11. Step 2: Understand and Build Your Social Media Voice

Understanding Share of Voice and Sentiment

To find your social media voice, you first need to clearly understand its impact within the social media spectrum and the emotions or sentiment that might be attached to it. All this can be tracked and is referred to in social media terms as your Share of Voice (SoV). It’s the conversations going on about your brand versus your competitors or your business sector in general. Likewise, sentiment refers to the amount of emotion attached to each mention made. You can calculate and monitor both SoV and sentiment through the information gleaned by using the tools and services we introduced in step 1. If you do it right, over time your social media presence will grow, and as a result, so will your voice.

Calculating and Monitoring

When looking at all the mentions tracked by the listening tools you have chosen to employ, make sure you monitor those that are positive, negative, and neutral in a way that enables you to assign a weight to each category (for example Positive = 1, Neutral = 3 and Negative = 5) to calculate your average sentiment.

To find your SoV, you need to divide the number of conversations or mentions of your brand by the total number of conversations or mentions about other brands in your market.

By creating a spreadsheet template (see Figure 11-1), you’ll be able to easily and clearly track your brand alongside your competitors. This provides a great way to see how your brand is finding its social media voice and growing in both share and positive sentiment month-by-month.

Figure 11-1. An example spreadsheet showing SoV and sentiment.

(Source: Convince & Convert LLC)

Over time, you’ll be able to see exactly how your social interaction benefits your brand. This will enable you to make smarter and more confident marketing decisions. Above all, this step when employed long-term in your social media strategy, will allow you to keep in control of your social media platforms, to see which of them benefits your brand the most and which needs further effort to create an impact.

Building Awareness

People can’t purchase your product or service if they don’t know it exists, so you need to know how to build on your presence in a way that maximizes awareness of your brand. Creating brand awareness through traditional forms of media has always been a costly exercise, but today social media brings it within reach of even the smallest business.

After all, social media gives you easy access to literally millions of people across a huge geographic and multilingual area, in contrast to traditional media such as television, where only those within a limited geographic location who happen to be tuned in at the right time to “catch it” receive information. What’s more, television allows for no interaction between the customer and the business¹, whereas you can engage freely with thousands of potential customers through social media, and the accessibility of messages and posts doesn’t rely on the right-place, right-time factor.

Marketing via social media can easily go viral if produced and delivered in the right way. You will have often seen content on popular blogs with hundreds of likes and retweets that have been republished from much smaller sites. Being able to track how others are using and responding to your social media material is a powerful indicator that you are on the right track to substantially increasing your brand awareness.

You can track your brand awareness through monitoring the following key indicators:

• The amount of traffic and number of page views on your website; this indicates the resulting level of awareness for the messages you are sending out and the way that your brand information is displayed.

• The number of searches made for your particular brand (terms, products, and so on). Again, this highlights an awareness of your products or services within the marketplace and allows you to effectively track audience and consumer growth within your own brand arena.

• The number of video and other content views relating to your brand and business.

Signs of Engagement

Signs of engagement are the pointers that tell you which people are those most likely to buy your products and services through their interest in you and your brand. In the early days of your social media presence, you can use the following to steer yourself toward the right kind of interactions by studying your competitors and like-minded businesses. Look for

• Facebook page and content likes

• The number of shares

• Retweets on a subject related to your business

• Ratings

• Mentions (positive, negative, neutral)

• Blog comments and subscriber numbers

Find Your Brand Evangelists

Many marketers are still under the impression that the majority of online comments made are bound to be bad ones. But as you’ll discover from continuing to monitor and grow your SoV, nothing could be further from the truth. You’ll learn that those who are most vocal about you are almost always your fans and potentially your brand evangelists, those who do much of the promotional work for you. So find them and use them to your advantage.

Spotting and Optimizing Trends

By spotting and optimizing trends correctly and frequently, you’ll be able to identify trends before they happen and discover those keywords that will work to attract customers to your brand instead of to your competitors.

Look for trends and themes that come up repeatedly in your particular arena. Use them to provide discussion and value to readers and followers. They will arm you with great insight about how your industry’s products or services fit into your consumers’ lives. In addition, be sure to study the terminology used in discussions, noting any keywords that come up often because these will prove useful when optimizing your website and tagging future blog posts and other online content.

Brand Versus Social Voice: Making Them One and the Same

It shouldn’t be a competition as to who shouts the loudest. Your brand and social voice should be one and the same: informative, responsive, and very, very approachable. With this in mind, your social media team, albeit made up of one or one hundred voices, needs to resonate a harmonious tone that over time will build trust and loyalty.

Traditional media experts still too often try to make a distinction between brand voice versus social voice, seeing the two as separate entities and failing to embrace the shift in communication that we have already come to understand from earlier chapters in this book. This shortsightedness can prove to be a death sentence to any brand looking to build a long-term effective social media presence.

The key lies in getting your social media team to work together in developing a voice that speaks for the business and brand as a whole. Clearly different posts by different people will vary in tone to some degree, but as mentioned previously, this is a harmony between a commonly bonded group of people with a specific message to tell. As time goes by, you will find specific members of your team best suited to specific social media areas. For example, Jane might fit well into those questions, comments, and general posts surrounding hardware issues of a particular product, whereas David may be better suited to issues related to customer service, and Kevin’s forte might lie in posting photos of news, events, and competitions. Start as you mean to go on by identifying your team’s individual strengths and passions and work with them to fine-tune your social voice into one beautiful harmony.