5 Critical Social Media Marketing Questions You Can Answer with Rival IQ

Data-Driven Marketing

As digital and social media marketing continue to advance rapidly, marketers are taxed with delivering more programs in more places. I would contend that every marketer should be able to answer the following 5 questions I outline in my post.

Trying to get these answers can be difficult and time consuming, requiring many different tools to aggregate results. That is, unless you have Rival IQ.

The Power of Competitive Intelligence

For the uninitiated, Rival IQ is a simple marketing analytics tool that analyzes the digital footprint of a company against its competitors. Data is collected from 6 social networks, company websites, and search terms (organic and paid) with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Within minutes, you can access a “landscape” that highlights your competitive social performance  via a rich web interface or Powerpoint export.

This post will use a sample collection of wineries, but it would work the same with your landscape.  Let’s uncork a bottle and get educated.

Q1: What search terms represent the best opportunity for additional traffic?

Regardless of your overall strategy, generating organic traffic from search is critical. Finding words with high search volume in areas you don’t currently rank gives you a chance to improve.

Check out this link to get results like this:

Top Keywords Where You Don't Rank

From this SEO break down, we can identify which keywords aren’t currently ranked, but would allow for quick and easy strategy improvement.  By combining good content with low cost advertising, you should be able to yield some solid benefit.

Q2: What social channels matter most to my customers?

It seems like a new social platform emerges and becomes all the craze each quarter, but which ones are your customers using? Are they on Twitter or Ello? Are they on Facebook or YouTube?

It is important to identify the networks on which your customer base is most present and engaged. This allows you to further target your marketing strategy and focus on the platforms that actually matter. Don’t spread yourself thin.

Just because a social network exists doesn’t mean you need to start posting content on it. Use this link to understand what channels matter, in terms of audience, activity and engagement.

For this landscape, Facebook and Twitter are clearly critical, but Instagram is gaining ground quickly, too. With this information, we can strategize which platforms to focus on, create both organic and paid campaigns, and set tangible goals for increased presence and engagement.

Q3: What social content resonates with my target audience?

What works is a relative term. This is why we believe it is best to look at content with a competitive lens. See which of your posts and your competitors’ posts are yielding high engagement. This way, you can analyze and assess the type of content your target audience is most responsive to.

Use this link to see how your social content compares and where it ranks in the top 50 posts for any given time period. Rival IQ “normalizes” for big and small followings by calculating an “engagement rate” (sum of likes, comments or shares/1000 page likes).

Here’s an example:

Winery Landscape Engaging Content

As you can see in the example above, the top four engaging posts have images. This is a trend we have seen across multiple platforms and landscapes.

Q4: Am I posting enough content on the right channels?

To be successful with social posts, both quality and quantity are important.

A great way to figure out how much you should post is by looking at others in your landscape. I also recommend looking at companies you aspire to be like to see what posting best practices they follow. By looking at the posting trends in your landscape, you can identify not only how much, but what times to post.

Use this link to see how often you should be posting.

Winery Average Facebook Posts Per Day Using Rival IQ

Q5: Who are the top Twitter influencers in my landscape?

Almost every marketer should care about Twitter because many top industry influencers are active “tweeters.” By understanding who is influencing your market landscape on Twitter, you can identify which people you should try to build relationships with.

This link will tell you who is driving the conversation for your brand and your industry.

Twitter Top Mentions Winery Rival IQ

It is pretty clear who already has some strong brand affinity and where to send a few nice bottles!

Get More Out of Social Media Marketing

With these 5 links, you are now empowered to quickly and repeatedly answer some of your most critical marketing questions.

  1. Top SEO Keywords: https://www.rivaliq.com/seo#tabs/landscape/details/8
  2. Social Channel Overview: https://www.rivaliq.com/overview
  3. Top Content: https://www.rivaliq.com/overview#facebook
  4. Average Number of Posts/Day: https://www.rivaliq.com/analyze#category?ordinal=3&category=facebook
  5. Top Twitter Influencers: https://www.rivaliq.com/mentions#tabs/mentioners

Time for that nice Cabernet!

T.A. McCann

T.A. is the co-founder of Rival IQ, the easiest way to build, analyze and monitor your competitive landscape. In his free time, he enjoys running, biking, swimming, and sailing. You can find him on Twitter, @tamccann

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