Across the globe, people are turning to social channels to learn, engage and share information about organisations and businesses. In turn, businesses are using these social media channels to market their goods and services, and to better engage with their customers.
A good social marketing platform can give you the tools necessary for finding or creating new content, and responding to posts and questions from your customers and clients. There are many social media management vendors in the marketplace, all claiming to meet the needs of marketing and commerce.
By bringing together elements of the leading platforms, Oracle’s Social Marketing Cloud Service lays claim to being the best.
An Integrated Approach
Most of the packages on offer are point solutions, meaning they offer only one piece of the social management toolkit. Businesses then have to piece together three or four of these solutions, to create a software suite that meets all their social marketing needs.
A few enterprise software vendors have attempted to put together smaller point solutions, to create a software suite that handles a variety of social media activities. Bringing together tools from disparate sources, the suites don’t really have a unified approach, and integrate poorly with other Customer Experience (CX) applications, like marketing, service, sales and commerce.
Oracle Social Relationship Management (SRM) is the industry’s first unified social platform. Beginning with Oracle’s acquisitions of leading social innovators Vitrue, Collective Intellect and Involver, the Oracle Social Cloud includes these technologies as core components, together with Oracle’s enterprise Social Network solution and Social Data.
Oracle Marketing Cloud integrates social technologies under one banner, as do Oracle’s other CX solutions like RightNow, ATG, and Siebel.
How It Works
By integrating Social Marketing (SM) and Social Engagement & Monitoring (SE&M), Oracle’s social platform covers the range from listening, engagement, content creation, community management, paid media and analysis of a company’s social media efforts.
Oracle SRM listens across paid, owned and earned content on social media networks, message boards, blogs, consumer review sites, and video sites across the globe, with access to over 700 million messages daily. The system employs Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), an advanced technology designed to expose contextual meaning in the media. LSA can reveal actionable insights like consumer intent, product likes/dislikes, and customer service issues.
Listening, publishing, engagement, analytics and content creation occur through a single user interface (UI). There’s single sign-on access, protected by advanced security protocols.
The emphasis is global, with the UI available in 31 languages. There’s advanced listening in 19 languages, including Chinese, Russian, Spanish and Portuguese, with growing global data sources including networks like China’s Sina Weibo and Baidu, and Latin America’s Reclameaqui and Vostu.
Oracle Social is integrated with Oracle CX solutions, like marketing, service, sales, and commerce. Social complaints can be directed to service. Social insights can be used to generate stronger marketing messages. And cues obtained by listening across social channels can be translated into better product development.
Oracle Social Marketing Cloud Service, in Action
The Oracle Social Marketing Cloud Service enables organisations to tailor posts on social media networks by region, city, postal (zip) code, language, brand, and product, to give control over customer targeting. There are consolidated publishing and management facilities for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other social networks.
You can track which administrators are posting what content to your pages at all levels, via the integrated dashboard. This makes it easy to ensure that brand messages are consistent across all social channels.
There’s pre-made content: a library of fan-favourite games and apps that enable you to integrate charitable giving, coupons, sweepstakes, and shopping calls-to-action, without custom coding.
Advanced analytic dashboards and drill-down data analysis provide real-time metrics, to improve and tune messages, content, and social campaigns. These can be sorted by customer segment or social property. By integrating with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications, you can create, align, and measure cross-channel marketing campaigns.
Some General Tips
To get the most from your next campaign, use the Oracle Social Marketing Cloud Service to:
Schedule your Posts
Line up two posts a day, across multiple social networks for five days, for example. This will free up your week for other activities, like
content generation.
Segment and Geographically Target your Posts
Use the multi-language options and location filtering, to target only those people you want to see your message.
Use Rich Media Elements
Videos, coupons, polls, and quizzes will increase engagement, with your followers. The integrated tool set means you’ll only have to post them from one interface.
Find, Flag, and Alert mentions of your brand, or unwanted content
Configure the platform to locate what you want to see, find it, then put it in front of you with an alert. You can even tell the platform to auto delete unwanted words for you, whenever it sees them.
Gather Richer Analytics
The figures you want to see will depend on what your social marketing goals are. Set filters, so you won’t have to wade through unwanted reams of data.
The key is to exploit the ease-of-use of Oracle Social Marketing Cloud Service so you can focus on your ultimate objective – attracting and keeping satisfied customers.