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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.

Click here to sign up for Social Surveyor today.

It has been some time since we have had an update for Social Surveyor.  Since we last provided an update, we have increased our service offerings in an effort to stand out in an already crowded field.

 Social Surveyor started as a social media management dashboard which provided clients with access to all of their social media accounts in one place.  Clients were able to post, distribute, manage and monitor content to several social media platforms at the same time, saving time running their social media campaigns.

 Since then, Social Surveyor has since been expanded into a content marketing platform.  In addition, to the functionality mentioned above, additional components have been added including:

 -          Campaign Timeline:  create a campaign or a smaller sub-campaign,  define the effective time period and upload your content to your social networking and blog accounts.  Campaigns you can create, upload, and manage include status updates, videos, photos, events, deals, blogs and newsletters.

 -          Blogging:  create a campaign or sub-campaign to upload content to your blog directly or post an update to your blog as part of a larger social networking campaign.

 -          Newsletters: create and manage lists of prospects and clients to send your emails newsletters to.  Through Social Surveyor, you can track and monitor who was sent what, who opened your emails, read them, and more.

 -          Sentiment Analysis:  monitors conversations taking place in social media and reports back the discussion on your dashboard so if needed, you can cut into the conversation to add your feedback or guide the conversation in another direction. 

 -          Workflow Management:  Assign additional users to your Social Surveyor account to distribute comments from the sentiment analysis tool for further action.  Users can create ‘support tickets’, assign categories to those tickets, and track progress being made by staff on tickets generated.

 -          Social CRM:  Contacts made through all your channels in Social Surveyor are maintained on one list so you can track a prospect’s or client’s progression from initial prospect to client.  This is just a starting point for what we have in mind for this functionality.

 -          Campaign Analytics:  Analytic information for all of your campaigns and sub-campaigns are reported on the Campaign Timeline page.  Reported data includes viewers, likes, and so on.  The reported data will depend on the platform content was uploaded to. 

 We need feedback from users at this point.  We will be releasing in limited beta in the next two to three days so please contact us if you would like to sign up while the site is in beta.  There is of course no charge for the time being.