the team.
What are the benefits of a social media audit?
It’s easy to get diverted from your goal while posting every day on social media. From following trends to creating content that competitors might be, social media can become dynamic in no time. That’s where a social media audit comes into the picture:
Find gaps in your social media strategy that could be dampening your reach and conversions
Identify opportunities to improve your social media content and campaigns – organic and paid
Identify your top performing social media channels
Identify your best-performing posts and weakest content types/ topics
Create new objectives for social media channels – engagement, follower count, target audience segments and similar
Set clear standards and measurable goals for the upcoming month/quarter
Keep teams aligned with social media campaigns – marketing, branding, sales and customer support
Monitor brand presence and conversations proactively to measure share of voice
Calculate the ROI of your social media efforts
Streamline and optimize resource allocation on social media channels
What should a social media audit include?
While there is no one set template for a social media audit, we do recommend including the following in yours – these may vary based on who your target audience is, the industry your business is in and what your business goals are.
Profile Information – your account username, URLs, and links posted on the account
Audience data – where they’re from, when are the most active, gender ratio and other demographics
Publishing schedule – how often do you publish content on social media, changes in posting schedules
Referral traffic – which social media channels drive the most traffic to your website or the links promoted through them
Account-specific metrics – reach, virality rate, views, video completion rate
Audience sentiment – how your target audience perceives the brand on a social media channel and how they feel about your content
How to conduct a social media audit?
Conducting a social media audit can be overwhelming – especially if your business has a presence on more than two platforms. To streamline the efforts you put in, we’ve compiled a series of steps based on our experience and interviews with leading social media marketers – feel free to switch them up or change them based on your business goals.
1. Create a spreadsheet
A spreadsheet helps you write down all necessary data in a tabular format and is easy to analyze and compare over time. This spreadsheet should include separate tabs for each of the platforms you’re present on, including all the profile information and the results over time – the metrics you map on each platform will be different.
Once you have your data neatly arranged in a spreadsheet, start looking for patterns and trends – weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly or at concrete intervals.
2. Conduct a competitor analysis
Competitor analysis teaches a lot about what works and what doesn’t without having to implement it. Here’s what you get after analyzing the social media accounts of your top competitors:
Performance benchmarks – the average number of likes, comments, and saves per post, average followers
Customer pain points
New content ideas
Heads up on what to avoid on social media – content with the most dislikes or negative comments
Make competitor analysis a part of your social media audit as it will give you a ballpark for comparisons and benchmarking. For instance, if you’re just starting out, this can give you insights on what KPIs to set, what numbers to expect over a period of time or what type of content you should publish more. Or if you have been stagnating on social media, this analysis gives you a run down on what you need to do to move the needle.
3. Define the objectives of your social media strategy
You may have created a social media account for leads, but your objectives must be more specific. Not having clear social media goals is like shooting an arrow in the dark. You never know what you’re aiming for.
Your strategy depends on your goals and it can be different for each goal. For example, if you want more sales, you need to find the bottom-of-the-funnel content and target people who’re ready to buy. But if you want to increase brand awareness, you’ll post more informative content and target new audiences.
Define clear objectives in the spreadsheet. Here are some examples of social media goals:
Increase brand awareness
Discover new audience insights
Generate more leads
Build an engaged community
Grow website traffic
Increase brand’s reach
We recommend using the SMART goal-setting framework. This ensures that your social media goals remain streamlined and realistic, making them more achievable over a period of time.
4. Create a list of your social media profiles
We’re all guilty of creating and forgetting about the number of accounts we make on social media. While channels like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and similar stay on top of our minds, smaller platforms that trend for a short period, often take a backseat. Even though teams don’t actively use them, your presence on the platforms does get indexed by the search engines and contribute to your overall social media performance.
Create a list of all your social media accounts and take note of when you signed up on them. Also take notes on why you may have signed up on the account, the potential it has, the effort it will require for reviving the channel, what segment of your target audience is present on it and at what position does it fall in the order of priority to achieve your business goals and objectives.
5. Evaluate the consistency in branding
Consistent branding makes your company recognizable across all social media channels – this includes your tone of voice, type of content you post, color palette, and visual identity, amongst other parameters. It is what sets you apart from your competitors on the noisiest of channels.
When you use similar branding throughout your marketing channels, the audience recognizes you fast and trusts you more.
68% of respondents in Marq’s brand consistency report said that brand consistency contributed 10-20% to their overall revenue. For instance, We make sure the colours and tonality used on our website are replicated across all our social media profiles for consistency:
Radarr websiteRadarr on InstagramRadarr on Twitter
Here are tips to ensure consistent branding for your business on social media platforms:
Create a social media branding style guide: Include colours, fonts, logo, voice, and icons in your style guide. Use these in all social media graphics to maintain consistency.
Create and communicate your brand value: Share your brand value as posts and stories, and tag people who are involved in the story to invoke a sense of community. You get more shares and mentions this way.
Use social media templates: Templates help you stick to a format. It comes in handy when you’re creating and scheduling posts in bulk. Create different templates for stories and posts – text or image-based. Add the core content to your pre-set template, and you’re good to go.
Repurpose Content: Repurpose valuable content to reach more audiences. For example, repurpose tweets into Instagram posts or newsletters with your branding style guide. Convert data points and statistics into infographics. Use tools like Mailchimp’s creative assistant to automatically pick a logo, colors, and font from your website to create personalized infographics.
Organize your visual assets in one place: Your media team will naturally avoid adding visuals. Store your logos, product images, infographics, and color palettes in one place. It can be a google drive folder or an asset management tool. Provide access to all your team members so they quickly pull out any visual element to use in a content piece.
Pro tip: You can also use image analytics to audit which of your branded images drives the most active engagement and positive campaign performance. Read more about it here.
6. Identify relevant metrics
If you still think only follower count is the measure of your success on social media, it’s time to rethink your KPIs. With algorithm changes across all key social media platforms, it is the interactions and audience engagement that counts the most. Here are some of the numbers we recommend adding to your social media audit metrics:
Engagement
Shares
Number of mentions
Impressions
Referral traffic
Click through rate
Reach
Measure these metrics in comparison to the previous month or quarter. If a metric has improved, find out which posts are responsible for the growth — repeat them. If a metric has declined, find out the gaps in your content — improve.
7. Evaluate your social media content
As per Hubspot’s survey report, 45% of businesses post multiple times per week, and 23% of businesses post multiple times per day – that’s a lot of content. Not all of it is relevant. Marketers publish some posts to maintain consistency; these posts don’t necessarily contribute a lot to the account’s progress.
The whole purpose of a social media audit is to analyze posts that resonate well with the audience. Look for:
The most popular authors
The most popular mentions
The post with maximum interactions
The best performing content format
The elements that make the content a success – tone of voice, image/ visuals, intent of the content
8. Conduct a sentiment analysis
Social media sentiment analysis or opinion mining tells you what people say about your brand online. A high number of mentions look good on the surface, but they cause a negative impression if people tag your brand in negative posts. It hampers your reputation and hurts your sales.
A sentiment analysis in social media audits helps you identify how your audience ‘feels’ about the content you publish or the campaigns you run – the underlying emotion that may or may not be visible through the number of comments or views on a post.
How to do a sentiment analysis?
Track your mentions with the help of social media monitoring
Monitor popular hashtags and keywords to analyze what your audience is talking about, where your brand is mentioned
Look for positive or negative words in the posts. Positive words include ‘love’, ‘amazing’, ‘best’ or ‘perfect’ and similar; while bad words may include ‘bad’, ‘awful’, ‘terrible’ or ‘worst’ and similar phrases
Now to ensure that your sentiment analysis is not based on personal opinions or assumptions, we recommend using a social media analytics tool like Radarr. With the help of AI and machine learning, Radarr is able to not just monitor online conversations related and relevant to your business (brand), but also present a thorough sentiment analysis on what your audience has to say about it. Learn more about it here.
9. Measure ROI of social media channels
Whether it’s audits or strategies, you want results after putting in the effort. But measuring the ROI of social media channels is quite challenging. You can measure followers, engagement, or results of paid ads, but it’s challenging to measure the increase or decrease in brand awareness or industry leadership.
First, let’s understand the real -monetary- ROI of your social media channels:
Calculate the overall investment:
Tools – social media audit tools, social media intelligence tools, social media management tools
Ads – the cost of all paid ads you ran this quarter
Content – content outsourcing costs (payment to graphic designers, writers, editors, and content managers)
Time – determine hourly costs of your social media marketing efforts
Once you have all the data in place, calculate the social media ROI with this formula:
Profit/Total Investment * 100 = Social media ROI
When it comes to brand awareness, the ROI is based on relevant metrics. For example, to measure brand awareness, calculate the reach. If you conduct an influencer marketing campaign to increase brand awareness, monitor your views and followers before and after the campaign.
Divide the number of increased followers by the cost of hiring those influencers plus any overhead costs of the campaign. Suppose the cost is $2000, and the increase in followers was 10,000.
10000/2000 * 100 = 500%
500% result is a pretty good ROI. We’ve assumed the number here but use the same formula to calculate the ROI of your social media efforts.
10. Monitor your social media presence
The whole purpose of a social media audit is to optimize your account so that your target audience can easily find you. Your account should pop up whenever they search for an industry keyword.
Check your presence across all social media channels to ensure you’re showing up for relevant keywords. Some channels, such as LinkedIn, use social media intelligence to share who’s searching for you.
For other platforms, search keywords to see where you’re ranking for them – the higher, the better. Jot down your rankings for all platforms and compare them over time. To understand how your audience looks for businesses such as yours, you can also use tools like Radarr for business intelligence and audience insights.
Ready to conduct a social media audit?
Keeping up with different marketing tactics and maintaining a presence on social media can be a very daunting task. That’s why most marketers shy away from really conducting a social media audit.
But if you ask us, a social media audit is what your business needs to streamline the amount of effort and resources you invest into a channel and optimize them for maximum returns.
This is where we’re seeing social media marketers and managers leverage analytics tools like Radarr for social listening, monitoring, sentiment analysis and KPI tracking. With all the insights on one dashboard, it makes it much easier for them to conduct a social media audit and pay attention to numbers that truly matter.
Want to see how we’re enabling social media audits and making them more effective?
