Four ways to scale social media with Brandwatch CEO, Giles Palmer

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Giles Palmer, Founder and CEO at Brandwatch, for a LinkedIn Live Session on how companies can get ahead with social media—and social listening—in 2021. Here are a few of our top takeaways:

Leverage social intelligence to ‘fill the chair’ with a better understanding of your customers

The shift to online and e-commerce has been happening for years, but no one could have predicted how much it would accelerate in 2020.

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is famous for saying that the empty chair in the meeting room is your customer. And with consumers spending more time online, intelligence gathered from social media is a great way to fill that chair with an accurate understanding of overall sentiment and demand for your products or services.

We heard this directly from our customers, too. In our recently published Social Transformation Report, 69% of respondents agreed that social media helped them prepare for COVID-19’s impact on business disruption by making it easier to maintain customer relationships.

At Brandwatch, Giles told us that companies that had taken an early stand to integrate social listening into decision making and operational flows were more agile and adaptable, and will emerge from 2020 stronger than ever.

Focus on gaining executive sponsorship to break down silos and scale social media

We know from our customers that organizations in every industry realize that there’s value in social media and they want to bring it into the mainstream of their business—but it’s not a journey without obstacles.

Giles told us that, in his experience, the most effective social media strategies succeed because of a mandate from the very top.

The good news is that there is plenty for executives to get excited about. As well as unlocking a whole new level of customer knowledge via social intelligence, integrating social media across sales, marketing, and support departments can break down silos to drive longer term, customer-centric success.

Create more engaged and empowered employees with brand-right social advocacy

As tech leaders talking about the role of social media in digital transformation, it’s impossible not to mention employee advocacy. By that, we mean companies amplifying their voice on social media by helping employees to share on-brand messages through their own networks. 

This gives employees a direct way of seeing how their work contributes to organizational success—increasing loyalty but also delivering as-yet unrealized value for companies as their messages reach wider audiences.

We’re in the early stages of maturity for employee advocacy, but we see a future that strengthens company culture by enabling everyone to play a role in the customer-facing functions of marketing, sales, and support.

Knock down the walls between your company and its customers by combining internal data sets with social intelligence

Consumer behaviors have shifted rapidly this year and none of us can predict what is around the next corner. What we know from Giles is that companies that are informed by customer insight and analysis have a better chance of adapting quickly when changes occur.

Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch makes accessing that intelligence easy.

Previously, understanding an activity spike on social media required an overwhelming, manual analysis of mentions. With Iris, your AI assistant embedded in the platform, spikes are automatically identified and the parts of the conversation driving the spike are pulled out—for instance, a news article that’s been shared hundreds of times.

It gets even better. Brandwatch has launched deep search methodology. If you search (for example) for Hootsuite, you’ll be asked if you mean the company and only that data will be extracted. It’s smart, but it’s also simple and easy to use.

Brandwatch processes online data from 100 million sources and over 1.4 trillion individual posts.  That kind of massive data store is out of reach of most organizations, but not with Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch. 

Social media helps improve the efficiency of other media—78% of respondents in our Social Transformation Report confirmed that—and now by joining up your own internal data sets with Brandwatch’s vast resource of social intelligence, you can improve the success and reduce the costs of reaching your target customers online.