How to Sell Your CMO on a Social Media Aggregator
It’s that time of year – every department is pushing for new tools and software or lobbying to keep existing ones. And as a social media manager, you know how important having a social media aggregator is to powering your user-generated content (UGC) campaigns. But does your CMO know the importance of this tool? Fear not, my friend. If you need to sell your CMO on a social media aggregator like TINT, we have the cheat sheet that will help you lock down this tool in the new year.
#1 Capitalize on the Power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Organizations must certainly advertise their product. You can’t underestimate the importance of broad awareness campaigns or even microtargeted account-based marketing strategies. But one of the most powerful forms of marketing is one that may be out of the hands of anyone in your organization: word of mouth.
A number of studies have examined the effect on sales of recommendations—or warnings—by friends. In an article titled “Controlling the Grapevine” in Marketing Management, authors Douglas Pruden and Terry Vavra tried to determine how effective word-of-mouth advertising really is. The article is a survey of previous academic research; among their findings:
- In 1955 social psychologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld published the book Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass Communications, in which they report word of mouth to be seven times as effective as a newspaper advertisement and four times as effective as personal selling.
- Research reported in a 1971 article by George Day in the Journal of Advertising Research found that word of mouth can be nine times as effective in changing negative or neutral perspectives into positive ones.
- An article in Business Week said that 69% of people use a referral at least once a year in determining a restaurant to dine at—and this was years before Yelp was invented!
Having a social aggregator embedded on your site is one way to showcase positive word of mouth from your customers. This, in turn, can influence the way in which prospects view your company and ultimately whether they make a conversion.
#2 Simplify UGC Discovery
While it’s certainly true that you can spend hours searching the different social media platforms for what your customers are posting about your brand, you have to think of the opportunity cost incurred by the business. Depending on the size of your organization, it could take hours and several full-time employees to comb through all the social platforms.
This is where a social media aggregator really shines. By defining a set of rules and logic, you can pull in conversations that people are having about your brand, whether around a branded hashtag, company handle or important keywords. You can then quickly go through that list, identify popular posts and repurpose or embed that social media content on your website.
But that’s just table stakes for a social content aggregator. Where a more evolved platform like TINT comes into play is in helping social media managers with smart curation to save even more time. Using previous interactions with our platform, TINT’s machine learning technology can predict not only the UGC that your team is most likely to approve, but also which content is likely to perform well.
#3 Identify Gaps in Your Product or Service
By its very nature, social media is a two-way interaction platform. Consumers are both seeking out information about brands and giving them a piece of their mind when something goes wrong. Rather than getting defensive, savvy brands use this gold mine of information to improve their products and/or services. It’s like having an “always on” focus group.
While social aggregators are often used to display positive brand interactions, clever marketers can also use the functionality to pull in critical comments. While you would most likely never post those detractor comments on your website, gathering them on the back end is an easy way to gain real-time product feedback. This can be especially helpful during a product launch.
So let your CMO know that a social media aggregator can provide you a direct conduit into your customers’ thoughts, which can in turn identify product shortcomings, potential improvements, and even customer support issues. The authors of the “Controlling the Grapevine” article conclude that “determining what is being said about them on the street puts [a company] in a more proactive position to either capitalize on positive images or neutralize or defeat negative images.”
#4 Single Out Potential Brand Ambassadors and Influencers
Influencer marketing is a trend that appears to be only continuing to gain momentum. Using a social media aggregator helps your organization more easily single out which online commenters have the highest affinity for your brand. And it doesn’t have to be a Kardashian-esque number of followers to make an impact.
The current trend is skewing toward microinfluencers (those accounts with less than 100,000 followers) and even nanoinfluencers (less than 10,000 followers)—it turns out that small footprints can often lead to larger impact. Are you seeing frequent posts from a particular user? You may have just discovered a future brand ambassador.
TINT Is an Industry-Leading Social Aggregator
Now that you’re armed with information about the importance of having a social aggregator, be sure to consider TINT. Not only is TINT an industry-leading platform—used by the likes of Coca Cola, Marriott and the Smithsonian American Art Museum—it also provides other key functionality to power your UGC campaigns, including:
- Machine learning technology that enables products featured in UGC to be automatically tagged
- A process to secure the rights to repurpose UGC and software that detects any potential copyright infringement issues
- Integration with a number of digital signage options to ensure that your brand stands out from the rest
And this is just the beginning of how the TINT platform can help your brand. To learn more, request a TINT demo today!
