Leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud for Your Social Media Strategy
Social media is becoming the number one channel for customers to connect with businesses to get answers to their queries and report their issues online. A baffling 57.6 percent of the entire global population actively uses social media. If you’re still skeptical about these numbers, here’s the breakdown of the top four most used social platforms:
· Facebook — 2.89 billion users
· Instagram — 1.39 billion users
· TikTok — 1 billion users
· LinkedIn — 800 million users
In this scenario, working on the fly without a social media strategy can steer your business downhill as it would eventually hurt your brand reputation. To always be there for your customers and resolve issues even before they arise is quite a challenge for organizations in this fast-paced business landscape. Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) can help you resolve this challenge with its robust tool, Social Studio.
The moment the word Salesforce pops in, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud or Commerce Cloud come to mind as we associate the IT platform with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), analytics, app integrations and so on; seldom does social media top this list. Today, we’ll examine how SFMC helps you execute your social media strategies with high levels of efficacy to ensure effective customer engagement. But first, let’s see what SFMC Social Studio is all about.
What Is SFMC Social Studio?
SFMC Social Studio is a great tool that empowers you to synchronize and enhance your social media marketing efforts at scale. Whether your audiences are active on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Weibo, Google My Business or YouTube, Social Studio can be used to engage them all in an effective manner .
So, what can Social Studio potentially do for your business? You can use the application to monitor your audiences, connect with followers and fans, understand the latest trends in your industry, stay alert on how customers and prospects resonate with your brand and do much more. Social Studio has a lot to offer for your business and helps you take your marketing efforts to the next level.
Today, social media management is not an option or a choice anymore! It’s a marketing essential for businesses of all sizes across all industries. Many a time, the number of likes, comments, shares, follower interactions and other relevant social media data can be overwhelming to deal with;, handling the data manually or using multiple tools can result in reporting inaccuracies and poor decision making, besides leading to wastage of precious time.
With Social Studio, you don’t have to worry about such things anymore! The application is a perfect one-stop solution where you can create, schedule, publish and track posts about your brands and products for audiences in multiple geographical locations. SFMC Social Studio helps you analyze the latest social trends, generate fresh ideas and measure keywords’ performance, allowing you create your very own social media operations center. Let’s take a look at how you can drive your social presence and business growth with Social Studio in the next section.
Benefits of Social Studio for Your Business: Leveraging SFMC for Meaningful Social Interactions and Business Growth
Listen to Customer Conversations
Millions of customers are talking about products, brands and various customer service issues on social media every single day. Given this, no brand can insulate itself from such conversations. A negative response from a dissatisfied customer can go viral in no time causing untold damage to you firm’s reputation. This is where social listening becomes extremely important. Here’s where social listening comes into play.
Social listening gives you an idea of which social networks your audiences use and enables you to analyze customer sentiment about your products, brand, competitors, industry, or markets and understand how people associate with your brand.
Furthermore, it helps you measure and evaluate your entire social media strategy; you can use the SFMC application to comprehensively analyze before, during and after the launch of short-term and long-term social media marketing campaigns. It allows you to identify potential harmful conversations in real time and initiate appropriate action.
Social Studio helps you analyze these conversations from almost every source to grasp what your prospects and customers are talking about your product, competitors, brand, industry and the market. As you integrate Social Studio, you can:
Gather Market Intelligence — Capture relevant feedback across your sales and marketing campaigns with qualitative reports linked to your social accounts.
· Create Topic Profiles — Look out for new trends and fresh topics from your customizable dashboard, so that all your marketing activities are relevant to your audiences at any given time.
· Learn from Real Discussions — Listen to online conversations about your brand across all networks and dive deep into each. You can utilize these insights to further improve your marketing campaigns.
· Tune into Customer Sentiment — Keep an eye on discussions of your audience that matter to your brand using image recognition and machine learning powered sentiment analysis capabilities.
Engage Your Customer Community
Engagement is the crux of social media management for all businesses. This is what makes social media social, facilitating a two-way experience between brands and people across the globe.
To be precise, social media engagement is the measure of how users engage with your content and social accounts that include likes, shares, favorites, retweets, saves, Direct Messages (DMs), replies, comments, mentions and clicks. These numbers are a great way to check if you’re creating content that truly resonates with your audience.
Social Studio lets you manage your customer community online, respond to posts and comments and provide the required support to your audiences seamlessly.
SFMC Social Studio lets you:
· Streamline Your Processes Seamlessly — From prioritizing posts and gauging brand sentiment to auto-routing a customer query to the relevant representative, Social Studio helps you streamline processes with high levels of efficacy.
· Manage User Engagement at Scale — You can set up a single platform to track and monitor social media engagement across all teams and channels in your organization. You can also manage roles and access with your team and user workspaces securely.
· Deliver Customer Service Through Social Channels — Social Studio lets you monitor and open relevant service cases based on feedback and interactions from customers on various social media channels.
· Get a Single View of Each Customer — You can route all your social media posts to your CRM system to get the big picture of your customers across email, social and other digital channels.
Publish on Social Media Seamlessly
Creating content that strikes a chord with your audience is one of the core elements of any business’ social media strategy. With SFMC Social Studio, you can both create and approve content for various social accounts and networks from a single place. Here’s how Social Studio enables your social media strategy:
· Manage Content Across Internal Teams — Create specific workspaces and control access to maintain brand consistency across the entire organization.
· Collaborate on Campaigns — You can draft, schedule, review, approve and share content, with a few clicks, either from your mobile or desktop.
· Analyze Performance — Intelligent reporting capabilities of Social Studio give you a snapshot of your content and design performance. With these centralized social marketing insights, you can improve all your campaigns and drive your growth.
· Grow Your Audience — Boost social posts that are performing well with Social Studio’s in-built social advertising feature. This feature allows you to expand to new markets and reach out to new customers.
Monitor All Social Media Activities from a Single Interface
Various social networks have their individual performance analysis dashboards. Keeping a track of your performance by monitoring multiple dashboards is tedious and time-consuming. With SFMC Social Studio, you can monitor all your social and marketing efforts, in real time, from a single interface, the Marketing Command Center.
With Social Studio you can:
· Visualize and Deliver Insights — Social Studio lets you track brand health, customer interactions and campaign results in real time. Also, it helps you respond to customer feedback instantaneously.
· Highlight Your Customer’s Voice — Monitor customer conversations online to understand your audience’s sentiment. You can segregate insights based on a post’s popularity, region and other relevant metrics.
· Respond to Customers Individually — Get a comprehensive report on multichannel views of each customer, explore email campaigns in-depth and analyze every stage of your brand journey, in detail, while responding to customers.
Generally, people tend to follow various brands on social media though they don’t necessarily purchase from them; they may like their posts and products or want to find out what other users think about the products. With a robust social listening tool like SFMC Social Studio, you can first strike a conversation with your prospects and take things forward from there. Thus, the Salesforce product helps you generate leads, and eventually, convert them into your customers. Thus, you can leverage the power of SFMC Social Studio to develop and execute your social media strategy to get the desired results.
Hope you liked this post. How do you use social media to engage your customers? We’d love to know.
