HomeHow would a small or medium-sized business use Social Surveyor?
We have received several questions from testers as to how a small to medium sized business would use Social Surveyor. This post will look at how ‘Dave’, a typical small business owner would use Social Surveyor to run his online marketing campaigns. Dave sells a product and service in his target market, which is regional in nature covering an area of several surrounding states. He also has seven employees who work for him.
Post content online
Dave is active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and a couple of other social networks, has two blogs for his business, and a couple of online newsletters. He is able to easily distribute all of his content from one place to all of his marketing channels with the click of a button. Dave is also able to monitor the results of his postings from the same place. This results in Dave being able to do things much more quickly and efficiently compared to how he used to run things.
Create a social media campaign
Campaigns and sub-campaigns enable Dave to organize his posts and content around his marketing goals and objectives. He is able to group and track the results of related postings around a common theme, such as campaigns, holidays, seasons, promotions and more. Dave is also able to see the results of all of his campaigns posted through the site and drill down to see results by sub-campaign or posting.
Schedule Campaigns and Sub-Campaigns
Like most business people, Dave is a busy guy. Running his business needs to come first before his online strategy and not the other way around. Using Social Surveyor, Dave is able to create campaigns, break them down into postings and schedule distribution to his social media platforms, blogs, and newsletters. He is able to do all of this from his Social Surveyor account. Once scheduled, the software will take care of the rest leaving Dave to run his business.
“Listen” to what customers are saying online
Using Social Surveyor, Dave can track conversations taking place online by keyword. When a keyword is used in a conversation, the conversation is picked up and shown within Social Surveyor. Dave then has the option of doing nothing, jumping into the conversation, or passing the conversation onto Molly, his office manager for follow up at a later time.
Dave is able to track conversations taking place online about the things that are important to him. Such things include his business, his products or services and his competitors. When a conversation comes up, Dave can either do nothing, jump into the conversation, or pass the conversation onto Molly, his office manager for follow up a later time.
When a conversation is picked up, the software will classify the conversation as either ‘positive’, ‘neutral’, or ‘negative’ based on the words used in the conversation. It will be up to Dave to make the final determination as to the writer’s sentiment when they wrote the post.
Molly, the office manager will often receive conversations for follow up when Dave is very busy. Molly takes whatever action is needed and Dave can track her activity through the site. Dave is also able to assign access to Social Surveyor to other employees to help out when needed.
Sentiment analysis or ‘listening’ is not only a great way to hear about what others are saying about what is important to Dave, it is also a great source of new ideas that Dave can use as content for his prospects and customers.
Sentiment analysis can also serve as an early indicator of emerging trends. Knowledgable individuals will often write about emerging trends before they become event and are picked up by bloggers, the media or goes ‘mainstream’.
Look for and address customer service issues
In addition to monitoring what people are saying about things that are important to him, Dave uses sentiment analysis to manage customer service issues.
There is no limitation in terms of what is shared using social media. People share both their good and bad experiences with the brands that they interact with on a daily basis. Sentiment analysis enables Dave to monitor for potential customer service issues. When something comes up, he can quickly address it then and there so that the issue does not become a problem.
For Dave, a negative review is an opportunity for him to turn a dissatisfied customer into a happy one. By jumping in and addressing the issue to the customers satisfaction, he is in many cases able to gain a repeat customer. Additionally, people who learn about the customer’s problem are much more likely to view the negative customer service issue favorably when it is resolved to a positive outcome.
Monitor activity being directed to the website
Dave’s goal for being online is to generate more leads for his business, which in turn generates more sales. This not only happens when a customer picks up the phone and calls him, but also when a customer visits to make a purchase or requests a contact to make a sale. Where a prospect makes the ‘conversion’ to a customer is on his website. Dave is able to view the activity taking place on his website through Social Surveyor. This enables him to see the relationship between his work generating activity through his social channels and the results on his website.
Summary
Social Surveyor has helped Dave to streamline and organize his online marketing activities. This has resulted in Dave being able to do his social activities more efficiently resulting in more time to run his business which translates into more money at the end of the day.
