Radian6 for Social Media Listening & Engagement - Top 10 Features

I have been using social media for brand promotion and engagement; there was this desperate need to evaluate data flowing in various channels. That’s when I discovered Radian 6 – it’s a very expensive tool but worth exploring.  

Radian6 has created a social media monitoring and engagement platform that allows you to view relevant conversations happening around your brand and products in real time. It’s a great social media listening tool that allows brands to enhance their products & services. I have been playing around with it for quite some time and here’s a breakdown of the top 10 most important features of Radian6.

Before you get started, create “Topic profile” by providing your product/ brand name, keywords and Social media channel list.

1. Conversation Cloud: It’s a widget that displays the top 50 words and call out the more distinct words mentioned across all the social media about your product/brand. So, if a negative word appears in the Conversation Cloud, it may be worth further investigating those mentions to see what’s being said about their brand.

2. River of News: River of news widget enables you to see mentions about your brand, products or competitors, and where the conversation is taking place. Further, the River of News allows brands to organize these conversations by Forum Thread Size, Twitter Followers, Publish Date, Media View Count, and more.

3. Topic Trends: By opening the River of News or Conversation Cloud widgets within Topic Trends, can further drill down into specific points throughout the timeline to see why the conversation had a spike during a specific time period. It pulls in conversations from Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Flickr, YouTube, Mainstream News, and Buy/Sell websites

4. Reporting: With this feature all the Radian6 widget data can be seamlessly integrated into excel worksheets. You can set up alert emailed reports on daily/weekly bases that need to be sent out to the higher management.

5. Summary Dashboard:  With the summary dashboard users can monitor about their brand, products, competitors and regarding industry very conveniently. It provides Social media metrics, Twitter analysis, brand analysis, competitive intelligence, workflow, engagement, key influencers, and demographics. It’s like a report card which gives the overall well being of brands from development to failures.

6. CS Engagement: It allows brands to interact with their customers as well as monitor conversations. Via engagement console can integrate various social media platforms such as multiple twitter handles, Facebook account and all the pages associated with the brand are integrated as well and chatter streams. Workflow functions with team mates are even possible on the go! If you have a VOC (Voice of the customer) team the desktop version will help teams to work on the go!

7. Competitive Analysis: Radian6 offers users comprehensive coverage of listening, monitoring and discussing on the social web about the Interaction of their customers with brand products as well as competitors. Given the same industry,  it’s easy to track which competitor was trending, and for what reasons. Based on the no of total post & sentimental analysis you can get a feel of how the market interacts with your competitor. You can build your strategy to play around with their weekends.  

8. Tracking Leads Generated: Radian6 is now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, so its integration with Salesforce.com is improving with each release. You can drive revenue by understanding what content drives traffic, finding the conversations that will convert into prospective sales. Discover purchase signals and point-of-need conversations or even intercept discussions with competitors. Plus, you can take advantage of the integration capabilities, linking you to Salesforce CRM, Service Cloud, web analytics, and more.

8. Sentiment Analysis: Radian6 is one of those matured tool which has the capability of automated sentiment reviews on-topic posts as they come in, determines the sentiment of the post at the sentence level, and aggregates a positive, negative, or neutral designation at the post level based on specifies sentiment keywords and phrases. To BigData is aggressively used to identify is our customers are happy about our products & services. Radian6 sits as an overlay to this technology and can give you real-time data of how your customers are feeling at a given time for brands to course correct and not lose revenue and goodness of the customers.

10.  Media Monitoring: Brand is facing the pressure of being present in all the social channels right from Facebook,Twitter, Instagram, Blog, YouTube to Forum. In this case radian6 will help you identify which are the most effective channels and can guide towards how much resource and budget brand need to invest in a given social channel to assure maximum ROI.

Let me know which is your favourite feature and why :) 

12 Social Media listening tools

Social Media is used by brands for various purposes like:

      ·         Brand Building

      ·         CRM

      ·         ORM (Online Reputation Management)

      ·         Lead Generation

      ·         Sales

      ·         Traffic Generation

      ·         Internal Communication

      ·         Fun Raising

The major activity in social media that marketers need to do is listen to what, when, where are consumers talking about their respective brands. Data on web is scattered all around, thus to make our life's more easy we have some free, premium & paid Social Media listening tools.

Tools to Monitor & Measure on Social Media:

1. Google Alerts: 

It’s a free tool; you can get email notifications any time that Google finds new results on a topic you’re interested in. Eg:- get updates about a product you like, find out when people post content about your brand on the web, or keep up with news stories.

2. Google Analytics: 

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales.

3. Facebook Insights:

Facebook Insights is a pretty powerful tool for those wanting to track user interaction on their Facebook Fan Page. Facebook Insights helps the page admin to track the number of active users, engagement, brand reach, virality & better understand page performance.

4 Klout: 

Influence is the ability to drive action. When you share something on social media or in real life and people respond, that’s influence. The more influential you are, the higher your Klout Score. It offers several ways to bring influencers & brands together.

5 PeerIndex: 

Very similar to Klout, it helps brands to identify the key influencers & content that really matter to them.

6 Tweetreach: 

TweetReach is a simple free tool to measure how far a hashtag reached on Twitter. It provides set of metrics to help you understand an idea's reach on Twitter, top contributors, top RTs etc

7 Bitly: 

Bitly is not only a URL shortening service but also lets you track the statistic of any bitly URL

8 Social Mention: 

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, tweets from across the web into a single stream of Information. It’s one interface to know if your brand reputation across the social channels is negative or positive.

10. SproutSocial: 

It’s a paid social media management system, with functionality for teams to focus on engagement, publishing & analytics. Sprout makes it easy for the entire team to respond to customers on social and to know we’ve gotten back to each and every one. Provides great managing reports.

10. Alterian SM2:

Alterian SM2 is a business intelligence solution designed to provide visibility into social media and let brands tap into their customers' thoughts and opinions.

11. Radian6:

Very popular & desired social media tool. Powerful tool which will change the way you use digital marketing. Radian6 is a platform that enables organizations to monitor and engage in conversations across the social web. When you configure a search, the Radian6 platform retrieves results from more than 150 million sites and sources.

12. Sysomos: 

Sysomos helps you monitor, analyze, gather insights and ultimately, make the decisions that allow you to create better products and services for your customers

All the above tools lets you hear customers feedback, issues, suggestions...All that I can say with my experience is - You build customer loyalty and connection not by answering fast, but by engaging with respect and transparency.

So let’s not social media be all about no of Facebook likes, Twitter followers, Youtube views, Unique page views...let it be a platform where customers feel heard & connected to brands.