These days, a company lives or dies by its social media presence. Without the right branding, we won’t reach our desired social audience. Without their engagement, even the best products won’t be able to generate profits.

SentiOne allows you to build your brand right and reach those willing to buy your products. Understanding your audience means understanding who and for what reasons needs your services. This, in turn, is a necessary condition for you to shine among your competition.

What is SentiOne

SentiOne is a tool for social listening, i.e. monitoring the current trends and discussions on social media. Algorithms based on natural language processing allow you to collect information about groups interested in your services. 

You can learn what the attitudes towards your brand — or your competitors — are. You can see which groups are most willing to talk about your brand. You can find out what keywords are used in these conversations and what are the best social media to promote your products.

This information will allow you to create consumer profiles. Your communication should be tailored to these profiles. There is a drastic difference between the channels and methods of reaching schoolchildren, young adults, engineers and middle-aged stock exchange players. 

The basics of building your social audience

#1: Define your target

Do you want to see who is posting about your brand? No problem! The analysis dashboard will provide you with information about the gender ratio of your audience. It will also show you the most popular languages and social media platforms among your audience. 

Repeat this process for your competitors’ brands and your services sector. This way, you’ll learn on which markets your rivals are more successful than you. With SentiOne, you can easily compare your branding strategies on social media.

The next step is to decide whether it is profitable to compete in a particular group that is already targeted by our competition. Maybe it is worth investing in dominance where we already have an advantage or there is less competition? Perhaps there’s a platform where your competition hasn’t yet claimed a stake? SentiOne will allow you to obtain this information and create a brand image suited to a given platform and group.

#2: Tailor your message to different audiences

Your services are used by consumers from different parts of the world, from different demographic groups, on different platforms? Stop trying to fashion a message that fits everyone! Teens on TikTok and young adults on Twitter differ in language, attitudes and needs. Match your message to each of these groups separately.

SentiOne will allow you to define keywords that are popular with your audiences. It will also allow you to verify what is important in your sector for audiences on specific platforms. Young people tend to attach more importance to, for example, whether your brand is environmentally friendly. Older people may be more sensitive to your brand authority — the credibility of the information you post.

Choosing the right platform is also crucial. For example, TikTok users might not be interested in cybersecurity and IT services. In the case of this type of service, it seems more adequate to run a blog and participate in discussions on Twitter.

#3: Learn about your social audience

Analysing your owned media will provide you with a wide range of data about your followers. That way, you can easily learn which of your posts are the most popular. You’ll have data about the reactions to your content. You’ll be able to identify which media helps your audience grow.

Taking a good, hard look in the proverbial mirror is a necessary step in maintaining your engagement and growing your social audience — you’ll learn more about owned media analysis from our dedicated article.

Strategies for increasing your reach and growing your audience

Videos over pictures

Let’s cover some basics regarding your reach. If you run an Instagram account, you may have noticed that many creators are complaining about the decline in engagement. This is a direct result of the algorithm changes that took place in 2022. 

In the last few months, the platform has been promoting the recently introduced Reels feature. Reels are simply short videos similar to Vines (remember them?) and TikToks. This change penalizes the creators of static images. This is worth keeping in mind when developing your PR strategy.

In the case of Facebook, live streams work best. Facebook Live is currently a feature heavily promoted by the platform. Lives get much better reach than premade movies posted on fan pages. This is the result of Facebook’s policy, which focuses on promoting more engaging content that will keep users on the platform longer.

The main advantage of Lives is their contemporary character and rawness. In addition, using the live function, you can stream some in-house events (of course informing the participants in advance). This gives your audience access to the “behind the scenes” of your business, which is always interesting.

In February 2019, LinkedIn also launched a live streaming function. The platform itself declares that live content generates up to 7 times more reactions and 24 times more comments than prepared videos. Among business professionals, LinkedIn is the most trusted social platform today. If they’re our target social audience, it’s certainly something worth considering!

Use hashtags, jump on trends

Hashtags allow you to easily classify your content and help with reaching the social audience interested in your market. Every social media platform supports hashtags, although they seem to be the most important on TikTok and Instagram. Marking your content leads to increased visibility and engagement.

What’s more, you can build marketing strategies around the hashtags you create. This way you motivate your audience to create videos about your products and brand. That way, you build a relationship with your audience while potentially reaching more users.

Being trend aware is also important. TikTok’s popular Duet feature has a very high potential to engage your audience and carry your content further. Knowing what hashtags and challenges are trending at the moment is also a big plus.

Corporations such as Burger King or McDonald’s are seasoned with real-time marketing — they react immediately to new online trends. This strategy proves that you’re keeping up; it also gives you a chance to show up in the Discover tab. This, in turn, means an influx of new followers. 

You can read our dedicated article to learn how to effectively use TikTok for business.

Easy replies with SentiOne

With the recently introduced Threads feature, you can see all your mentions and messages on social media platforms in one place! The Simple Reply feature allows you to search for mentions of yourself even when your profile has not been tagged.

Cross-platform integration makes the work of your PR team much easier. Instead of having to log onto several platforms, you simply reply from one place. Everyone wins — your followers can see quick reactions and your team works more efficiently.

Social media is a collaborative effort

Nowadays, social media offers more opportunities than ever for collaboration between accounts. The shared posting feature is becoming more and more popular (e.g. Instagram and Twitter). Likewise, the aforementioned duets on TikTok are an opportunity for brands to cooperate.

Don’t be afraid to get involved with larger accounts and influencers. Perhaps you have business partners who are established on social media platforms and are willing to collaborate? Maybe you are frequently interacting (commenting) with the content of chosen opinion makers? This is an opportunity for cooperation and mutual benefit.

When it comes to influencers, all their work is based on staying relevant and trustworthy. Your brand authority can only benefit from working with the right people. Criticism from them is also a great opportunity to improve the quality of your services and show your audience that you listen.

Account takeovers have also become popular recently. They typically involve taking over your account for a limited period of time, usually 24 hours, by an influencer or a brand ambassador. They are given freedom as to the content they post. If they are experienced content creators, this usually means a lot more traffic on your account and potential interactions with people who haven’t been following you before.

Don’t buy followers

The prospect of a short-term boost to your visibility on social media by buying followers may seem tempting. Remember, however, that this is an investment that does not pay off.

The followers you buy are usually bots or inactive accounts that don’t engage with your content. This (obviously) negatively impacts engagement. They do not comment, they do not react. They only increase your followers count.

This way, your engagement per follower drops and the health of your account plummets. Even worse, if your audience notices what’s going on — it isn’t that hard. This is, of course, bad for your image.

Your budget for buying inactive accounts is better spent on a good marketing strategy. Or — hear us out — a SentiOne subscription 😉

Conclusion

Building a brand on social media is not the only key to success. Developing appropriate business strategies is also based on a perpetual analysis of your and competitors’ content. It is also necessary to define the current trends in your sector. Reaching more potential consumers will also be easier when you’re generating effective leads.

SentiOne allows you to accomplish each of these tasks and more. Book your demo today and gain access to a powerful social listening tool.