Intelligent Social Media: Why Creativity Can't Be Siloed In Marketing

There is no doubt that social media has influenced the world. From the early days of friends sharing pictures of their cats doing funny things to the role of social media in the political climate, social media is one of the most powerful marketing tools at a company’s disposal. lts colossal reach means brands that don’t use social media are missing out. Although cat pictures are still very welcome!

A 2021 CMO study reported that companies were spending 58% of their marketing budgets on online channels, a growth of 15.8% from the previous year. That's a significant chunk of your budget so using it wisely is essential to creating engaging content that creates a worthwhile ROI.

Creativity is an important aspect of social media marketing as it ensures company posts and engagements are eye-catching, lead to interactions, and are memorable. But while important, there is more to a successful social media marketing campaign than creativity. Let’s look at the importance of intelligent social media and how it can influence the way brands approach their marketing.

Finding Trends and Opportunities

Nearly every brand uses social media to promote their products and engage with customers, fans, and followers. But that’s only one side of the coin. Companies can harness social media to create a deeper understanding of their customers' likes and behaviors while they form deeper relationships and engagement.

With millions of active users on each social media platform, it’s possible to find trends and insights into the way customers think and feel about products and brands. This can help direct companies to make better products, market themselves to their target audience, and refine their branding strategy.

Today’s buyers are better educated about the products they are buying. Thanks to social media and the internet, brands must adapt to modern consumer habits. In fact, personalized advertising is now so effective that 80% of customers are more likely to buy from companies that offer personalized marketing experiences. Given this importance, brands must use social media to discover what their customers want.

How Intelligent Social Media Creates Consumer Insights

Also known as social listening, monitoring, or intelligence, brands gain insights into their customer behavior by tracking conversations happening around their brand. Social listening tools such as Mention, Meltwater, and Hubspot allow companies to spend their efforts elsewhere while these platforms aggregate data for them.

With a constant tab kept on trends, your competitors' actions, and potential new marketing opportunities, social listening helps companies to use their social media marketing effectively. Social listening allows companies to monitor the success of their social media campaigns, from tracking keywords to monitoring how many exchanges they generate, and what the demographics of those who like their posts are.

Ultimately you want to improve your brand’s online reputation, and you can track this with social listening tools. You can also find and assess influencers who may be able to boost your brand in the eyes of their audience if they fit into your target demographic.

Brands can use social listening tools to:

• Discover trends that fit into their niche and use them as part of their posts
• Tailor their language to fit with the culture of their followers
• Make better-informed decisions that meet customer expectations
• Follow the successes, and failures, of their social campaigns to learn what they do well and where improvements can determine how their brand message and tone are received, and whether changes are necessary.

Creating Shareable Content

Social media content can really resonate with people when it's relatable. It helps others want to share that content with those in their network who may also find it relatable. This can snowball and continue to grow in popularity as more eyes see your amazing content.

This is where intelligent social media tools come to the forefront again. They allow you to analyze data and uncover what makes content shareable.

By dialing into your audience demographics, you’ll learn intricate details such as the time of day or even which day of the week you should post. All of this information can be used to shape how you create content in the future. It might help you determine that your in-house graphics are shared more than stock images for example.

Keeping Accounts Secure

There is another edge to intelligent social media and that’s keeping your company data secure. As your social marketing team begins to grow you face the problem of who in your company should have access to the social media accounts.

Many companies have just one set of login credentials for their social media channels which commonly get shared around to those who need access. Cybercriminals can (and do) use this as an opportunity to infiltrate your system or network. Once compromised, they may install ransomware or halt your operations entirely.

Using a social media management platform like Zoho Social, eClincher, or Buffer can help keep your platforms (and passwords) safe. They help keep the number of people with access to your main social media logins to a minimum but still allows for your marketing team to make changes and create or schedule posts.

Cybersecurity experts, Redscan, claim that “People continue to be one of the weakest links in an organization’s cybersecurity.” The experts use ethical hacking services to test company networks and computer systems for weaknesses to help them shore up their defenses. With users often the cause of a security breach, shoring up those defenses can be priceless to your reputation and operations.

Multi-factor Authentication

One of the latest but strongest ways for companies to protect themselves intelligently against hackers is to use multi-factor authentication or MFA. This process asks for additional credentials from a user every time they log in. MFA  typically occurs in the form of a code sent to a device or through a tool that automatically generates authentication codes every 60 seconds.

Remain Creative

Although using intelligent social media tools to determine what your followers interact with the most, you can’t lose the creativity of your marketing department. Following a set of guidelines formed by analysis tools too closely can restrict the organic nature of your content. It then appears formulaic and ultimately predictable which will hurt your brand’s reputation.

Marketing consistency is important to avoid alienating your customers and followers. Spontaneous and creative content is also critical for social media success so try not to be too rigid. Overdoing it on one type of successful post becomes dull, old hat, and not worth sharing.

Keeping content fresh is a cornerstone to social media marketing success and with intelligent social media management, you can comprehend when your posts are losing traction. Marrying creativity with analytics ensures your brand stays fresh and relevant in a crowded marketplace.