Time for Help?

It is really common for rowing teams- college and youth-to go through a continuous cycle of speed. Meaning a couple of years a team might be one of the fastest in their conference then they start to decline either due to vital team members graduating, or sickness affecting the team, injuries causing the team to slow down on their training plan. I could go on about the different reasons teams decline or plateau. However, at the college level from my experience it is common that a coach will do everything in their power to bring in a second opinion, a recovery coach or a speaker to come and do what they can to help the team get to where they were. As an example I am going to use my current team, The University of Louisville rowing team last winter when we were in our decline phase. The Ohio river was flooded, which is nothing unusual, but this time last year, it was so bad that it got into our boathouse and flooded us out of our own facility. We had to quickly move mot of training equipment to the football stadium and workout outside everyday at 6am in less than 30 degree weather. I can tell you first hand it was absolutely awful for so many reasons, but that's a story for another day. Our team was burnt out, our training numbers were steeply declining and we had more than 10 people out of erging because of injuries and several others with minor injuries but not completely out. Our coach decided to bring in the U.S rowing national team athletic trainer to help with injuries and our mental health. Everyone that was completely out, or have had reoccurring issues in the past and at that time had a personal one-on-one meeting with him. People would talk with him about their injuries, he would evaluate them and either give them advanced treatment, advice or rehab/PT plan. After this our team slowly but surely recovered and got right where we needed to be and better. At the end of the season our top 8 boat got third at ACC's and I would give a lot of props to the professional trainer that picked us up and helped.

Going up to the medal podium after placing Third at ACC's

So once again I am sure you are thinking what in the world does this have to do with social media and how does this once again tie into my class? Well this past week in class we talked about different social media sites that will analyze your account, give you numbers about engagement and the popularity of ones content. This way, someone who runs a social media account for a brand can look at these numbers for each post and type of content and decide what the next step is to elevate ones brand on social media. I believe that every major brand needs to do this with their social media platforms as it can create so much more success in a companies branding. If a brand sees a decline in engagements, or decline in followers, decline in sales within the company, the first thing they need to do is investigate their marketing strategies. For most brands now and days this is through social media, which makes sense as that will give a brand the best exposure. There are several social media monitoring tools that will help any brand or company get a better return on their investment. Companies have to ask themselves questions like: do we know what your top-performing posts look like so we can recreate them time and time again? Are we capitalizing on those instances when someone in our industry shows our social content some serious love? There are so many monitoring tools out there, which can get pretty confusing so I am going to spotlight a few that I think are most important.

The first one is Sprout Social- it is a social media management software and solutions that helps companies find, form and deepen real connections with people who follow your brand. No matter the size of ones brand or the scale of one's social media efforts sprout will keep you covered to deliver and measure valuable content, foster advocacy, nurture relationships and mine social data and active social listening. Rather than bouncing between the likes of Facebook Insights or your Twitter feed, Sprout collects your activity in a single, central hub. The ability to work within one solution is a must-have for brands juggling multiple profiles. Features such as the Sprout’s trends and listening report provide invaluable insight into what’s on the minds of your audience. This allows you to tack on appropriate hashtags and keywords to your content.

Another notable monitoring tool is a site called Simply Measured (a branch of Sprout social), while it does some very similar things as sprout social does, it is more advanced in terms of numbers. This site offers serious sentiment analysis, so you can see at a glance how fans and followers perceive your brand and your content in addition to how many people you’re reaching. Simply Measured also collects a word cloud of top hashtags and/or key terms broken down by location(country or city) which is important for brands with an international reach. One of the most noticeable features of this site is that it has the ability to track the performance of your brands Instagram stories, past just which followers view it.

Buzzsumo (not part f social sprout no worries), is a site that analyzes what content performs for any topic or competitor. Buzzsumo allows marketers to easily monitor the sort of blog posts, listicles and breaking news that followers want to see. As an example, you can plug in any given topic or brand to see how their content translates to social shares via Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Linkedin. In addition to monitoring sharing metrics, Buzzsumo can actually influence your social media content strategy. It gives you metrics on your top competitiors and shows you their strategy and what they are up to, because analyzing their top-performing content is an essential piece of content curation.

The last monitoring site that I think is most helpful to brands on social is Reputology, which does what it sounds meaning that it is all about monitoring and protecting your brand's reputation. Its a platform that helps businesses monitor, respond to, and analyze their online reviews. The reason I choose this one is because I think it is a unique site that has this factor of analyzing reviews instead of just looking at their content on social media. In society today, almost everyone I know uses online reviews to make a decision when they purchase things either online or in person, having knowledge on that reputation is so important. Having the ability to focus in on customer feedback is crucial to success. This site collects these reviews and/or comments pertaining to your brand in a timely manner. Having the ability to take action on a bad comment or review will make the difference between a lost customer or a PR nightmare. This site is helpful because there are so many review sites, and it would take forever to try and filter through the tags or mentions.

With the help of some of these monitoring tools, question marks such as the best times to post or figuring out how to get in front of influencers don’t have to be complete guesses. At the end of the day social media monitoring tools clue you in on your strengths and what to do to grow your audience and influence by the numbers. Its the reason why marketers today embrace a data-driven approach to social media rather than randomly and mindlessly posting content and tags at random.