Many brands are now gathering a significant amount of user-generated content due to their digital activities, whether this is information gleaned from their fans on Facebook, followers on Twitter, or customers who have bought a product and then left a review on the site.
By Steve Hurn, CEO at Reevoo
This information provides a wealth of insight into what customers think about the products, the brand and the service received. Despite this, many brands are not yet using the information gathered through digital and social activities effectively as they could be.
In order to make the most of the insights available to them, companies can and should start thinking towards the bigger picture associated with user-generated content and its benefit to a brand.
The three areas where user-generated content can add value to a business are by aiding analysis of customer sentiment and profile; promoting positive interaction with customers or prospects; and by allowing the company’s different departments to streamline their operations by sharing valuable information into customer feedback.
Analysis
1. Insight gained from social and digital activity can be a simple barometer for brands to see how much positive versus how much negative feedback they are getting online. This feedback can be easily measured and tracked simply by focusing on what your customers are saying and capturing the top-line data from their feedback.
2. Should there be a problem with a product or service, companies can leverage real-time feedback to respond to individual customers and address the issue quickly, pre-empting any potential crisis situations.
3. Taking this one step further, brands can tag all the qualitative data acquired from verified customers, creating a data set based on customer feedback, which has quantitative value and allows for quick analysis to gain insight into how actual customers feel about a product.
Interact
4. The social Web allows brands, customers, and prospects alike to have direct communication. Customers can be responded to personally, for example, be thanked for a nice comment, tweet or picture. This shows that there is a ‘human touch’ behind your brand, which demonstrates a receptivity and caring approach towards customer feedback.
5. Enable productive communication by providing a platform for your customers and prospects to exchange information between one another. Social commerce can be used for Q&A – either between the customer and the brand, or to connect two or more people who have purchased a product. This not only helps customers, but you will gain a greater understanding of where the pain points are in the buying process.
Reach out far and wide
6. Make the content generated from social commerce work smarter for you by leveraging the content that is created from user-contributed feedback. User-generated data gleaned from social commerce, including positive quotes and reviews, make great marketing collateral.
7. Reach out wider into the online social ecosystem to integrate the content your users are generating with Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest. This allows you to help customers and prospects no matter where they are online.
8. Look to integrating the data gleaned from social commerce insights with existing CRM and other data-aggregating systems. In this way, a company can use social content for the benefit not only the sales departments but also those for marketing, customer service and technical support.
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