meltwaterbuzzMeltwater Buzz 3.0, the social media marketing suite of the online intelligence solution provider, got upgraded around a year ago, as we had reported. The company helps businesses to monitor their social conversations and to engage social influencers at a personal level.

But since businesses still seem to struggle to move from traditional monologue marketing to social dialogue marketing, I would like to take the opportunity and talk about their solution again.

The Meltwater Buzz suite combines deep social media monitoring and analytics with efficient social engagement, social promotion building, word-of-mouth marketing and develops a firm understanding of social marketing campaign performance.

The expert advises to segment communities into target groups - such as prospects, customers, partners, press, employees, influencers and advocates – and to make use of their technology features listed below, as described in the modules::

Listen Module

  • Access 2.5 billion posts monthly ;
  • Use advanced keyword search queries ;
  • Filter posts by geography, sentiment & language ;
  • View posts in list or map form;
  • View campaign success using sentiment trends, theme clouds, hit counters and more;
  • Receive daily email alerts with recent conversations ;
  • Export all data & graphs to Excel or PDF.

Engage Module

Manage Social Channels

  • Send messages from up to 20 Facebook or Twitter accounts;
  • Schedule message delivery;
  • Post image & video content;
  • View content calendar of published & scheduled posts;
  • Assign posts to other users for response;

Measure engagement, including top posts, top influencers, brand impressions & campaign performance.

Manage Social Communities

  • Create tags to segment social community members into target groups;
  • Apply multiple tags to each community member;
  • View detailed information on community members such as other social profiles, conversation history and overall sentiment toward your brand;
  • Track Twitter followers and Facebook fans automatically.

Connect Module

Facebook Tab Builder

  • Use drag-and-drop functionality to build tabs that include Twitter search, linked images, YouTube videos, forms, polls, surveys, etc.
  • Schedule tab publishing
  • Measure tab views, element clicks, and survey and poll results

Facebook & Online Promotion Builder

  • Display sweepstakes and contests on Facebook tabs, mobile-optimized Facebook Canvas apps, a stand-alone microsite or embed on your website;
  • Select winners by popular vote, expert judging, or both;
  • Measure promotion entries, demographics & geography.

Meltwater’s comprehensive analytics upgrade provides clearer insights across social conversations and social media channels allowing you to understand community member rank and reach.

In addition, it is of course useful to take a second look on the four C‘s of social media marketing not to lose sight of the basics::

1. Communities

Fact is that social communities differ from advertising audiences, since driving word-of-mouth buzz relies heavily on the common interests, interconnectedness and overall size of the target community. The most brilliant tweet, blog post or video will not go viral if your target community isn’t interested, doesn’t share it, or simply isn’t big enough. Therefore, understanding interests and relationships through social community analytics helps enormously to choose more interesting topics and engage with the most influential individuals to spark the conversations that your target community will value and spread.

2. Conversations

Some may be surprised that “content” is noticeably missing from the Four C’s of Social Media Marketing. This is no oversight; content marketing without conversation is simply long-format advertising. Facilitating social conversations starts and ends with listening, so to find your target communities and understand what interests them, you must first listen to what’s being said and who’s saying it. After you join the conversation, you must listen to know if you are being heard, to understand how you are received, and to measure the business impact of your social media campaigns.

3. Channels

There is a variety of social media channels on the market, but they all have one thing in common: sharing. Social conversations emerge by sharing information, and the value of that shared information builds social communities through reciprocity. Choosing the right social media channels for the ideal conversation within your target community amounts to understanding what you wish to share and the best places to share it. Whereas it may take seconds to retweet on Twitter, it can take minutes to read and recommend a blog post. Therefore, engagement metrics must be analyzed in the context of the social media channel. It may also be necessary to capture cross-channel engagement metrics to understand a social conversation fully; a blog post, for example, might spark conversation through tweets, shares and RSS redistribution. As the level of distribution an engagement will vary by each channel, it’s important to establish your KPIs accordingly. The effective social media marketing manager is like an air traffic controller, managing many complex conversational trajectories with the help of sophisticated social radar, analysis and communications technology.

4. Campaigns

Social communities, conversations and channels converge holistically to form the fourth C: the social media marketing campaign. A social media marketing campaign requires a target community, a conversation, and a channel to drive word-of-mouth marketing that supports a social business goal, such as customer advocacy or viral demand generation. It is the campaign point of view that brings business meaning to your social media programs.

And remember, reciprocity is your social currency, so be sure to analyze your community and channel to ensure that you’re fostering the right conversation – and get to know your followers better!

By Daniela La Marca