This was a vital step and always illuminating.  It also set the foundation for our priorities and the overall messaging framework we would build for our client.

Competitive Research Doesn’t Have to be Hard

This was also extremely time-consuming, not only because it was the early days of the Internet, but because the information I gathered lived in many different places.  I would go to each company’s Website and explore the pages, search the blogosphere, search multiple online media and news sites, etc.

This remains a vital step when I am updating or creating positioning and messaging for a company and a product.  However, having just done a new competitive communication audit in the past two weeks, the time involved in the gathering was minimal, leaving me more time to analyze, strategize and develop my recommendations for our new positioning and messaging.  This is where you want your marketing leaders spending their energy – not in searching the Internet.

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How to do a Competitive Communication Audit

I did it by using our product.  Let me walk you through what I did, and the document I created from this process that I then presented to the leadership team with my recommendations.

For this example, I’m going to use the B2B Integration market, a market in which I worked for several years previously.  My competitive landscape set up in Rival IQ has seven companies across the integration market.  For my competitive communication audit, I chose to focus on four I used to know well in this space (Liaison, E2open, Axway, and Pervasive).

B2B Integration Competitive Communication Audit

Rather than having to go out to multiple sites, I simply went into the Company Profile section and selected one of the companies, and immediately received detailed content of their positioning and messaging across each social channel presence as well as their Website.

Create your own competitor landscape in Rival IQ.

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For my audit document, I was using a basic table in Microsoft Word, so I simply copied and pasted each area into my table.

After copying the Website title and meta description, I clicked on the company Website URL in that same section, and on the home page looked for their tagline or main “what is it” copy.  I then went into the “About Us” or Company section and copied the first paragraph that always says “what is . . . “ xyz company.

I did this same process for each company in my competitive communication audit.  It took me 1 to 2 minutes per company, so a total of no more than 10 minutes to capture all of their positioning and messaging information across key social channels and Web.

SEO Keyword Analysis and Popular Topics

To identify which key terms and keywords I’m directly fighting with my competition for, I need to do a quick SEO keyword analysis. First, I went into the SEO Keyword section of the application. Under ‘top keywords’ for each company, I captured that data. Then, I skimmed it to identify which keywords we’re both ranking for.

If this was for my company, I would also review the keywords for which my company doesn’t rank but the competition does, as these might be areas we need to invest in, so we start showing up in search.

Popular Topics in Rival IQ can also help you spot key messaging areas your competition is focusing on.

Using our natural language processing, you can automatically find notable phrases and topics your competitors are talking about in their social posts. Easily sort by engagement and frequency so you can prioritize the most impactful phrases in future communication strategies and content planning.

Message Consistency is Key

Each company definitely has a unique way of describing itself.  Some companies are better than others in the consistency of those messages.

One aspect of positioning that is VERY important is making sure your topline messages are consistently communicated, meaning who you are and what you do are clear and consistent across all digital channels.  This is also true for visual branding, which should be consistently employed.

Let’s evaluate each company’s main positioning focus:

Liaison:  From a positioning standpoint, Liaison is clearly focused on global cloud integration and data management.  However, there are a lot of other terms used inconsistently, including secure, data integration, transformation, enterprise, EDI and managed services.  And when it comes to SEO, it is almost all EDI related, showing how search optimization is not aligned with positioning.

Axway:  Governing the flow of data and business in motion are key positioning statements for Axway.  My first response with this was I have no idea what either of those really means or the value it brings me – and neither uses the word “integration”.  Remember, your positioning needs to say what you do quickly and easily.  Also, I see a lot of inconsistency and confusion around the terms cloud, identity management, software, services, secure, and integration.  When it comes to SEO, it’s all about file transfer and a little b2b gateway or EDI.  Clearly, this company is trying to make file transfer sound sexier with a flow of data, but is it working?

E2Open:  Collaborative execution, cloud and on-demand software reign for E2open.  Again, I have no idea what this solution does from these terms.  My guess is they are trying to evolve the term b2b integration to collaboration.  And when you look at what’s driving traffic to their site, it’s about supply chain management, b2b outsourcing, and sales order management.  There is, however, a supplier collaboration key term ranking fairly high.  I think the longer messaging, such as in LinkedIn, tells the story about real-time, integrated business processes, but that clarity is buried.

Pervasive / Actian:  Now this one was interesting, because Actian acquired Pervasive, so messaging went through a recent transition.  If this company’s competitors had been using Rival IQ, they would have received an alert telling them about this messaging change!  What I clearly see here is a shift from SaaS Integration, data integration and data management to a Big Data positioning focus. Clearly, Actian’s market position is Big Data for the “rest of us” and bringing value to data.  Before the acquisition, Pervasive had been driving traffic from strong keywords like Datacloud, data integrator, online integrator and data integration software.  Actian, in contrast, ranks high for big data and database related phrases.  Although the new company is still ranking for data cloud, just lower than Pervasive did.  I also find Actian’s twitter description too short and a bit bizarre, as it brings in a whole new concept of coffee sipping (but maybe it’s working to drive traffic to this landing page?).  Overall I would now wonder if this company was still my competitor.

Free Social Media Competitive Audit Course with Lauren Teague

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How Do I Clarify My Market Position?

Since my data gathering has only taken a short time, I would now work at identifying where in this market I want to stand out and how to clarify my messaging so it’s distinctive but still relative to the space.

In updating my positioning and messaging, I need to make sure what my company does and our differentiation is clear.  Sometimes marketers try to be too clever with messaging, leaving nothing but confusion on the part of the reader, which can quickly translate into lost leads and lost revenue.

I also want to make sure I’m not losing the authority I’ve built up so far, so if I am receiving strong awareness and web traffic with a few key terms, and there is strong search volume still for those terms, I need to maintain relevance in those areas.

Sometimes we think we can redefine a category or create a new market terminology, but if we do this too far ahead of our customer base, we can hurt our company’s topline results and even reputation.

1. Make sure your positioning is a real market category

In reviewing this competitive communication audit, there is clearly a move away from the word “integration”.   With all this rich content at hand, my next step might be heading over to the Gartner research site and finding out what the heck the industry analysts are calling this now.  So I did that.

There, I see the company is still holding its annual Gartner Application Architecture, Development & Integration Summit.  So there must still be a market for application integration.

And when I look up my old buddy Benoit Lheureux, I see he is still working on all things b2b integration and eCommerce, as well as the evolution of EDI and supply chain management. In fact, not long ago, Gartner released its Magic Quadrant for Integration Brokerage (speaking of I didn’t see anyone using integration cloud broker in this audit).

Gartner Magic Quadrant for Integration Brokerage 2014

2. Create a strong positioning statement

I would, therefore, make sure my updated positioning and messaging both maintained a clear connection to what market categories existed, what my customers were searching for, and what my solution actually did – with a little bit of vision or future added if I felt we needed to start evolving.

So perhaps positioning the company as business integration that bridges your data to the future (okay, not the exact words but the right concept).

Typically, I write down all the words or areas I’m trying to communicate and then start playing with combinations and sentences that make sense, are simple to understand, and tell the story of who I am, what I do, and why you should care.

Putting together the complete messaging framework is a topic for another blog in the future!

3. Keep an ongoing audit of your competitors’ positioning

Outside of this strategic exercise, I recommend checking your competitors’ positioning on a monthly basis across key digital channels to make sure nothing surprises you.

For this, we provide a fast and easy per channel view of positioning statements across all companies in a landscape.  Below is an example of twitter for this integration landscape.

Strategic Messaging is a Priority

In this fast-moving digital market, it’s still important to step back as marketing leaders and analyze the competitive landscape.

The good news we can now do this with minimal headache or time with the help of a competitive communication audit, so we can use our time to focus on making strategic recommendations, updating our communication messages, and winning more customers.

This article was originally published on July 25th, 2014. We’ve refreshed some of the details and screenshots to give you the most up-to-date information possible.

The post Competitive Communication Audit Template appeared first on Rival IQ.

With every passing day, social media is becoming more and more critical to modern digital marketing. Across all industries, social media is filling marketing gaps that range from communication channels for professional sports teams to amplifying branding and messaging for craft breweries.

There has been a clear and positive trend amid organizations across these industries to view social media as strategic. Specifically, I am seeing an increase in titles such as social media strategist, social media coordinator, and digital marketing strategist in the job market.

An increase in businesses taking social media seriously (finally) is good for multiple reasons:

1. Social media should be a strategic part of your integrated marketing mix and have a direct, and measurable positive impact on your business and revenue.
2. Social media has become increasingly sophisticated. While an inexperienced person (aka intern) might know how to use Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, he or she most likely does not understand the nuance of branding, voice, customer experience, crisis communications, and other areas that must align with social media if you do it effectively. Having interns help is awesome, but social media has evolved past a “we’ll do this to be cool if we have time” to a must-do for effective branding.
3. Data overload is real, and your social media marketer has critical thinking skills and data literacy to decipher ‘vanity metrics’ from metrics that inform decision-making and impact the bottom line of your business.
4. Managing social media is more than cute puppy posts. What your business posts on social should be tied directly to your content strategy. Your content should be tied to your specific audience needs. An effective social strategist views social media as a channel for content distribution, building a community of brand enthusiasts, and increasing the overall customer experience.

With this complex, strategic role, I thought it would be helpful and fun to outline a typical day these professionals go through. Plus, show off some tools that help them do this job faster, smarter, and more aligned with the business.

The Average Social Media Strategist’s Daily Workflow

Step 1: Get up to speed on what’s happened overnight

As with so many marketing and competitive intelligence roles, social media strategists start the day making sure they didn’t miss anything and learn what’s trending in the news and on social media.

You want to find topics you can plug into that are relevant to your business, both good and bad. You need to make sure there aren’t potential social bombs ready to explode, like negative customer comments or an influencer mention that isn’t flattering. Or, perhaps the negative news is about a competitor, which in that case, you want to be the source of competitive intelligence.

Twitter mentions negative sentiment report in Rival IQ plus the actual tweet, showing a smart response by Carnival Cruise.

Time it takes: Approximately one hour

Tools that’ll help

1. Google News Search:  Search key terms or companies and review top stories. Sort by relevance or date to find the news you need. If you have a list of companies or keywords that you know you want daily stories about, set them up as Google alerts so these feeds come straight into your email inbox every day.
2. Tweetdeck or HootSuite:  These tools give you the ability to set up real-time streams or feeds from multiple social media channels using keywords or search terms. You can do this natively in the social networks themselves, but these tools make it so much easier and faster.
3. Rival IQ Twitter Mentions Report:  See which influencers have been talking about you and your competition on Twitter. Also, track potentially negative mentions that could blow up during the day.

Step 2: Respond to social interactions

As part of the move from social media coordinator to become a strategist comes the goal of increasing engagement and building community. Social media is no longer a one-way communication channel to a faceless universe. It’s about finding ways to bring value to your audience, help your customers and prospects solve problems, and engage in conversations that are both interesting to them and relevant to your business.

Social media experts spend a lot of time conversing on various channels. They know how to do so in a personal way while still being true to their organizational brand, values, and voice.

This can be as simple as thanking someone for following you, sharing or retweeting a post that really resonates with your audience, and favoriting or liking a post that mentions you or a topic meaningful to your business. You could do something more intricate like working with your customer success team to respond to a complaint or negative mention in a constructive way.

Time:  Depends on your number of interactions – need to do this also throughout the day as you get engagement or to drive more engagement

Tools that’ll help

1. HootSuite: These tools allow you to view conversations or social streams based on key terms, as well as assign conversations to teams and respond directly within their consolidated dashboard.
2. Tweetdeck: Just for Twitter, this tool allows real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement.

With HootSuite, you can set up streams for activity as well as keywords. Here are some of our streams.

Step 3: Schedule your new posts for the day

Even if you manage to schedule more than one day at a time, it’s a best practice to plug in a few timely posts too so you don’t look completely out of the loop. Once you’ve done your analysis and had your first cup of coffee, you start scheduling your posts across the social media networks you’re focused on.

I’m assuming you are using a tool to help you post. If you’re not, stop everything and immediately go sign-up for one of the many free or affordable tools. Do not, I repeat, do not keep doing this manually!

By using the right tool, you can take one blog post or important link and schedule it out over several days, months, and even a year-all in just a few minutes. Visibility into your entire day or week of social posts allows you to quickly analyze whether you’re posting enough native vs. curated content if you have a good media mix in your queue, and make last-minute adjustments to your posts.

Ask yourself these questions as you build out your content:

• Are you using hashtags correctly?
• Are you using as many images in your posts as you can?
• Are you mixing up images, videos, links, GIFs, and other media types?
• Are you drawing on best practices to encourage engagement?
• Are you testing out new things? (and of course, accurately measuring those experiments)

Time: About an hour in the morning and perhaps more time in the afternoon

Tools to help you out

1. Rival IQ’s Social Post reports: You can see which of your posts have received the most engagement across six social networks, and then if you’re a Buffer or HootSuite user, you can re-publish those posts directly from Rival IQ.
2. Hootsuite, Buffer, Powerpost, or Hubspot:  There are many other social publishing tools out there, but these are some favorites. All of these tools allow you to create your own schedules or follow set schedules.
4. Any one of our recommended Social Media Management tools listed in this review: They’re organized by our rating, pros and cons, and your team size and budget to help you save time picking your platform.

With Buffer, you can easily schedule posts for multiple networks.

Compare your social media performance to your top rival.

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Step 4:  Build Your Audience

Building your audience is both your first step when establishing a new social media presence, as well as an ongoing part of your social media strategy. You could be creating and publishing great content, but without an audience, it’s like cutting down a tree in a distant forest.

Follower Quantity

Determining how many followers is enough depends on your company, your market, and the social network you’re using. A good place to start when determining social audience size goals is building a competitive landscape in Rival IQ. A competitive landscape will give you insight into the average audience size for each channel and the rate at which your competitors are growing their audience.

Follower Quality

The quality of your followers is also incredibly important, arguably more so. You can buy followers, but they don’t have much value since they’re not potential customers. Purchasing followers just creates the perception that your brand is popular, but anyone with access to historical data can see when you do this. Plus, it will mess with your engagement rates because purchased followers likely won’t engage with your brand in an authentic way.

Personally, I’d rather have 500 targeted, high-quality social fans as opposed to tens of thousands of random, spammy fans who don’t care about what you are doing.  So, as you build your audience, focus on quality, NOT just quantity. Otherwise, you will not get a realistic sense of engagement or business impact.

Time:  One hour per day (this is being generous, after all, everyone needs to grab lunch)

Tools to help

1. Twitter Followers: If Twitter is one of your top networks, then pay attention to who is following you, and if they are high quality, follow them back! This helps build community and reciprocation will keep those people from unfollowing you in the future.
   • Pro Tip: Visit the social pages of your competitors and companies with a similar audience as you and look at their followers – and start following everyone you see who is relevant.
2. Twitter Follower Campaigns: If you don’t have time, or if organic fan growth is not moving fast enough for you (or your boss), then build a Twitter or Facebook ad campaigns to build your followers. Make sure and leverage the targeting filters, so you are adding relevant followers who are actually interested in what you do.
3. Rival IQ Twitter Mentions: Make sure you are following influencers on Twitter important to your business. One of the best ways to do this is with the Rival IQ Twitter Mentioners report, where you can find and follow the top influencers talking about you or your competition directly from the tool.
4. Instagram Followers: Check your most recent followers, see who you think would be a valuable relationship to further nurture and follow back.
5. Facebook Boosting: If a recent post gained a lot of traction, boost it to get further reach and obtain more followers. On Facebook, you can also set targets, so do so!
6. LinkedIn Followers: LinkedIn has added many new resources and best practices to help you promote your company page, gain followers as well as get leads straight from LinkedIn.
7. BONUS: Of course, the best way to add high-quality followers is to engage with relevant people and companies on every social network you have a presence.  So be sure to RT, favorite, like, and comment.

Step 5:  Track trends and social conversations

As previously mentioned, an ongoing priority for social media strategists is monitoring trending topics on social that are relevant to you and your business. Doing this manually could take 12 hours a day, so it’s imperative that you use the best tools out there to make this a breeze.

Tracking trends isn’t just a one-off mental note of what others are doing, as you see what the competition is up to it’s important to make note of engagement and return so you can take what you can and inform your own strategy. It’s vital to have your tone, goals, and creative ironed out before diving in to post something off-hand. Keep a running document, have regular meetings with your team, and get your measurable goals written down.

Time:  One hour to five hours

Tools to help

1. Rival IQ: You can use Rival IQ to see what your competitors and key influencers are discussing. It helps you keep track of what’s trending in your specific industry as well as hop into the conversation. You can step up your hashtag game with Rival IQ too! See which hashtags are currently trending and identify which hashtags are dominating your specific social space.
2. Google Trends and Reddit: Identify which key terms and topics are trending on Google and on the web overall. This way, you can create timely content if the trend is or can be (take “the dress” for example) relevant to your company. Talk with your SEOs and get together a strategy that reaches all parts of your digital footprint, what is your brand known for? Make sure your social channels reflect that.
3. Buzzsumo: Has powerful content alerts to keep you on top of new and trending content. It also allows you to set up alerts for keywords or content.

Check out the latest Social Media Industry Benchmark Report to see how you stack up.

View the report now

Step 6:  Collaborate with your teammates

I’m always amazed at the number of companies who keep social media in a silo. This is as ineffective (and dangerous) as hiring an intern to manage your social media strategy.  Social media needs to be tightly integrated with your public relations, your website, your demand generation, and other parts of your marketing team and disciplines.

So, if you are a social media manager, don’t allow yourself to work in a vacuum. Reach out, collaborate and make sure you understand what is happening across marketing and your company. Chances are if you aren’t, you’ll find out the hard way by seeing someone else talk about it on social media.

Also, make sure everyone else knows what you are doing and what you need to be successful. Do you know what product launches are coming up? Do you know the top SEO keywords your website manager is optimizing? Talk to your coworkers and cross-collaborate so you stay informed.

Also, the more you collaborate and develop cross-marketing and cross-company relationships, the more likely employees will adhere to social media guidelines and help spread your message responsibly. In addition to the tools below, I recommend sending out a daily or weekly email that highlights the top posts or content you want everyone to promote on social. Your colleagues are busy people, so help them help you by including pre-written posts and images, so everyone can just copy and paste and immediately use your content in their profiles.

Time:  Once a week, seriously, schedule it now.

Tools to help

1. Powerpost and Buffer: The ultimate cheap tool for SMBs. It allows you to grant access to multiple social accounts all within one platform. Team members can schedule posts which all “buffer-up” into one unified easy-to-read (and access) feed.
2. HootSuite: These tools allow you to create teams and assign tasks. This way you minimize the chances of forgotten social posts and helps create a clear collaborative team.
3. Human Contact: Yep, the most powerful tool is walking by your teammate’s desk or, if you’re remote, using Slack or other IM tools to chat and video call away.

Step 7:  Report on issues and successes

Just as with collaboration, if you are not reporting on your issues, successes, and metrics, then no one will know how social media is doing or if your strategy is working. Use tools that make it easy for you to report key metrics and top content.

Be the source of any brewing issues. If you are doing your job right (and doing the steps above), then you know when something is trending or going awry on social media. Let people know!

Time:  One hour per week (and each day as needed)

Tools to help

1. Rival IQ: Get real-time alerts for break-out posts for both you and competitors that you can immediately share – or even add your teammates to the alert feed. Exporting reports of key content and metrics to PowerPoint, PDF and other formats takes just a few minutes (or less!).
2. In-Tool Analytics: Social networks are continuing to improve their analytics. Twitter analytics, Facebook Insights, and other in-network tools should be monitored and shared.

Republished with updates on May 28th, 2019. 

The post A Day in the Life of a Social Media Strategist appeared first on Rival IQ.

But if you own marketing or social media for a company with multiple brands, geographies or personalities, the complexity and potential for branding failure is high.

This is why I am encouraging our customers to use Rival IQ’s powerful comparative engine not just for competitive marketing intelligence on social media, but also for enterprise social brand management. In other words, you create a group of your brands or geographies to compare against each other.

What’s the Value of Social Brand Management?

You might be saying, oh, I can totally track all of our brands on the social media channels themselves. Maybe. But the advantage of using Rival IQ to do this is  you can do it one place, quickly and easily, and not only make sure everyone is following brand standards but you can also learn from each other.

Top 6 Reasons to do Social Brand Management

1. Fast brand audit to measure compliance

2. Maintain consistent and strong cross-brand, cross-geo social profiles, based on best practices

3. Share best practices on content, engagement and influencer strategy

4. Track negative comments on social media, and plug in your PR team as needed, early

5. Develop, track and report cross-company social metrics to show overall performance

6. Make it easy for customers to find what they are looking for on social

How to do Social Brand Management using Rival IQ

In Rival IQ, all analytics and content revolve around a Market Landscape, which is basically a group of companies, brands or people you want to compare against each other.

Step 1: Create a Cross-brand Landscape

You can create a Landscape of all of your cross-company social brands. I love searching the social networks, in addition to using the known or approved social handles, as you often find “unapproved” or “rogue” usage of your brand on social media. You might want to add those, too, so you are seeing what is happening with those, assuming you can’t shut them down.

The example here is a collection of Microsoft products/brands.

You can see from this Landscape that most of the brands are on Twitter and Facebook, but the other channels are “spotty” so to speak. One of the strategic areas this can quickly inform you is whether you have a clear company-wide plan or guidelines about where brands should have a presence. For example, should only the main corporate brand be on LinkedIn? Should everyone have a Google+ to help with search results?

In addition to cross-brand, you could set up a Landscape of all your geographic handles worldwide. This way you could ensure that your company is maintaining a consistent brand framework and social nomenclature throughout the world. The example below is a collection of some of Starbucks’ global locations on social media.

What’s cool with Rival IQ is that you don’t have to use a website address as the URL for each brand – we also allow a Twitter handle URL or a YouTube page URL to be entered for each profile you add to a Landscape.

What’s interesting to see from this Landscape is how Starbucks is focusing primarily on Facebook and Instagram around the world, with Twitter also heavily used. This is very typical of a B2C (business-to-consumer) market. However, you can also immediately see some variance in logos, which could be an area the company could fix immediately.

Step 2: Analyze Cross-Channel Social Performance

One of the benefits of a cross-company Landscape is really tracking what’s working and what’s not working in social media.

You can see which brands or groups are really doing a great job of building their fan base, influencer marketing, meaningful activity and engagement.

This chart shows social activity across Starbucks geographies for top social networks.

One of the most important metrics to target and track is social engagement. Depending on how comparable your global brands are in terms of marketing budget, fan base and activity, you can choose whether to compare total engagement or the more rationalized engagement rate.

This compares the global social activity by total engagement on the top social networks.

Step 3: Evaluate Top Social Content

Beyond the metrics, you want to really dig into the content to see how your brands are earning fan engagement on social media. With Rival IQ, you can analyze what we call “top content” either by cross-channel (an aggregate view across top networks) or by individual social network.

Since all the Microsoft brands are active on Twitter, I am using top Twitter content for my example. Rival IQ pulls the top 50 tweets for the time period you select (in this case, last 30 days) and sorts it by engagement. For this, I chose Engagement Rate. We can see that Microsoft Dynamics is doing the best job of engaging with its Twitter followers, followed by Visual Studio.

Here is top Twitter content for Microsoft companies sorted by Engagement Rate

The most important thing with Top Content is learning best practices. What did your colleagues do to earn engagement, and how can others learn from their success? How can you develop best practices around this evaluation, such as using images with Tweets (over 80% of the most engaging Tweets included an image!).

I can also learn how contests can work on Twitter to earn engagement. Xbox showed a great example of this, which gave this brand over 18,000 interactions on a single Tweet. Wow!

You could also use this report to celebrate successes. Maybe you can create a weekly Top Content “shout out” or email blast to your cross-company marketing teams, showing whose content really did a great job on social and what the team can learn.

Step 4: See Who’s Talking About Your Brands on Social

In addition to keeping track and learning from top content, you also want to make sure you know who is talking about your different brands. Rival IQ makes this super easy, especially on Twitter.

The Twitter Mentions reports enable you to quickly understand and analyze each brand’s total potential reach on Twitter based on top influencers.

This report shows Top Mentions by Company, telling you quickly number of mentions, mentioners and potential reach.

Then, you can dig in by mentioner, and look at who is tweeting about your brands. You can also find key influencers you are not yet following and follow them straight from the tool!

In the top mentioners report, you can see who is talking about your brands, and you can follow them straight from the tool.

Finally, you can view by the Tweets from the top influencers, sorting by reach, engagement or sentiment. This is a great report to track on a regular basis to make sure you know both positive and negative commentary going on about your brands.

Twitter mentions sorted by engagement, reach or sentiment.

 Step 5: Do a Cross-Company Social Positioning Audit

Rarely do companies pay enough attention or optimize their social bios on the networks. This needs to be a focus of your social brand management. Make sure your brands are making the most of their profiles. Many social users are now searching for products, services and companies within the social networks themselves – not just on search engines like Bing or Google, so you want to think of your social bios like you would your meta description on your website.

As part of this, you will probably want (and need) to set some new guidelines and content best practices for updating and optimizing social bios.

Here are some suggestions for positioning guidelines:

• Use the full allowed character count for each social networks. For example, Twitter allows up to 160 characters. Few of the Microsoft brands above are optimizing for this length.
• Use hashtags to help drive search results and relevance. What are the top key words for your business or product. Use them on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube all leverage hashtags).
• Use a standard way of mentioning the “mother ship”. While each brand or geo might have it’s own key terms, hashtags or description, establish a standard way of showing all these brands are part of the same company.  I like the way Office 365 does this on Twitter by saying “Powered by @Microsoft”. If I was managing Microsoft’s social, I would set a guideline that every brand use this simple but powerful statement along with the corporate Twitter handle.
• Use only approved corporate branding and logos. It’s amazing that teams will not use approved branding, but it happens, so make sure you establish guidelines for this also.

 Step 6: Establish guidelines and metric targets

Beyond guidelines for social profiles, you should create set policies and guidelines for social media overall for your company. This is not intended to stifle creativity or micromanage, but rather set some parameters that ensure brand consistency while empowering your social media managers to be creative and try new things for their brand or location.

You will also want to establish target goals and metrics for the teams. Create a scorecard all social media managers can use to track and report their success.

Some of the top guidelines and metrics I recommend include:

• Target social channels – some networks just may be completely inappropriate for your brand. Or maybe you want all your brands to be on Twitter, but then they can choose the others. Maybe you want to limit all brands to the top 3 networks for their market. Whatever it is, make your guidelines clear.
• Target engagement rate – this should be relevant for each network. For example, 1% engagement rate on Twitter is rocking it, but on In
• Target activity per social network (every network is different)
• Image guidelines – provide clear and helpful guidance on what size and resolution to use on each network. It varies a LOT!
• Voice or branding guidelines 
• Customer support guidelines – can social media managers respond to complaints? If so, how?

If you have an Intranet or Wiki at your company, make all of the metrics and guidelines easily accessible for everyone.

 Step 7: Manage Ongoing Cadence of Reporting and Sharing

Now that you’ve done all the groundwork, keep the momentum going! Have a weekly or monthly meeting with all the social media managers to share best practices, updates to guidelines and review the metrics.

Make sure and use this opportunity to congratulate the top content winners of the period and share their success secrets!

Implement Social Brand Management at Your Company

Now you are ready to really move the social media strategy and brand management forward for your organization. If you don’t have someone designated within your brand or social team to manage this cross-company initiative, then start with an organizational update!

Share in the comments what you are doing for best practices to manage this growing area of brand management.

The post Enterprise Social Brand Management Using Rival IQ appeared first on Rival IQ.

For Q1 2015, we did an RRI for High-end Department Stores, which analyzed and scored 12 top brands based on their social media performance from January 1 through March 31, 2015. In this report, Nordstrom was the only department store to receive the highest ranking of Superior Social IQ.

Download the complete report for free 

The RRI for High-end Department Stores analyzed and scored twelve top brands.

Social IQ Evaluation Areas

The RRI evaluated the department stores on the following categories:

1. Social Presence
2. Social Audience
3. Social Total Engagement
4. Twitter Mentions Potential Reach
5. Average Engagement Rate on Twitter
6. Average Engagement Rate on Facebook
7. Average Engagement Rate on Instagram
8. Top Social Content across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Google+

The RRI evaluates companies in a market across eight key categories

 High-end Department Stores Overall Analysis

While these brands surely spend billions on marketing overall, it would appear several are still not fully investing in social media. In our topline analysis, we found:

• A lot of social media best practices and “standards” are being missed by these huge department stores that spend millions on advertising. They are missing the viral value of social media.
• No eCommerce connection between their Instagram or Facebook pages and online stores. Big gap! They are only posting content, and not leveraging product images or content with potential purchases. We have seen many leading brands starting to beautifully connect their social media channels directly with eCommerce purchasing.
• Most brands do well on only one or two channels but are not consistently focused across channels or leveraging content or messages across channels. They should all be rocking Twitter, Instagram and Facebook – at least.
• No pattern or consistency in how much or when they post on different channels.
• There is a higher focus on building audience and activity (posting) rather than engagement.

Four Big Surprises

Based on this, we were really surprised by the following results:

1. Really low engagement on Twitter and Facebook. On Twitter, part of this is the lack of using images. Stores are posting frequently but not focused on engagement with their social audience.
   

   A best practice engagement rate on Twitter is .50 or above, which no one is hitting in this market.

2. Hashtag abuse or lack of use overall. This is a huge issue on all channels, including Instagram, which is an extremely hashtag-centric network.
   

   Even in the most engaging posts, hashtags are missing, which could have led to even greater engagement.

3. Lack of social profile optimization or consistency. There are minimal to no product links, hashtags or branding consistency across channels. Even for sister companies, there is no cross-brand consistency.
   

   Only Bloomingdale’s is optimizing for Twitter’s allowed 160 characters, there almost no hashtags, and the Twitter profiles are different from other channels.

4. No connection or link to sub-brands or partner brands. For example, stores are not using product brand Twitter handles to tie the two brands together. This is true even for Nordstrom, who scored the highest Social IQ. In doing so, they are missing the influence and extended reach of these other brands.
   

   Macy’s has a great tweet here but missed the greater opportunity by not using @EsteeLauder. Nordstrom should have used @Tom_Ford to extend the reach!

What you can learn

The big takeaway from this is even some of the most well-known brands can improve on their social media. This is also another reminder to not do your social media in a vacuum – see how you are doing relevant to your competition and other brands in your market. You may be doing better than you think, or you may be drinking your own koolaid and getting out socialed by others!

Read the research report to learn more about how you can increase your Social IQ and beat the competition.

The post Rival Results Index (RRI) for High-end Department Stores appeared first on Rival IQ.

We also continue to hear challenges about content marketing, especially around keeping up with the need to create and publish engaging social media content across multiple channels.

Today, we are launching three key new features designed to help in these areas:

1. Rival IQ Dashboard
2. Cross-Channel Social Top Content
3. Buffer and Hootsuite Integration 

Let’s walk through each of these.

Rival IQ Marketing Analytics Dashboard

First, we wanted to give users immediate context around what is happening in their Market Landscape (what Rival IQ calls a group of companies you compare against each other). The new Rival IQ Dashboard does just that.

Now, when users come to the Rival IQ online app, the first page they see is the Dashboard, which gives you an at-a-glance update of the most important analytics and content about you and your competitors.

The new Rival IQ dashboard for a Landscape of Cruise Lines

Every report provides one-click detail, enabling you to quickly dig into detailed analytics behind each dashboard chart.

About You At-a-Glance

At the top of the dashboard, you quickly learn how your company (or the focus company in that Market Landscape) is doing in social media and SEO keywords, including:

1. Social Audience: What’s your current cross-channel audience total (for 6 social networks)? How has that changed over a specific time period?
2. Posts Per Day: How many posts per day have you averaged? And on which channels have you posted the most?
3. Interactions Per Post: How many total interactions have you received across the six channels? Which social network is most engaging for you?
4. Ranked SEO Keywords: For how many SEO keywords are you ranking on Page 1 or 2 of organic search and for how many words are you ranked on Page 1 specifically?

About Your Competitors

Next, you get some fast competitive context for all the companies you are tracking in your Market Landscape, including:

1. Which competitor has increased its social audience the most?
2. Who has achieved the biggest growth in organic keyword count and rankings?
3. Who is spending the most on Google Adwords?

You also quickly see all the latest alerts for your Landscape, such as which company had a breakout post or changed their social or SEO positioning. 

Top Social Content and Twitter Mentioners

Who has time to dig through each social network looking for the most engaging content for both you and your competition? With Rival IQ, you don’t have to – and the Dashboard makes it even faster and easier to see both your top social post as well as your competitor’s over the last 7 days.

The Dashboard shows you top posts for you and your competition. This is sorted by Engagement Total.

You can sort the posts by either Engagement Total (the total number of interactions) or Engagement Rate, a Rival IQ metric based on the number of total interactions per 1,000 followers – so you know how you are engaging within the context of just your social fan base.

In one click, you can view top content based on Engagement Rate.

Top Twitter Mentioners

We also make it easy for you to see which influencers are talking about you and the competition on Twitter, highlighting the Top Mentioners of the past 7 days. You can quickly sort by your top mentions or your competitor’s top mentions.

From the dashboard, you can dig into detail in a couple ways. Right on the dashboard, you can click on the “See Mention” hyperlink, which immediately opens a window on the dashboard with highlighted tweets by that mentioner.

With one click, you can view the tweets posted by each top mentioner.

From that window, you can also conduct influencer marketing, by clicking on the Twitter “Follow’ prompt, which opens up that mentioner’s profile on Twitter. If the mentioner looks like an influencer you should be following, then simply click on the “Follow” button, and you’re set!

Click on the Twitter follow button to see the mentioner’s profile – and you can start following them right from Rival IQ!

Cross-Channel Top Social Content

Our top social content reports for each channel are some of the most powerful reports in Rival IQ, because you can immediately learn what posts are the most engaging for each company in a Landscape. We took that same great approach but made it cross-channel, meaning you can now see what content is most engaging across Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+.

With this new report, you can find out which channel you are rocking compared to other channels and your competition overall. As with all Rival IQ content, you can sort by Engagement Rate or Engagement Total as well as more granular engagement metrics, detailing Applause, Conversion and Amplification.

Buffer and Hootsuite Integration

In our recent market research, a large percentage of Rival IQ users said they use Buffer and/or Hootsuite for social media content publishing. Fortunately, our engineers just love solving new challenges and figuring out how to make our jobs easier as marketers.

If you are a Buffer or Hootsuite user, you can now publish content directly from Rival IQ into those two tools.

To set this up, you just need to go into Account Settings and go to the Social Publishing tab. There, you can click on Hootsuite or Buffer.  Once you do that, you will see a Buffer or Hootsuite content box popup within the Rival IQ app.

I recommend going into your own top social content (you can do this easily by going to your organization’s Company Page), and re-posting high engagement and still relevant content. Schedule it for different times to test optimal times.

Also, let us know if you would like to see us add more publishing tools with this capability!

How to Use the Dashboard in Your Daily Workflow

With these new features, you’ll want to visit the dashboard each day to make sure you haven’t missed any alerts, top posts or top mentioners. Also, you can easily download the dashboard report to PDF or PowerPoint and have a fast update to send out to the team.

We look forward to hearing your comments and experiences with these new features. Leave comments here or contact us at support@rivaliq.com.

The post Rival IQ Launches Marketing Analytics Dashboard and New Social Content Features appeared first on Rival IQ.

Need more leads? Create a landing page.

Want to capture emails for your newsletter? Create a landing page.

Want to integrate social media with your lead generation machine? Wait. . .  what?

In spite of landing page prolificacy, few marketers are tying together their social media strategy and growth goals with their overall demand generation or other marketing initiatives, let alone using landing pages. But I have found social media landing pages are an ideal match.

Landing Pages for Social Media Advertising

We have found the combination of paid social media and tailored landing pages to be very successful in building brand awareness, targeting our message, collecting qualified prospects for our SaaS application, and achieving high conversion rates.

We’ve also had some good learnings over the past few months since we started doing this, and I wanted to share the steps we’ve taken so you can save time and money with your own initiative.

Learning #1:  Sponsored Updates Alone Are Not Enough

We started piloting social paid advertising a few months ago. As our target market is B2B and target customers are marketers, LinkedIn is a good fit for us. Since our strongest content at the time was our blog, we created sponsored content campaigns, highlighting relevant posts that would appeal to marketers.

Our two most successful blogs in terms of CTR was one on hashtag best practices and another on social job hunting.

The traffic increase to our blog was significant. Over a period of 30 days, we received 560 unique visitors to our blog and over 40,000 impressions. Our average CTR was 1.6% with a CPC of $4.48. Not bad if some of those folks were converting and becoming part of our trial users or newsletter subscription database.

Topics like these drove strong traffic to our blog from LinkedIn targeted ads.

But the result? Increased awareness but zero conversions, not even sign-ups to our blog newsletter. Costly for awareness only.

Learning #2:  Tailor Your Message and Focus on Conversion

Next, we created ads specific to the value proposition of our marketing analytics tool to see if LinkedIn prospects would actually sign-up for our free 14-day trial.

Rather than link to our website, we created a landing page tailored to each headline in Unbounce, also having images on the landing pages that aligned with the advertising. Our call to action was to sign-up for our free 14-day trial.

Landing page for ads using the headline “Be a Marketing Superhero”.

Over 30 days, we received 367 unique visitors to the landing page, and converted nearly 6.5% of those visitors to sign-up for our 14-day free trial. Good conversion, but our CPC was still quite high at $4.92, which meant we were paying about $100 for each trial sign-up.

That was significantly higher than we were paying for a similar sign-up from Google PPC ads. And only one of those seven trialers converted to paid, making that an extremely high cost of customer acquisition from this source.

Learnings #3:  Provide an Incentive and Valuable Content

Our first instinct around providing valuable content and not trying “close” a LinkedIn member immediately was correct. But we still needed to at least get an email address, so we could start nurturing these leads over time.

So, next we ran a campaign providing the prospect more value for giving their information. We were able to do this, because now we had a solid piece of content to offer beyond our blog or website. We had conducted successful primary research on Social Media Trends and Priorities.

Again, we built a specific landing page in Unbounce, where visitors entered some basic information and were immediately able to download the report.

In addition to LinkedIn, we did similar ads and landing pages on Twitter, and are planning to do the same on Facebook.

We built tailored landing pages for each social network where we advertised.

Our conversion rate? 11% visitor to sign-up. 

Learning #4:  Use Incremental Improvements and A/B Testing

A few days into the campaign, we created an A/B test, with the B version including a shortened lead form with three rows, reducing the information to just name and email address. Our conversion rate rose to nearly 20% for this version.

We learned that the shorter form with just name and email converted at least 8% better.

We will continue to make adjustments as we see the results of the different social networks, as well as track how the campaign performs differently on different channels.

Key Takeaways

Here are my 6 takeaways from these multiple tests of aligning social media with our overall marketing goals, particularly around lead generation. I’d love to hear examples of what you have done successfully combining social media paid advertising and Unbounce landing pages.

1. Use Landing Pages
2. Include a Call to Action
3. Tailor your Message
4. Provide Relevant & Valuable Content
5. Push for Higher Conversion Rates
6. Be Agile – look for ongoing incremental improvements

The post Why You Should Use Social Media Landing Pages appeared first on Rival IQ.

And I am making some pre-game predictions based on their social media scores (disclaimer: I take no responsibility if someone actually bets on this!).

For this evaluation, we used the official social handles for the basketball teams or the school’s official Athletic Department handles – in order to really evaluate the sports fans!

Let’s Size Up the Off-Court Audience

We have learned many times in our analysis of social media prowess that the largest companies, brands or schools do not always have the biggest social media following or engaged fan base.  Let’s see if that rings true for our college teams. From the numbers below, it’s easy to calculate that the big state schools could have literally hundreds of thousands of fans rooting them on today.

Based on official Collegeboard.org undergraduate populations, our final four teams have the following student base enrolled:

Michigan State: The largest of all the final four schools, with an undergraduate population of ~39,000.

University of Wisconsin, Madison:  Next in line with ~32,000 undergrads enrolled.

University of Kentucky: The eight-time national champion team school has ~22,000 undergraduates.

Duke University: The smallest and only private institution in our final four playoff, with just under 7,000 undergrads enrolled.

Who has the Largest Fan Base?

Going into today’s big games, Michigan State is capturing those hundreds of thousands of current and previous students on their social media channels. It easily wins the Social Audience portion of our pre-game analysis, with nearly 900,000 fans across the top six social media networks.

In spite of being in the lead, Michigan State is not standing still. The social media team for the athletic department and hoops team has added nearly 21% new followers in just the last week alone!

Who’s Going to the Post the Most?

Going to the post? Get it — passing to the big man and posting on social media – he he!! Okay, I thought it was funny.

The point of this is who is most ACTIVE on social media. And Kentucky and Wisconsin are in the lead.

Kentucky edges out the Badgers with one more post, hitting 319 posts in the past week. Twitter and Facebook and where the action is.

Whose Fans Are Showing the Love?

Kentucky is not wasting those posts either – they are engaging with their fans, especially on Facebook. When we look at the aggregate social engagement totals for the teams, Kentucky outscores everyone with 735,000 social interactions this past week.

Duke is small but mighty, coming in second for engagement with over 600,000 interactions, with much of that love shown on Instagram (the most popular of the six channels with the college age demographic).

Where in the Social Arena is the Game Playing Out?

Staying true to what we find for Business-to-Consumer brands, these teams are focusing their activity and engagement on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.  And from the chart above on social engagement, the teams are doing a good job tailoring their focus to where their relevant fans are. For Kentucky, Facebook and Twitter are tops, Duke has Facebook and Instagram focus, while Michigan and Wisconsin spread the effort across all three.

What are the Big Plays Drawing Applause?

Let’s dig into the social content to see what we can learn about how the teams are getting engagement with their fans.

If we look at the top content scored by total engagement (defined as the total number of interactions on that social network for the time period we are using), it plays out as I’d expect.

Duke has the most engaging content on Instagram. 10% of these top posts were video, which we are seeing more of on Instagram (not just YouTube!).

Top Posts based on Engagement Total on Instagram

Kentucky is scoring big on engagement with Facebook.

Top Posts based on Engagement Total on Facebook

and Wisconsin edges out Kentucky for most engaging tweets on Twitter.

Each School’s Top Play

Every team, like every organization, has it’s own personality. Let’s take a look at the top Facebook post for each team and see what it says about the team, it’s fans and the school.

1. Michigan State Focuses on the Score

With a nail biting playoff game going into the final four, no wonder the Sportans team’s most-engaging post of the whole week was it’s win over Louisville. No photo was needed here, as the score said it all.  No matter what size your social fan base, achieving an over 11% engagement is impressive!

2. Kentucky Focuses on Team Effort

Packed with a team of stars, it’s no wonder that Kentucky showcases a full team “selfie” for its most engaging post on Facebook.

3. The Big Man Wins the Hearts in Wisconsin

Who knew Badgers could be so big. This team is packed with size, led by the all star post Frank Kaminsky. He’s the go-to man on the court, and on social media, too.  The top two Facebook posts for Wisconsin featured shots of Kaminsky, drawing likes, shares and supportive comments from Wisconsin fans.  On the hardwood, the team’s second-tallest player, Duje Dukan, who stands a mere 6-10 to Frank’s 7 feet, receives a lot of applause, too!

4. Duke Notices Every Detail

Coach K is known for his incredible focus on details and the fundamentals. It appears the team’s social media manager does, too. Duke fans love to see photos of Coach K achieving his own record and hearing all the details.  I noticed the post is also written in grammatically correct full sentences, as all good grads of a top private school should. Even the commas are correctly placed. We’ll see if that intellectual approach will bring the ultimate trophy for the team!

The Prediction

The games today are going to be close. These teams know how to play when the pressure is on.  They all have amazing players and coaches.

I created a cross-analysis chart of social media activity and engagement for the six networks we track.  Kentucky really stands out from the pack in this chart.

Therefore, I predict that Duke will beat Michigan State and Kentucky will win over Wisconsin.

Your Takeaways

So what can all social media strategists learn from this analysis?

Here are 5 takeaways:

1. Build your fan base starting with those people that already know and love you, and grow from there
2. Post frequently to keep your fans informed and coming back for more
3. To gain engagement, give the fans what they want – if they want to hear about your star players, then give them your superstars.
4. Make your social voice true to who you are. Are you fun, intellectual, assertive? Whatever your company’s voice is, your social media should reflect that.
5.  Track your competition and make sure you know what your best offense and defense is.

If you would like to review all the data and analytics we used for this analysis, you can use this link to start a 14-day free trial: http://bit.ly/1Mqxejf

Good luck! And let’s all play nice on and off the court.

The post Social Media Final Four Pre-game Predictions appeared first on Rival IQ.

Rival IQ can help, and you can create stunning reports in literally minutes.

Follow these steps following the end of each quarter using Rival IQ: 

#1: Establish and Report Quarterly Metrics 

If you haven’t create a scorecard and clear metrics for each quarter, then start now!! Use this quarter to establish metrics of success and goals for each quarter for the areas you are responsible for. Ideally, these metrics would roll up into the overall integrated marketing plan and scorecard.

Based on primary research we conducted, conversion to revenue and social media engagement were the top two most important metrics for marketing teams to report on a regular basis. Social media activity and audience also ranked among those identified as the most important metric to measure and report. Make sure you understand what is important to your team, your executives and your business, and reflect those metrics in your quarterly reports.

#2: Show Quarterly Progress in Social Media

Goal: Illustrate marketing success, trends and quarterly updates

Outcome: Clear metrics, growth trends and successes to include in your marketing quarterly business review

Steps to take:

1. Either use My Charts or select from one of Rival IQ’s many curated reports for one-click export: https://www.rivaliq.com/reports.
2. If you haven’t yet created your own chart to show trending data, then go to Custom Chart Creator, set the date range to the last quarter, and pick the source, metric and graph type you want. For example, I show two custom charts below you can create and export in seconds.
   

   This custom chart shows how the total engagement for me and my competition has changed over the past quarter.

   

   This is a great way to show follower growth for a specific channel, like this one for Holland Cruise Lines on Instagram!

3. Set the Date Range to the past 90 days – or if you have a subscription level that supports custom date ranges, set the specific date range you want for the past quarter (e.g., January 1 to March 31).
4. Click on the report you want to export, choosing from either channel specific reports or larger summary reports for all channels or all detailed metrics. If you haven’t seen all the easily exportable reports already curated in Rival IQ, check them out.

Under reports are all the curated report sets you can download in one click!

#3: Review Social & SEO Positioning and Make Recommendations if needed

Goal: Stay on top of competitive positioning and messaging and adjust your own positioning when needed.

Outcome: Be the source of competitive market positioning and show how you and your team are optimizing your positioning across social media and the web.

Steps to take:

1. Set your Date Range to Last 90 Days (or put specific quarterly dates in the custom date range selector).
2. Review the Alert Matrix to check on any positioning changes you will want to mention: https://www.rivaliq.com/activity.
3. Go to Cross-Channel Bios (Social Positioning): https://www.rivaliq.com/analyze#?category=social_positioning.
4. Not only analyze competitive positioning but make sure you are doing your own brand and positioning audit. Are all your social channels consistent?
5. Review and Export the positioning charts to PPT.
6. Go to SEO Positioning: https://www.rivaliq.com/analyze#seo_positioning.
7. Review and Analyze the competitive homepage titles and meta descriptions. See which of your competitors are still using keyword tags.
8. Export the positioning charts to PowerPoint or PDF.
9. Be sure to add any recommendations or strategic analysis to these slides as you finalize your quarterly report.
   • For example, is positioning and bios on social and on websites all starting to sound the same across your competitive landscape?
   • Do you need to differentiate more?

 #4: Share Your Quarterly Report

Goal: Show how your strategies and tactics are working, communicate key trending data, provide competitive positioning and landscape metrics.

Outcome: Illustrate the strategic value of social media and content marketing and incorporate your analysis and metrics in the quarterly marketing and business review.

Steps to take:

1. Create your quarterly Rival IQ report.
2. Export the report(s) to PowerPoint or PDF.
3. Include the Rival IQ charts with other marketing reports if needed.
4. Create a one page overview slide talking about highlights, lowlights and next steps – and put at front of report.

Metrics Matter

Many marketers go through their work and never stop to measure what is working and what is not working or report on those findings. With marketing more data-driven than ever before, you need to take the time to identify key metrics of success for your marketing and organization and then report on those metrics on a regular basis. This builds credibility and trust, and it also gives you the power to ask for more budget, people or programs.

In addition to using Rival IQ to create awesome quarterly marketing reports, be sure to review our suggestions for daily, weekly and monthly workflow using Rival IQ.

Happy reporting!!

The post Quarterly Marketing Reports with Rival IQ appeared first on Rival IQ.

Be sure to follow these steps at the end of every month.

#1: Analyze SEO Keyword Rankings

Goal: Identify keywords performing the best for me and my competition

Outcome: Collaborate with the Web team and start using top-performing keywords in social posts and blogs

Steps to take:

1. Go to SEO “My Keywords” report:  https://www.rivaliq.com/seo#tabs/focus-company
2. Review the keywords driving the most traffic to my website. Ask yourself these questions:
   1. What’s really working?
   2. Any major movement up or down?
   3. Any cool landing pages I’m not leveraging in my social media or blogs?
3. Now review the Landscape Keywords report: https://www.rivaliq.com/seo#tabs/landscape
4. Review Keywords in Common. Ask yourself – How can I help us get ahead of the competition with these terms by using them more in social media or other content marketing? 
5. Analyze the Top Keywords Where You Don’t Rank: These are terms your competition is ranking on page 1 or 2 but you are not showing up in the top 20.
6. Put your plan together:
   1. Capture the keywords you need to start emphasizing in your content plan.
   2. Coordinate with your writers, social media manager, web team, etc.
   3. Start a monthly keyword focus campaign based on the Rival IQ report that you send out the beginning of each month!

#2: Conduct a Monthly Brand Audit (for large enterprises)

Here’s an example of a cross-company Twitter bios for Microsoft

Goal: Manage cross-company brands and positioning and ensure policy adherence.

Outcome: Take action and fix any off brand presence, messages or content. Recognize those sub-brands doing a great job.

Steps to take:

1. To do this, you will first need to set up a Market Landscape of all of your organization’s brands and sub-brands on social media. If you haven’t done this, it’s your first step!
2. Once step 1 is done, Go to Cross-Channel Bios: https://www.rivaliq.com/analyze#social_positioning.
3. Review all brand and sub-brand positioning across each channel (here’s an example using Microsoft brands).
4. Communicate and request action for any off-brand or off-policy positioning or content.
5. Export reports to include in monthly report (see step #4 below)

#3: Analyze and Recognize Top Social Content (for large enterprises)

Goal: Promote cross company learning and content improvement.

Outcome: An integrated approach to social content and shared best practices across teams, product groups and social media managers.

Steps to take:

1. To do this report, you will have needed to set up a Market Landscape of all of your organization’s brands and sub-brands on social media. If you haven’t done this, it’s your first step!
2. Go to Cross-Channel Detailed Metrics:  https://www.rivaliq.com/analyze#cross_channel_social
3. Set your Date Range for “Last Month”
4. See where the team members have made the biggest impact. Has someone really rocked social follower growth this past month? Has somebody really exceeded the average in engagement rate?
5. Export the charts that show the top performers.
6. Next, go to Detailed Metrics for one of the social networks, such as Instagram:
7. Hover over the charts until you see “view content” and then click on that link to see the content behind the engagement performance.
8. Export or copy and paste that top content.
9. Create and share a report (or include with your monthly report below) giving kudos and best practices lessons for the team.

#4: Prepare and Share a Quarterly Report

Goal: Show key benchmarks, success metrics, areas of improvement, competitive movement, etc.

Outcome: An informative report everyone looks forward to receiving. Easy inclusion in monthly operations reviews, business reviews, marketing meetings, etc.

Steps to take:

1. Establish your monthly report (use one of Rival IQ’s set of reports: https://www.rivaliq.com/reports – or create your own set: https://www.rivaliq.com/analyze#favorites). We recommend including both social and SEO content. Be sure to include key trending reports you can create under Create Custom Charts: https://www.rivaliq.com/analyze#create
2. Export your report(s) to PowerPoint or PDF
3. Include with other marketing slides or share with colleagues/boss via email.
4. Our research shows these key metrics are reported on a monthly basis by most marketers:
   1. Social Media Audience and Audience Growth
   2. Social Media Activity
   3. Social Media Engagement
   4. Top Social Content
   5. Top Social Influencers and Potential Reach of Mentions

Learn More About How to Use Rival IQ in Your Workflow

In addition to using Rival IQ as part of your monthly processes and reports, be sure to review our suggestions for daily, weekly and quarterly workflow and reports using Rival IQ.

The post Rival IQ Monthly Analysis and Reports appeared first on Rival IQ.

Here are some best practices to do every week to make sure you are getting the most out of the tool. By following this weekly Rival IQ checklist, you will also keep your marketing team and leadership informed of what’s happening as well as illustrate the ROI of your social media and other digital initiatives.

#1: Manage “My Charts”

In “My Charts” you can both create custom charts and then manage your own curated set of reports.

Goal: Manage your own curated set of Rival IQ metrics and reports

Outcome: Creation of your own customized analytics and report dashboard

Steps to take:

1. If you haven’t yet, go through all reports and click on the “star” to add the chart to My Charts.
2. Go to My Charts: https://www.rivaliq.com/analyze#favorites and review the charts you have selected.
3. Go to Custom Chart Creator if you need a trending view or two-dimensional chart, and create your own custom charts:  https://www.rivaliq.com/analyze#freeForm?timeAnalysisMode=0.
4. Star your custom charts to save them to the My Charts set.
5. Go back to My Charts; move the charts around if needed into the order you want.
6. Delete or add new charts as needed every week to keep this up to date.

#2: Send Out Your Weekly Report

In the “Reports” section, you can pick from a number of curated sets of slides to export to PowerPoint.

Goal: Illustrate marketing successes, weekly trends or challenges

Outcome: Impactful reports you can create in seconds and quickly send to the team

Steps to take:

1. Either use My Charts per above or select from one of Rival IQ’s many curated reports for one-click export!
2. Set the Date Range to the period you want (Last 7 Days most likely)
3. Click on the report you want to export, choosing from either channel specific reports or larger summary reports for all channels or all detailed metrics.
4. You can also export charts and reports from anywhere in Rival IQ (if you want just one or two slides).
5. Review the report(s) you’ve exported, add them to other marketing slides if needed, and prepare to send out.
6. Add a slide with your insights, strategic advice or suggestions.
7. Send your weekly roundup report to your team, boss, CEO, etc.

What Else Do You Do Every Week?

Tell us how you use Rival IQ every week, so we can share your best practices and learn more together!

In addition to using Rival IQ as part of your weekly processes and reports, be sure to review our suggestions for daily, monthly and quarterly workflow and reports using Rival IQ.

The post Your Weekly Rival IQ Checklist appeared first on Rival IQ.

These days, when I watch any sport, I always want to translate a team’s competitiveness on the court or field to the digital landscape. I want to know what social media lessons we can borrow (or completely ignore) from winning athletic teams. So, I put together a landscape of the top 10 ranked NCAA men’s basketball teams.  Most of these teams are frequent March Madness participants, so I assumed they were probably not strangers to social media either.

Since these teams are uber competitive, I thought I would also score the teams on each lesson, giving a simple Win or Lose ranking.

Here are six social lessons we can learn from the NCAA top 10 men’s basketball teams: 

Lesson #1:  Have a strong presence

Score:  WIN

This is a social landscape, with all the teams active on several social platforms. Not surprisingly since the schools and teams are targeting young consumers, alumni and basketball fans, the social presence is focused on more consumer-oriented networks: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.

From a social engagement standpoint, however, it’s primarily Facebook and Instagram – a trend we see with most B2C organizations.

Lesson #2:  Use consistent social naming and branding

Score:  LOSE

Clearly, these teams’ fans are willing to work to find them on social. Naming, logos and descriptions are inconsistent at best and all over the place at worst.

For many teams, there is a mix of the term MBB – Men’s Basketball – and the Athletic department.  So on some networks, the team has its own handle, but other times it’s part of a broader athletic department profile.

Also, several of the teams have more than one “official” website, with a men’s basketball sub-domain off the main university or athletic department website and typically more of a fan-oriented site, such as goshockers.com for the Wichita State team.

Let’s take Duke as an example:

The website where basketball fans can find detail about their team is the men’s basketball section of goduke.com.  However the “Go Duke” nomenclature is used primarily for the overall athletic department.  The team also has its own website dukeblueplanet.com.

For social profiles, the Duke men’s basketball team uses three different profile names, each with different descriptions and logos – all of which say they are “official” and managed by the team. And all with tens of thousands of followers.

1. Duke MBB
2. Duke Basketball
3. Duke Blue Planet

It also has more than one “official” handle on some networks, such as Facebook.

Duke it not alone with this inconsistency.

As marketers, what we can take away from this and learn is the following:

1. Have one main naming structure for all your social networks and be consistent.
2. Use the same logo and creative across all, so everyone knows it goes with the others.
3. Use the same description and profile bio language, as well as consistent hashtags.
4. Make it easy to find the social handles with share links from any website page associated with the team, as well as links to other networks from each social channel.

Lesson #3:  Build your social fan base

Score:  WIN

As I said, in spite of not following best practices for social profiles and branding, the fans are finding the teams and following them.

University of Kansas men’s hoops takes the lead with the most followers across the top six social networks, with 638,000 combined followers. Duke and Kentucky also come in very strong.

Lesson #4:  Be Active!

Score:  WIN

Every hoops player knows you never have a chance of winning if you don’t shoot the ball. So take your social posting to the paint enough to make some points!

This is an active group of teams.  At the top of social activity is Villanova, with 285 aggregate social posts across the six networks over a 7 day period, including 217 tweets, 32 Facebook posts, 4 YouTube posts, and 32 Instagram posts. Nice work!

Also, nearly all the teams are posting on multiple networks. Wichita would be the only exception in this category, focusing only on Facebook, and posting a healthy 47 times in one week.

Lesson #5:  Post content that engages

Score:  WIN

As we always say, the biggest fan base does not translate into the most engaged fan base. The same is true with these teams.  When we look at which team is doing the best job engaging with its own followers on Facebook, the leaders are not the biggest teams or most social teams. But they know what kind of content and information their fans love.

When we look at the top 50 posts on Facebook for this landscape, Virginia comes in with the top 3 posts by Engagement Rate. Other teams scoring big on engagement are Wisconsin, Gonzaga, Kentucky, Arizona and Villanova.

Lesson #6:  Get Visual!

Score:  WIN

If you’re following social media trends, then you know everything is visual these days, even on Twitter. These teams know how to play up to their followers with great photos, images and videos that get engagement and social applause.

The top 5 most-engaging Tweets over a one-week period were nearly all photos and videos.

Follow the March Madness Frenzy

To follow your favorite team or the overall activity, be sure to track the hashtag #MarchMadness, and see who is winning both on the court and in the social field.

If you want to dig into more data from these teams, you can quickly create your own Top 10 NCAA Men’s Basketball landscape in Rival IQ – along with a free 14-day trial! It’s that easy.

The post Social Media Lessons from NCAA Top 10 Men’s Basketball appeared first on Rival IQ.

Rather than wading through the social networks or Google search to try and figure out what’s going on, take just a few minutes in Rival IQ and KNOW what’s happening quickly and easily – and be ready to take action!

Your Daily Rival IQ Checklist

1. Read Twitter Mentions

Twitter mentions enables you to see who is talking about each company in the landscape by company, by mentioner/influencer and by mention.

Goal: Know which influencers are talking about me and my competition

Outcome: Expand the breadth of my influencer network so I can get broader reach on my content.

Steps to take:

1. Go to Twitter Mentions: https://www.rivaliq.com/mentions#tabs/mentions
2. Look for influencers who mentioned “me” that I need to thank/engage with.
3. Find influencers who mentioned one or more of my competitors that might be open to outreach and the start of building a relationship.
4. Follow influencers that mentioned me or others in the landscape (you can click the follow button from within Rival IQ!)

2. Review the Landscape’s Top Performing Social Content

Twitter Top Content Report and Analytics

Goal: Identify themes/types of content performing well that I’m not leveraging

Outcome: Improve my own social content to gain more engagement/following

Steps to take:

1. Go to: Twitter Overview https://www.rivaliq.com/overview#twitter
2. Select the Date Range you want to analyze (yesterday or last 7 days)
3. See who has the most top posts (we pull the top 50)
4. Change the filter from Engagement Total to Engagement Rate to see what has changed; who is achieving the most overall engagement, and who is doing the best within their specific audience.
5. Analyze the characteristics of the most-engaging posts – photos, video, links? What hashtags are being used? On what day of the week was the most engaging content posted? What other intelligence can you gain?
6. Create some new posts using what you learned and schedule them using your social management tool of choice (we use Buffer and Hootsuite!)

3. Analyze YOUR Top Performing Social Content

You can analyze Top Content by company

Goal: Identify themes/types of content performing well that I can repeat

Outcome: Further improve my social content to gain more engagement/following

Steps to take:

1. Go to Companies: https://www.rivaliq.com/companies/
2. Click on “My Company”, which will take you to a detailed section all about a specific company.
3. Click on “Social Content”
4. Select the Date Range you want to analyze (last 7 days, yesterday, other?)
5. Analyze your content and ask some key questions:
   1. Which content has performed the best?
   2. What can you learn from that?
   3. Did you use awesome images?
   4. Were you funny?
   5. Were you helpful?
   6. Did you mention other people?
   7. What else can you learn from your most engaging content.
6. Re-use successful content and post composition with new posts and schedule them for today or tomorrow!

4. Check Rival IQ Alerts

In the Alert Feed, you can find all breakout posts or positioning changes.

Goal: Make sure there are no surprises among my competition or landscape

Outcome: Be the first to know and communicate competitive actions

Steps to take:

1. Go to Alert Feed:  https://www.rivaliq.com/events
2. Review the feed, looking for key changes in positioning, breakout posts
3. If anything major or newsworthy, copy and paste that alert and send an email to your team/boss/CEO, etc.

How do you use Rival IQ in your daily marketing workflow?

Tell us your daily routine, so we can share best practices and learn more together! Add thoughts and other daily analysis your team does into the comments section.

In addition to using Rival IQ as part of your daily workflow, be sure to review our suggestions for weekly, monthly and quarterly analysis and reports using Rival IQ.

The post How to Use Rival IQ in Your Daily Marketing Workflow appeared first on Rival IQ.