Social Networking Strategies - Monitoring with Woolworths

I have discussed earlier the benefits of implementing social media in an organization. More interestingly, companies should establish, in advance, a social media strategy to gain the benefits they are looking for, which can be achieved by monitoring, understanding and response to their social media activities. In today’s post, I would like to explore a range of social media monitoring tools in a selected case organization and to share my insights about their social media behaviour.

Woolworths, one of the leading supermarket businesses in Australia, is now attempting to solve a business challenge by creating a better customer shopping experience and increasing customer loyalty. Woolworths currently has many different kinds of digital platforms and information systems such as social networks, official e-commerce website, and a mobile application.

 

 As stated in the The Social economy report, McKinsey Global Institute, 2012 , social technology providers have “social Analytics” tools to analyze real time data and make a better use of such tools. This analysis is ultimately used to manage either company or client brand communications and demonstrate a Return on Investment from social media marketing.

 

Topsy

Topsy is a tool to search tweets, links, photos, videos and show different kinds of statistics as most social analytical tools do, where you can get the latest news or articles about an organization. Woolworths uses social media tools such as Facebook and YouTube to gain customer insights about their products and how they could improve or even develop new products in the future. These tools also enable Woolworths to more effectively interact with customers and to broaden and deepen their marketing by frequently post their latest news and information and to receive fast and accurate responses. Their collection of responses can provide valid feedback of recent sales promotions. An interesting feature in Tobsy is that it enables the company to gain competitive insights and analyze competitor campaigns and web traffic. It uses precise metrics to model current trends, against competitors, or even predict future outcomes. As it can be seen in the graph below graph, Woolworths is not engaging very well in Twitter compared with its competitor, Aldi, and should then enhance their presence to achieve or overcome competitors.

 

 

Addictomatic

This analytical tool aggregates information about the company from different resources and most interestingly Woolworths uses most of the social media tools, except Twitter, to ensure it reaches their broader customer base and increase brand loyalty. It additionally customizes social networks as a marketing channel to promote for new products because social media is now able to create a sense of transparency between the customers and lets them influence their “friends list” or at least recommend products to them.

To sum up, a company should listen to what their customers are saying online and respond in a timely manner if they are willing to have a successful social business. Woolworths might integrate some social media features into their existing mobile application to help in the smooth processing of information and allow more customers to communicate effectively with them in a real-time response. @Woolworths

“The goal of social media is to turn customers into a volunteer marketing army.”

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