How to Improve Your Business ROI with Social Media Listening:

Don't Just Listen.....Engage!

August 27th, 2013 - Posted by Nilay D to Social Media
This entry was written by one of our members and submitted to our YouMoz section.
The author's views below are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.
Social Media Listening Creating Buzz in the Biz world
Social (media) listening is emerging as one of the most powerful tools in the social media block. Also, known
as social media monitoring, this platform is now effectively used in business circles to monitor, analyze and
then engage in customer interactions in social media networks. Studies have repeatedly shown that listening
tools if used strategically can prove to be a useful resource for accessing social media information through
organizations.

Fig: Social media listening is all about listening to your customers feedback and responding accordingly.

Social media listening process starts with LISTENING to customer interaction, DECIPHERING customer
feedback, BENEFIT from intelligence gathering, ANALYZE from context collection; and then use the platform
to DEMONSTRATE appreciation to your customers for helping make your brand better.
Eventually, social listening is all about customer benchmarking.
The Role of Social Media Listening in Business & Brand
Development
Social media listening is all set to play a vital role in business and brand development in days to come.
Enterprises have been competently harnessing the power of social intelligence courtesy listening platforms to
help capture social data (buzz) relating to its brand, manage and analyze its content (updates and
conversations) through text analytics, and deliver insights (by engaging and demonstrating ) in dashboards
and reporting services.

Dont just Listen: Understand, Analyze, Engage and Demonstrate appreciation to build customer relationship.

In fact, brands have been quick to realize the potential of social media listening; because social media
networks not only allows enterprises to connect and interact directly with their customers, but also opens up
opportunities to listen to what your customers are saying about you and your brand. Use this to your
advantage. Dont just listen, ENGAGE!
Listen to the social buzz, identify the opportunities to respond to engage with your customers queries,
concerns and complaints more comprehensively. Listen to the growing trend of conversations and identify
the influencer(s). Remember to keep your friends close, but your enemies even closer.
How to Ensure Real-time Customer Engagement with Social
Media Listening?
Real-time customer engagement in social media if used effectively can prove to be a goldmine for enterprises
who are willing to harness it to their advantage and boost their ROI (return on investment).
Remember, the entire concept of social listening in business is irrelevant without involving the very essence
of being social or interactive. And interaction in the right perspective involves not just consuming information,
but also to share and give back information. Because it is only by nurturing customer engagement both
people and companies can build relationships gradually leading a potential buyer into the selling process.
The Curious Case of Makers Mark: Social listening personified
Everyone here, serious about imbibing social listening into your business strategy are surely aware
of Makers Marksunprecedented social media success story. This will ever remain the ultimate example of
how the popular whiskey brand implemented social listening effectively to turnaround their impending
business debacle into a social media win. Heres a round-up of the amazing social listening coup from
Makers Mark:

Fig. How Makers Mark effectively implemented Social Listening to turn a business debacle into social media
win.
How to Boost your Business ROI with Social Media Listening
You have just seen how Makers Mark used the negative publicity to its advantage just by being quick and
effective in converging its social listening data to tap the pulse of the customers, and work in its favor
adding to its branding and improving ROI. However, many big brands are finding it difficult to implement it in
the right perspective. Lets check out a few golden rules:
Use Social Listening for Demographic Segmentation
Use social listening for demographic segmentation by using data from listening platforms and web analytics
software like Google Analytics. This will help you to accurately address your target customers (even using
traditional advertising), increase sales and improve ROI.
Identify Influencers and Collaborate
Use your social listening skills to identify influencers, and then engage and collaborate with them in product
development, building business processes, etc. as well as making them customer representative in brand
promotion. Brand value definitely takes a leap when customers (especially an influencer) endorse it.

Fig: Implement Social media listening techniques to boost ROI
Do More Than Listening Participate, Amend and Implement
With statistics indicating that an average American spends 16 minutes/hour on social media sites, it is
important for businesses to do more than just listening. Whether your customers are venting out amongst
others in the social circle or directly at you, it is important for you to pay heed to the updates and conversation
and engage to satisfy the queries and concerns of your customers. This will help improve brand loyalty,
increase conversions and repeat sales; and boost ROI.
Instill Trust: Social Listening Is Not an Intrusion into Privacy
While over 40 percent consumers feel that social listening is an intrusion into their privacy, it is essential for
brands to instill trust amongst its customers (social media followers), by engaging in constructive discussions
and implementing consumer suggestions into your business policy thus reiterating that Your Brand listens
to you to improve products/services and respond to your grievances as well. Again, an important factor in
building enduring business relationship and improved ROI.
How to Choose the Right Social Media Listening Platform for
Your Business
Now, that you have understood the many benefits of social media listening; your next prerogative will be to
choose the right social media listening platform. Here are a few parameters that will help you to adjudge the
one that will suit your business the best:
Understanding What Your Business Needs to Measure
Contemplating to choose a social listening platform for your business? First, identify what you are actually
going to measure, because every successful social media campaign are based on clearly defined objectives
and measurable outcomes. Some of the most prominent measures are Reach and influence over your
community, social media Engagement, Competitive data, customer Sentiment about your brand, and sales
conversions.
Know Your Budget
It is important to know the budget your business is ready to allot for social media listening or monitoring.
Simply speaking, the cost estimate for implementing social media listening for your business depends upon
the amount of data you need to collect and archive for analysis. Apart from tracking and storing data related
to social listening, there may be other features and functions that can boost expenses. Google Alerts is one
of the best free tool to monitor your brand terms across the web.
Ask More QuestionsDo Not Hesitate
Who are your customers mainly the social audience and target market?
Is your social media platform meant just to monitor (listen) social media mentions or also manage social
media profiles?
Identify the profile you are most active on. Does your chosen social media listening platform support that
network?
Do you to archive data for analysis for how long?
Are you also looking for sentiment analysis in your listening platform?
Are you looking for listening platform to integrate with other tools like Google Analytics, etc.?
Top 5 Social Media Listening Platforms
Google Alerts
Unquestionably, the best and the most inexpensive social listening platforms you can have for your business.
Manage your brand in real-time through Google Alerts notifications each time your brand name is
mentioned. All you need to get the best of this great tool is a simple adjustment to settings.
Social Mention
Another robust, fast and free social listening tool that monitors blogs, videos, comments, etc. is Social
Mention. Its sort by feature allows you to monitor the most recent updates and conversations related to your
brand that people are talking about. It also gives you an insight into the conversations you might have
missed.
HootSuite
HootSuite is a simple, intuitive, user-friendly and highly popular social media listening and discovery platform
- especially small to SME brands. Besides being easily accessible, users can comfortably manage and
monitor multiple social media accounts through one interface, to identify and customize real time analytics. Its
USP is its global messaging functions, which offers options such as scheduling social media posts. It also
notifies you just when someone mentions your brand and in what light.
Sysomos
Sysomos (a Marketwire Company) comes with a complete social listening platform that besides demographic
tracking, real-time tracking and analytics; offers automated sentiment analysis, competitor comparisons and
much more. Moreover, this monitoring tool can provide great insights into social interactions based on
segmentation by age, location, interests, and engagement levels.
Radian6
Radian6 (now acquired by Salesforce) is a powerful social listening platform with clean dashboards and real-
time charts making it easy and a popular choice amongst marketing professionals. The tool proves to be a
great asset when it comes to converting data into appealing visuals. In short, it helps you to seamlessly cut
through the clutter, and focus on deriving meaningful data for marketing decisions.
Synopsis
One of the thumb rules to generate genuine social media following for effective real-time customer
engagement is to identify customer market and understand business opportunities. Share content to
implement your marketing message across all points of the buying cycle from social media circles like Twitter,
Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, etc. to shareable sites like YouTube, Slideshare, Pinterest and Flickr.
Many enterprises in spite of creating a successful social media branding fail to endure the media frenzy and
buzz it has created, as they back off into a dormant mode after creating a stir believing they have
accomplished their mission. Not really!
Social media listening is about customer engagement (without invading privacy). Your actual mission starts
here..


50 Top Tools for Social Media Monitoring, Analytics,
and Management
By Pam Dyer
Use these platforms to manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.
To succeed in todays connected world, you need to build a community around your company, brand, and
products. Over the last decade, social media monitoring has become a primary form of business intelligence,
used to identify, predict, and respond to consumer behavior. Listening to what your customers, competitors,
critics, and supporters are saying about you is key to getting great results from your social media campaigns.
There are countless tools out there, offering many ways to analyze, measure, display, and create reports about
your engagement efforts.
These 50 tools distill data in ways that are relevant to your social media marketing plan, enabling you to figure
out how to succeed with your audience.
Determining which tools are right for you requires a clear definition of your objectives. Some are real-time, highly
customized dashboards that enable you to manage multiple accounts, use shared work spaces, and respond on
multiple social networks with one click. Others are simple, effective, and lightweight, and provide the right
amount of functionality.
1. Alterian/SDL ($) | Alterian is now SDL, an integrated platform that blends the marketing analytics, campaign
management, and social media capabilities from Alterian with those of SDL.
2. Argyle Social ($) | Identify and engage with more prospects, qualify and quantify better leads, and build and
maintain stronger relationships by linking social media actions to the marketing platforms youre already using.
3. BackTweets (Free) | Track how many people are talking about you, whos talking, and what theyre saying. You
can search through a tweet archive for URLs sent via Twitter, including results for full URL links, shortened URLs,
and URLs without the www prefix.
4. BlitzMetrics ($) | Social media dashboards for your brand that monitor content across Twitter, Facebook,
YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and more. It helps you benchmark against your competitors, learn which
demographics are the most active, and track content performance so you can improve your reach and
engagement.
5. Bottlenose ($) | A tool that provides live social intelligence by analyzing activity across all the major social
networks. Use it to search, monitor, analyze, target, and engage in real time, all from one place.
6. Brandwatch ($) |This service reads through and summarizes whats being said on the Web about brands, people,
and products. Define keywords to track (brands, topics, people names, products) and get access to mentions,
trend and campaign analysis, and competitive info.
7. Buffer (Free and $) | An app that manages multiple Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, with the ability to
set a tweeting or updating schedule unique to each. Includes detailed analytics for all your posts.
8. Buzz Equity ($) | Listen to social media conversations in real time from various social media channels like Twitter,
Facebook, blogs, news, forums, reviews, and video websites.
9. CARMA ($) | Evaluate your overall social media image, brand recognition, message penetration, competitive
positioning, and areas of strength and weakness, and use the data to develop a strategically sound and effective
communication strategy.
10. Collective Intellect ($) | This Oracle platform captures millions of conversations a day across multiple social
networks, including Facebook and Twitter. It extracts sentiments, preferences, and intentions from those sources
and displays the information in real time.
11. Crimson Hexagon ($) | Tap into social media conversations with listening tools that help you understand how the
most engaged consumers think and feel about your brand, why consumers are choosing other brands over yours,
and how your ads/marketing are really perceived by your audience.
12. Curalate ($) | This tool applies advanced image analytics to social media conversations to give you detailed
insights for your initiatives on Instagram and Pinterest.
13. CustomScoop ($) | Track media coverage, listen to social conversations, monitor your competition, measure PR
and marketing effectiveness, and get automated daily reports.
14. CyberAlert ($) | Monitor 100,000+ consumer-generated media sites for word of mouth, including Twitter, blogs,
Usenet (theres a blast from the past :), and video sites.
15. Facebook Insights (Free) | Facebooks built-in tool provides Facebook Page owners with metrics around their
content. Helps you understand and analyze trends within user growth and demographics.
16. Fliptop ($) | A customer intelligence platform that uses publicly available information, including social data, to
score leads so you can prioritize your pipeline, better target your audience, and know more about your
customers.
17. Google Alerts (Free) | Get email updates of the latest relevant Google results (Web, news, etc.) based on your
queries.
18. Gorkana ($) | This tool searches through and filters conversations to provides insights into the most relevant
conversations about your brand. Offers audits and reports plus daily social media alerts.
19. HootSuite (Free and $) | A social media management system that enables teams to collaboratively execute
campaigns across multiple social networks from one dashboard. Includes audience identification tools, the ability
to streamline workflow, and custom reports. I use HootSuite to manage my companys Twitter account.
20. Icerocket (Free) | A free resource for brand monitoring, it taps the Web, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, and
delivers easy-to-read results in one page.
21. Klout (Free) | A tool that finds the influencers in your audience so you can target and empower them to become
advocates for your brand.
22. MarketMeSuite ($) | A dashboard similar to Hootsuite and TweetDeck, it can be used to manage and market on
multiple social profiles, schedule messages, use geotargeting, and more.
23. MediaMiser ($) | Web app that collects and analyzes relevant content about your brand from social, traditional,
and digital media. Spots trends in media coverage, including sentiment, share of voice, and top regions.
24. MediaVantage ($) | Pulls traditional media coverage and social media mentions into a database that helps you
monitor your reputation, align your teams and messaging, and measure results.
25. Meltwater ($) | Combines social media monitoring and analytics with social engagement tools to help you create
targeted marketing campaigns and build brand relationships.
26. Mention (Free to $) | An iPhone and Android app that lets you create alerts for your company, its keywords, your
brand, and your competitors. Updates in real time.
27. NetBase ($)| A social intelligence platform that enables you to monitor, understand, react, engage, and publish
through both owned and earned channels.
28. Netvibes (Free and $) | A platform that tracks clients, customers, competitors, and your reputation across media
sources, analyzes live results with 3rd party reporting tools, and provides media monitoring dashboards for brand
clients.
29. NUVI ($) | Real-time display of conversations that weight influence and sentiment. You can instantly see the
social media conversations taking place in your market and immediately engage your detractors and evangelists.
30. Pinpuff (Free) | Similar to Klout but focusing only on the Pinterest, it measures the how people share images
about your brand and the influence that results.
31. PinReach ($) | Measures your Pinterest influence by giving you an overall score and easy-to-read charts and
tables that show your most popular pins and boards.
32. Pinterest Web Analytics (Free) | Pinterests built-in analytics gives site owners insights into how people are
interacting with pins that originate from their websites. See my in-depth post: Use Pinterest Web Analytics to
Jumpstart Your Social Media Marketing.
33. Plugg.io (Free) | Manage and tweet from multiple accounts, get friend suggestions, and automate syndication via
blogs and news sources.
34. Shoutlet ($) | A community management and moderation platform for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Foursquare,
and YouTube. Includes integrated workflow tools and task assignments.
35. Social Marketing Cloud ($) | An automated solution that enables you to monitor and analyze blogs, forums,
wikis, and microblogging sites to track real-time conversations about your brand.
36. Social Mention (Free) | A real-time social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated
content from Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc. into a single stream.
37. Social Response ($) | Formerly Cotweet. Build dynamic Facebook fan pages, respond in real time on Twitter and
Facebook, and communicate 1-to-1 with your followers.
38. Sprout Social ($) | Web app that monitors Twitter, Facebook Pages, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Gowalla, and other
networks where consumers are engaging with businesses and brands. Also offers contact management,
competitive insight, lead generation, and analytics.
39. SWIX Analytics ($) | This tool tracks 75 social media metrics in one dashboard, enabling you to measure your
social media influence.
40. Synthesio ($) | Platform that offers global, multilingual monitoring of your brands reputation, campaign
management, influencer tracking, and competitive intelligence. Well-suited for large enterprises.
41. Sysomos ($) | A real-time monitoring dashboard that collects relevant online conversations about your brand and
provides insights with detailed metrics and graphics.
42. Talkwalker ($) | This reporting tool constantly scans the Web and social media to monitor your brand,
reputation, and competitors. It can also be used for campaign tracking, market research, and customer service.
43. Topsy ($) | Monitors tweets, websites, blogs, and social networks, and analyzes/indexes/ranks content and
trends.
44. Trackur ($) | Quickly monitor your online reputation, measure social media trends, and analyze social media
mentions for your company, brands, or clients.
45. TweetBeep (Free and $) | This app is like Google Alerts for Twitter: Choose some keywords and receive daily
search results via email.
46. TweetDeck (Free) | Very similar to HootSuite, only without all the bells and whistles, this client enables you to
tweet and track mentions, people, and keywords.
47. Twitalyzer ($) | One-click access to Twitter metrics that analyze followers, mentions, retweets, and influencers
and their locations. It can also be used to compare your Twitter account to those of your competitors.
48. UberVU ($) | Keeps track of all the major social media platforms in real time and delivers opportunities for
audience engagement.
49. Visible ($) | A social media analytics and engagement dashboard that enables you to monitor, analyze, and
engage in social media conversations all in one place. It can also be integrated into your existing CRM system.
50. Vocus ($) | Cloud marketing and analytics platform that looks at social, search, email, and PR, and delivers real-
time marketing opportunities in the form of leads, prospects, social media conversations, curated content and
inbound media inquiries.

What Is Referral Traffic?
Referral traffic is the Internet version of word-of-mouth advertising.
Whether you're running a blog or a commercial site, you've probably often heard the term
"referral traffic" thrown around as something that can boost your visitors or sales. Referral traffic
is not easy to obtain, but if you can get it, it can help you reach your readership or sales goals. You
should know a few things about referral traffic if you want to increase the number of visitors to
your website, blog or online store.

Definition
Referral traffic is used to describe visitors to your site that come from direct links on other websites
rather than directly or from searches. For example, other sites that like what you have to say or sell
may post a link recommending your site. You can also try to drive your own referral traffic by
leaving links on other blogs or forums you have joined. Pay-per-click ads also count as referral
traffic.
Importance
Referral traffic increases the "page rank" of your blog, which boosts it in Google search results. High
rankings in Google are coveted, as being listed on the first page of a search can lead to many more
clicks than if your site showed up on the fourth or fifth page of search results. Referral traffic is also
important because it provides a steady source of traffic outside of search engine hits. Referral traffic
drives targeted visitors to your website, which may increase revenues as they are more likely to
purchase a subscription or buy your product. A person who finds your site at random may find it has
nothing to do with what he was looking for.

Good Referral Traffic
Some referral traffic is good, but some is useless. If visitors aren't subscribing, buying a product or
making return visits to your site, you're getting the wrong kind of traffic. It's a good idea to find out
if you're getting the right kind of referral traffic, and a good way to do this is to use a free tool like
Google Analytics or Yahoo! Web Analytics. These tools break down exactly how many return visitors
you're getting, what pages they are checking out, how long they're staying and from where they
came. This can give you clues as to which pages on your site are generating visits.
Increasing Referral Traffic
Increasing referral traffic is not easy, but it is possible with enough effort. Your site must be original
and provide information about a new product or service before most everyone else. If you have a
blog, you might also write honest reviews of other products and ask for a link, or write a series of
posts on a particular subject. You might be able to use social media to your advantage; for example,
Typepad's official blog notes that adding a Facebook "Like" application can boost referral traffic by
50 percent.

About AICPA:
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) founded in 1887, is an organization
of Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) in the USA. It has more than 390,000 members in around 128 countries
spanning across different business and industry, government, public practice, education, international associates
and student affiliates. With the bench strength greater than 390,000 members, the AICPA (American Institute of
CPAs) is always aiming to engage tools of community- building with a simple goal of helping its members not only
to connect with one another but at the same time sharing best business and industry practices. The AICPA
leveraged social media platform like LinkedIn where they constituted a group for members-only which helped them
to create a professional environment ideal for its members to interact among themselves online. It also acted as a
channel where AICPA could share benecial marketing and educational tools with its members. This enabled the
group to grow by 40% and attract around 54,000 members within 6 months of its inception.
Business Objective of AICPA:
Main aim of member engagement team at AICPA was building an online community which helps its members and
accounting professionals to connect with colleagues/peers and exchange ideas about their businesses and
industry. The need was to constitute a group only open to members, as this would encourage a free exchange of
opinions, ideas, suggestions relevant and valuable to the group members. Another advantage would be that this
kind of group will in addition, allow AICPAs members to improve their skills in the social media landscape, and at
the same time can be promoted as one of the benefits of joining AICPA.
Strategy/Approach Adopted By AICPA:
AICPA members look at LinkedIn as the best and natural platform for professionals and industry experts to interact
socially. AICPA, to achieve this objective created a LinkedIn group open to only its members , thus enabling them
to take advantage of a community which is open to suggestions, sharing of ideas, having organic discussions and
where they can demonstrate thought leadership. The AICPA promoted the LinkedIn groups availability through
Social channels, LinkedIn Display Ads, email signatures and newsletters.
The Display Ads not only helped to increase in membership in AICPA but at the same also raised awareness
regarding key accounting and profession initiatives.
Subgroups that were Interest-specic allowed the members to discuss special topics in depth.
AICPA also used these groups to share information and news about important resources such as toolkits and
webinars.
These groups were positioned as the key benefit of being a member of AICPA.
Results Achieved By AICPA:
The AICPAs group has seen a tremendous growth and accounts for about 15% of the total membership of the
association. The key results of this strategy are as follows:
Growth in group membership to the tune of 40% by mid 2013, i.e. in just 6 months!
More than 54,000 members of the group.
LinkedIn has emerged as one of the top driver and contributor of trafc to the AICPA website.
Key Learnings:
Creating professional groups on Social media platforms like LinkedIn not only provides the AICPA members a
platform to gather online, but at the same time it also helps in raising awareness of the company/brand.
Being active on social media networks like LinkedIn helps professional Co/brands to highlight resources as well as
connect with new members, as most prospects professionals/users spend most of their time on LinkedIn.
This shows another important feature of social media marketing where a careful and strategic usage of social
media network helps the co./brand to not only increase its engagement but also enhance its footprint in the form of
more members.
Efficient use of social media helps to turn your current users into your promoters.
Social media marketing provides a perfect platform where companies can increase their revenue by getting
business from repeat customers. This can be achieved if your current customers can somehow be converted to
your franchise promoters.
Use Of Social Media To Turn Your Customers Into Promoters:
When you want social media to convert your customers into your franchisees or promoters of your business, you
have to change few of the strategies that you employed to attract users / visitors. To achieve this objective, your
social media strategies should be planned in a manner that the feeds that you post should be having quality
content and directed towards both current and potential customers. Following are few SMM strategies which can
be adopted to recruit promoters:
Generating Content That Is Shareable
When a company / brand aims to turn its current customers into the promoter of its business, the main goal behind
this is that the promoters propagate exciting news about their franchise. If this is one through social media it means
sharing the posts / content of the brand across different social media platforms. The best way to convert your
current users into your genuine promoters is by providing them good quality and unique content which motivates
and inspire them to like and share even if you do not ask them to do it. If a reader agrees, enjoys and feels excited
about your post then they are most likely to share and promote it among their peers. The content should be
original, rightly timed, crisp and short.
Inviting And Encouraging Users To Share Their Experiences And Stories
One of the good way to turn your customers into happy franchisee promoters is by inviting them to talk about and
share their testimonials. Users that are happy, love to talk about their good experiences in the form of writing
online testimonial on a contact form, uploading a positive video review on your YouTube channel or by
commenting on a status update on Facebook. Though there are chances that you may draw few criticism and
negative review while inviting to give feedback on social platforms but that can be managed by employing
reputation management system and strategies to address users concerns.
Making Your Presence On Social Media Platforms Truly Engaging
The work of marketer does not stop once you get some stories and engagement from your customers in the form
of positive review. It becomes even more important for the brand to acknowledge them. Always remember that the
conversations are two way or both sided. A potential customer / user will generally feel impersonal if the
conversations are one sided. Monitor your page / accounts regularly and constantly try to reply to comments and
engage users who are posting there. All this gives a positive feeling to the customers of getting involved and
heard. This will further encourages them to be more involved, give positive review, testimonials, and more sharing
of their positive experiences on different social platforms.
Continuously Try To Establish Customer Impetus
The old age of marketing states that 80 percent of your business is due to repeat / old customers and 20 percent of
business is accounted by new ones which holds good even to this day. Thus, keeping this concept in mind never
forget your current customers. Make sure to show your love and appreciation to your current customers too.
Brands / Franchisees sometimes while giving schemes / discounts to the followers put a caveat that this scheme
applies only to the first time users / customers. Now this can turn off some of your current customers who may
have the feeling that their loyalty and long association with the brand is getting overlooked. If you give an impetus
to the current customers to return to your franchisee, then they more likely to further promote your brand and
spread better and positive word of mouth.



The Best Social Media Campaigns of 2014

Companies take to Facebook and other social networking platforms everyday, to run contests with the purpose of
creating more engagement, generate more fans and increase loyalty amongst audience members for the brand.
Some get it right and some fail miserably. Although we can fill volumes of books on botched social media
experiments and failed campaigns, for now well focus on some of the most innovative and best social media
campaigns of 2014!
#MyNatGeoCoverShot

With over 10 million fans on the Facebook
page, Nat Geo India decided to promote
their show CoverShot through a My NatGeo
Cover Shot contest on Facebook.
Participants could experience the thrill of
having their photo as a NatGeo magazine
cover. All they had to do was upload their
pictures and add a caption through the
Facebook app to create a virtual cover
page.
The USP of the campaign was that
participants could download this image as
well as share it on Facebook and Twitter
with their friends and followers. Every week
participants with the best shots were
announced as winners on the show. Thanks
to the contest the FB page currently has
13.8 million likes even though there was no
need to like the page to be able to
participate.
#NoMakeupSelfie

With selfies being all the rage on, it wasnt surprising to see that somebody would spin this blatant show of self-
love. From author Laura Lippman posting a no makeup selfie to Gwyneth Paltrows no makeup picture of herself,
to Beyonc, Rihanna and Cheryl Cole. All of these women have taken part in a trend that ruled the social media
space and helped Cancer Research UK earn more than 8m in just a couple of weeks.
Interestingly, a trend that was not even started by the NGO, directly benefited them and helped them sponsor 10
new clinical trials. Since its creation in March 2014, the No Makeup Selfie Cancer Awareness Facebook Page has
received 261,692 likes with each of their photos gathering approximately 1500-2000 likes and over 100s of shares
each photo.#HyundaiGoal

Hyundai UK teamed up with the largest independent football channel on YouTube, Copa90, to engage with football
fans through a contest to add value to its FIFA 2014 World Cup Partnership. The contest asked participants to
create a video of them recreating their favorite goal celebrations and submit it via an app on the Hyundai Facebook
page. They will then have a chance of winning one of seven pairs of VIP packages to the 2014 FIFA World Cup.
With the estimate number of digital fans alone for soccer being 3.5 Billion in Europe and America a campaign such
as this was able to see huge numbers in shares and participation and Copa90s YouTube channel jumped up to
613,056 subscribers with over 45,589,346 views
#MumbaiInANewLight

Philip
s
India
Ltd
launc
hed a
camp
aign
in
partne
rship
of the Maharashtra Tourism Development Corporation to promote the lighting of Mumbais iconic Gateway of
India structure. As a way to introduce and promote their new colored LED lights, Philips India utilized Facebook as
a channel to multiply the reach of their campaign. The company asked customers to click interesting pictures of the
Gateway lights or share their own plans on how they would enjoy the new lights.
The campaign killed two birds with one stone an increase in the number of tourists to Mumbai as well as
promotion of Philips.
#GetCovered

With his phenomenal success in the 2008 Presidential Elections, the President of the most powerful nation on the
planet was widely called the social President. President Obamas social media team made incredible strides in
changing the course of history in 2008 and once again they were at work to spread the word about insurance
coverage. The campaign originally launched towards the end of 2013 with a microsite was an abysmal failure with
memes and gags turning up on social media.
The White House re-launched the #GetCovered campaign in 2014 with the support of prominent members of the
movie and music industry. Some of the stars being Lady Gaga, Connie Britton, Kerry Washington, Will Ferrel, Zach
Galifianakis and many more. The campaign focused on getting American Millennial (Generation Y) to sign up for
insurance and before the deadline, since research showed that this demographic had avoided signing up for
insurance so far.