Tis’ the season for shopping, and reading the virtual room this holiday season is a must to inform exceptional sales! We have lots of great insight to share, including how to capture the social mood – and ways to use this insight to inform your next campaign.
Buzz, Behaviors and Other Brand Intel
We can see lots of buzz around shopping local and behaviors that encourage you to discover new Indie shops. We also see lots of recommendations from consumers. This is all encouraging for small retailers decimated by COVID-19.
But, we also see Amazon prominently hashtagged – and for good reason. It is hosting a ton of sales, as are Walmart, Target and other big names in the ecommerce game.
With lots of noise happening online, what’s a retailer to do when it wants to stand out in this online crowd? Understanding the social mood behind these posts is essential. Let’s start there and work our way back to these hashtags and behaviors.
Social Mood Says So Much
Social mood found via social media listening parses intel around whatever topic a brand is interested in to separate out consumer emotion around that topic as compared to the overall mood online. This is a great starting point for brands to have in mind as they create holiday messaging. Designing holiday campaigns that speak and support the feeling of “anticipation,” “joy” and “trust” will do well with consumers:
So that means avoiding language that reminds us of the pandemic and other depressing tidbits, even in a humorous light, may not be the best idea. Outside of this holiday sentiment, we see a high level of disgust dominating online, so avoiding negative emotions is probably advisable.
Exploring sound bites for trust, we see tweets and a forum post around shopping small from people who have built trust in niche communities:
This shows us that shopping small is a big draw, and even medium-sized retailers can benefit by positioning themselves as smallish, compared to the big guys.
Quid Social Listening & Sentiment Exploration
Coming at the same insight another way, we can dig in with social listening to see which where positive sentiment lives and target our “anticipatory messaging” appropriately. We see that blogs are a huge draw, which makes sense as influencers are out in force:
And when we expand these bars, we get more specific intel around not only what influencers are saying, but the comments they’re attracting from consumers. The picture there is a little less positive, and something to explore.
Clicking in the negative comment section, we see a variety of posts and keywords. We can explore individual articles, revealing holiday skepticism; sadness around missing relatives; and, concern for small businesses this season.
Explored another way, we can see all the frequently mentioned keywords in these negative comments – and that need for positive messaging becomes clear. Consumers want a break from politics, and something to look forward to:
And although it’s extremely important – understanding sentiment and social mood isn’t the full social listening picture either though. There’s so much insight available, as each bit of data found in NetBase Quid is clickable and transparent, allowing brand to explore actionable insight down to an extremely granular level. For example, beyond knowing what to post, it’s important to know when and where to post.
When and Where to Post
Connecting back to our earlier hashtags and behaviors, it helps to understand when key messaging is happening. We can explore any of the words in our clouds above with social listening, filtering for whichever is relevant to our campaign. From there, we can check out the typical days and hours those posts are shared by consumers.
For example, if we wanted to have an influencer message out about some items they recommend, we can click on “recommend” and see this:
Let’s assume we were exploring that word cloud based on a Topic search of our competitors. We could now see when they’re posting, and if we click on specific days/times to dig deeper, we could even see who is tweeting about them. For example, when we look to see who is tweeting at the saturated time slot of 7pm on Monday night, we find these folks:
This is super valuable intel, as we could see who their potential influencers are (in this case, microinfluencers) and if their posts are resonating, we may want to reach out them to promote our products instead. Lots of influential, every day people are not actually working of a brand – at least not yet.
Digging in to Details Isn’t Difficult Here
And where are they posting? That’s simple to sort out too. Although blogs generate lots of sentiment and meaningful interaction, we see reach is greatest on social sites. This makes sense as authors promote blogs and other content on social media, with Twitter chief among them:
It’s all pretty amazing once you get into it. And finding insight that’s relevant to your efforts is quick work too. We’ve only shared a few top options here to get you started – and you should really reach out for a personalized demo to see this intel in action in a variety of wonderful ways. It’s beginning to look a lot like holiday shopping season, so be sure to move fast!
