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Brand health is a metric that measures how customers perceive and interact with your company. So if you want to know how healthy your brand is, look no further than social media, where someone, somewhere, will be talking about it.
Mike Baglietto, global head of market insights at next-generation consumer analytics and market intelligence platform NetBase Quid, describes social media as “the world’s largest focus group.” “You are not required to purchase a research report, you don’t have to do a survey. People on social media share anything and everything, and they’re pretty unfiltered, so you can find out exactly how people feel about your brand, competitors, and even your market.
However, there is a significant distinction between social media and any other focus group, big or small. Once you’ve found out how people perceive your brand, only social media also allows you to change that perception.
Social media’s top trends
Baglietto was one of the speakers on The Drum’s Consumer & Market Intelligence in 2022: What’s Affecting Your Brand Health? webinar, which was to be co-hosted by NetBase Quid. Baglietto, and his colleague Harvey Raola, NetBase Quid’s global head of media intelligence, discussed the following during the session:
- This year’s top social media trends
- The mass adoption of augmented reality
- TikTok and Reddit’s increasing importance
- The need to create a baseline so you can track the health of your brand over time.
- How influencers and critics might be identified by brand managers
- The necessity to establish a baseline so you can track the health of your brand over time.
- Baglietto presented the key parameters that marketers could use to assess their brand’s health.
“There’s the number of posts or mentions about my brand; how do customers feel about it, my net sentiment score; and how many people will really see it, my net potential impressions.” Then there’s the issue of how many people are writing those posts.
“Then we’ll look into where your audience is talking about your brand, and which social media platforms are hosting those conversations.” We’d also like to investigate the possibilities for your brand on such platforms.”
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One of Baglietto’s key points was that different channels appeal to attract a different audiences. For example, the Tiktok audience is more female, whereas the Reddit audience is more male. Rather than creating “social media content” and pushing it out across all channels, marketers need to target their content by channel.
“The people who follow your brand on Twitter may not be the same people who follow your brand on TikTok or Instagram,” he explained. “So, in order to unlock additional income and retention possibilities, you need to fully understand who that audience is.”
Do not be concerned about the Kardashians.
The other major topic for discussion was influencers and in particular micro-influencers.
“Micro-influencers – the folks with 5,000 to 25,000 followers on social media, generate a lot of potential for your brand and have the most impact,” Baglietto added. “They provide you the ability to connect with them in a genuine way.” It’s fantastic to have a Kardashian tweet about your company. But do customers really take action as a result? If I were an activewear brand, I would search for yoga instructors or personal trainers with a following. They’ll engage their target audience, and they’re true to the category and to my users.”
However, as Ranola pointed out, authenticity is a two-way street. When it came to interacting with Reddit groups, he emphasized the importance of striking a balance between knowledge and promotion.
“One of the things Reddit is known for is how brutally honest people are and how easily they can spot something that isn’t genuine,” he said. “Toeing the line of being able to provide value while remaining authentic is something that businesses must be very careful about.” I know this from a personal experience at a company I previously worked for, where we were a little bit too salesy and we got called out pretty quickly and banned from the Subreddit we were promoting.”
Baglietto concluded with a list of recommendations for marketers looking to monitor and improve the health of their brand:
- At least once a month, evaluate your success with all of your important audiences across all of your main channels.
- Understand the types of content that are most important for each segment on each channel.
- Look for influencers who have the same personality as your company.
- In real-time, monitor the response to anything you and your team post, as well as what your influencers post.
- Make any necessary course corrections.
