Customer is king. The customer is always right. The customer's perception is your reality. Even without these well-established mantras, it's safe to say customers are an important part of business. If not the most important part. How a company communicates with its customer base - the frequency, the tone, the methods - all combine to make up a brand's voice.
Businesses need to effectively determine, and then implement the best way to communicate with their audiences. By using the right channels, the relevant content, and the appropriate voice, brands have the opportunity to begin, retain, or improve a positive brand reputation. Which all leads to growth and sales.
But in this current state of constant social media updates, bombardment of brand conversations and content, and an unmanageable amount of data to digest, how does a company stand out?
One of the smartest tactics is to speak to customers through the power of visuals.
Communicating with visuals
Words, posts, videos, pictures. Infographics and articles. Books and films. Live streaming. Data and information are everywhere, in every nook and cranny of our waking (and half-awake) moments. What pushes through the noise the best?
Visuals.
Consuming information through visuals is the easiest way to digest a large amount of data. People are starting to have full-blown conversations via only emoticons. Lack of pictures in a blog post can make readers lose interest.
The marketing team within an organization probably understands this best, especially when it comes to social intelligence.
When customers purchase goods, how they interact with products, and most importantly what they say about a company online is priceless information. It can be the key to determining necessary changes and adapting to a new situation or consumer need. Using the eloquence and ease of consumption that visual social data offers, it's easy for brands to analyze conversations, comparing and contrasting various factors such as time period, campaign hashtag mentions, and competitive product discussions.
Insights provided by visual social intelligence bring you a whole lot closer to understanding current and potential customers, and the external perspective of a brand and its products.
Social media intelligence + visuals
Social intelligence gathered and analyzed by the marketing team in any company is useful for campaign planning, PR tracking, influencer identification, and real-time opportunity flagging.
But what about every other role in the enterprise?
The truth is, social intelligence provides insightful information to roles across businesses -
whether that's measuring the success of KPIs, OKRs, and other success measurement factors, improving customer service outreach, or even culling mentions of customer annoyances for product development to consider and change the future season's offerings.
Visual social intelligence in the form of social media command centers and data visualizations, brings businesses closer to their customers. It prioritizes what the world is saying about a brand by putting it at eye-level, literally. Having real-time data is the ideal way to identify influencers, respond to customer concerns, and track business success.
Doing so through data visualizations such as topic clouds, Twitter livestreams, and minute-by-minute charting is a more direct path of consumption than sifting through hordes of raw data in a grid, or via a more traditional report. The faster various employees can analyze and assess the data, the quicker and more strategic a response can be developed and fully realized.
Departmentally thinking
It's natural to lump social data and analytics with either the marketing or data departments. But it can do so much more. Put the power of visual social data to work across the enterprise, and brands will be surprised at how many actionable insights they glean.
Benefits from the insights gained from visual social intelligence:
Social - Tweet, Retweet, reply, and engage with brand advocates, customers, influencers, and employees in real-time. Identify actionable and relevant industry trends.
Customer Service - Find out when products or services are down before IT/service repair gets informed, take high-risk conversations offline, and address customers needs directly and personally.
Crisis Management and Communications - Visually monitor potential security threats and crises with real-time listening and analytics. Globally pinpoint where conversations are happening that need to be closely monitored. React with well-informed responses, and strategize communications internally and externally.
Product Development - Garner honest and unsolicited feedback on products via online conversations. Social networks are essentially massive outlets for consumers to gripe, praise, and show new ways to use products. The information can inspire new product ideas, guide product improvements, ,and help the product team prioritize features.
Marketing - Uncover owned content metrics on social, brand mentions in media coverage, and identify industry influencers. Visual social data makes it easy to track, key messaging and major topics associated with a brand to leverage for SEO marketing and other activities.
C-Suite - Showcase business success and competitive positioning in high-traffic areas of headquarters as real-time data scrolls in for stakeholders and executives to consume in a visually appealing way.
Visual businesses finish first
The power of visuals is starting to seep its way into marketing campaigns, business tactics, and brand communications, but it hasn't fully matured Which makes now the perfect time to consider using visual social data in the enterprise.
Whether it's a full-fledged social media command center comparable to NASA's control room, or a lobby data visualization, visual social intelligence is a tool every enterprise can and should be using.
Professionals consume social data faster and share it wider throughout the enterprise through visuals. Social intelligence is a cornerstone for many businesses, and is a gaining ever more visibility as more companies adopt a social-first attitude toward conducting business.
To communicate with customers, companies need to first understand their wants, needs, likes, and dislikes. Doing so through visuals makes it easier for employees to dissect and disseminate this vital information. Seeing is the fastest route to understanding.