Finding the time to keep up with social media trends can be a challenge for those running a small to medium-sized business.
The daily tasks of business administration already demand constant attention, not to mention the additional expectations to respond to customer enquiries online, stay informed of competitors and generate buzz around exciting business promotions.
Contrary to popular belief, jewellers don’t have to be logged into Facebook, Twitter and Instagram 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for social media campaigns to be successful. Business owners can easily monitor how engaged customers are online and even find new ones by using some popular social media-monitoring tools.
Here are four of the most useful tools to help retailers keep on top of social media activity.
Manage hashtags
Implementing hashtags on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is one of the easiest ways to reach a larger audience. Customising hashtags for a jewellery business is not only a great way to promote the store’s own brand but it also makes it easier for followers to find the business and track activity online.
RiteTag can help social media managers discover popular hashtags – they are organised by colour code and how often they’re used – as well as where followers are using them across various platforms and even the top ‘influencers’ in the industry. RiteTag enables users to type in a hashtag such as #vintagejewellery to find its popularity, the top-10 related hashtags people are using and where they appear online. It’s a great way to build and monitor a brand community on social media platforms.
Streamline searches
Monitoring an organisation’s presence online and determining the popularity of industry-related keywords and phrases has never been easier for business owners and staff. Just type a term like ‘jewellery’ into the search bar of SocialMention and the software will collate all the mentions of ‘jewellery’ in real-time from blogs, websites, videos, images, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms.
SocialMention uses four different measurement metrics: sentiment – whether the term is positive or negative – passion – the likelihood the term will be mentioned repeatedly – strength – how popular a keyword is – and reach – where the audience using the keyword is located. Users are able to view the top-related keywords and hashtags, how often keywords have been mentioned, how many re-tweets there were, top keyword users and most recent mentions of jewellery-related keywords on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other websites.
Track competition
Looking for insight into the online performances of high-profile jewellery and watch brands? An online tool like HowSociable allows for the tracking of 12 social media sites such as Tumblr, LinkedIn, Wordpress, Blogger and Reddit, using a magnitude scale of 0 to 10 that indicates the activity level around a brand on any given week. The online tool also breaks down the scores for each individual platform so users can see which of their accounts work best and which ones need more development.
Once the magnitude report has been produced, users can click on each social media site to see more details such as high-impact mentions, pages and history. Businesses not monitored by HowSociable will still be able to input the name of a competitor or supplier to track performances.
Pin down customer preferences
If a business has an account on Pinterest then ViralWoot is the ideal tool to help manage customers and potential customers.
The Pin Alert feature lets a business track which of its images users are pinning to their own Pinterest pages and which of these images are trending on Pinterest. In addition, it provides the identification of top pinners – potential customers.
Businesses can also use the Post Scheduler feature to schedule pins for future dates and create category-targeted and real-time trackable contests and campaigns. Any ViralWoot users who are following that business then receive notifications of these campaigns and can easily participate to claim their rewards. The tool also offers services for Instagram accounts.
Managing multiple social media accounts can be relentlessly time consuming.
However, with the right monitoring tools, retailers can enhance their online efforts to engage with customers and potential customers, promote products and services and ultimately expand their businesses.
Forget being superhuman and invest a little time into finding tools that can help make social media campaigns easier to develop and maintain.