This week we take a look at how companies are engaging with social media tool companies to develop and execute effective marketing strategies. We examine how the data generated by tools such as Socialbakers is being integrated into command centers and executive business dashboards; and how companies are engaging with Socialbakers to help them develop and execute their strategies.
I have always been interested in how companies often buy tools but don't successfully integrate them or use them to their full potential. It is good to see that companies are actively approaching Socialbakers for help and support. As a consequence Socialbakers is growing the range of professional services that they provide to their clients, in addition to selling their software and their database.
Social Bakers provides a comprehensive social media management suite which comprises three products namely:
- Analytics
- Builder
- FB Ads
I have provided a brief overview of these products below, however, I wanted to start with the three areas where companies are seeking support. There are three specific areas where Social Bakers increasingly provide support to companies through professional services.
1) Strategy and Execution
Managing social media is a complex business. It is also an important part of marketing and customer service. Companies are investing in more professional approaches which start with strategy including their content strategy.
The rise of social media and content marketing is changing the way teams are organized. Thus companies are looking for examples of best practice and support from experts such as Social Bakers in how to organise teams and how to structure efficient workflows.
2) Command Centers
It is now very common for companies to set up command centers. These involve large screens or banks of screens which you will find increasingly in reception areas and in corporate headquarters. These command centers help visualize the stream of social data. They also make making it clear the organization takes social seriously. Social Bakers have installed over 20 large command centers including one of the largest for Nestle in Geneva.
3) Executive Dashboards
Social data is a key part of operational data for many companies especially consumer facing brands. Social data is being combined with daily sales data, web traffic and customer service data to provide insights into the performance of a business. This data is aggregated and presented in visual form as an executive dashboard for the business.
Socialbakers through their professional services team are helping companies to design and implement executive dashboards. A good example is their work with Lenovo in Singapore.
How Socialbakers Generates Actionable Data and Insights
I have provided an overview below of the data generated by the three Social Bakers products and how they support the management of an efficient workflow as well as provide insights inot what works.
Analytics
The analytics tool works across all the core platforms and makes it easy to add and monitor pages or accounts.
The tool allows companies to monitor and compare their social engagement at a detailed level against competitors and industry averages. You can drill down further such as comparing local fans in specific regions.
The tool calculates comparative engagement rates by aggregating likes, comments and shares across the number of fans and calculating an engagement score
Social media is very much a customer service channel for consumer brands and the analytics tool measures response rates to queries from customers and allows companies to set key performance standards to be measured against. Socialbakers have calculated global benchmarks for different industries and companies can compare themselves to these.
The tool allows you to focus in on key influencers, measured by the number of user interactions. These may be positive or negative influencers and allow you to take action accordingly.
The reporting is impressive you can create custom reports, compare against competitors, create trend charts and export everything to Powerpoint for editing. The type of data is very much the type of data companies will use to refine their strategies and monitor performance in command centers and executive dashboards.
Builder
The Builder tool allows you to create and schedule social content. It will be familiar with people that use tools such as SproutSocial or Hootsuite or AgoraPulse.
You can manage multiple accounts across Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. Currently the tool doesn't support LinkedIn and hence may be better suited to consumer facing companies. The tool creates its own shortlinks for monitoring purposes.
The tool has been built with larger companies in mind. The tool allows you to create teams, regions, and a workflow process In essence to structure the tool to match your workflow. You can assign tasks, update progress and monitor performance such as the average engagement achieved by different members of the team.
Whilst the tool focuses on content creation and scheduling it does provide feeds for monitoring purposes such as competitor feeds, incoming messages, direct messages etc.
Socialbakers Ads
Socoalbakers has a very strong Ad product focused on Facebook paid ads. The tool itself is organised into three parts namely ad analytics, ad manager and ad booster
The ad booster allows organizations to boost their Facebook ads. Unlike some other tools it provides hourly metrics, so you can boost content at the right time.
The ad manager allows you to manage campaigns from a single interface including generating multiple ads and variations quickly, targeting custom audiences, and tracking conversions.
Summary
Socialbakers provides both a comprehensive suite of social media tools and a range of professional services. The developments in both their products and their services reflect the growing importance of social media in area such as customer service and brand reputation.
If you want to find out more about Social Bakers products and services visit www.socialbakers.com.