Our social media framework

A flexible, dynamic and intelligent approach to social media management and optimisation.

Most agencies don’t have a social media framework formalising how to engage within the social space and make measurable gains. For most, Social Media Optimisation is low level engagement – ‘you need a Facebook page’, ‘you should start tweeting’. Whilst you probably should do all of those things, this shoot-from-the-hip approach fails to ask the serious questions, questions like why you might want to engage, for what tangible goal, and even if you should engage in various channels at all.

To engage cost effectively, intelligently, and in a way that actually works, you need a plan, a strategy of engagement, focused on your real needs as a business and not just consumer engagement for the sake of it.

Greenlight has a social media framework that doesn’t make this fatal error and therefore essentially fits every and any brief – cost effectively and realistically.

The framework has three distinct but organically linked categories of activity – LISTEN, JOIN, START.

LISTEN to the conversation

By monitoring the web in near real-time Greenlight amasses significant and timely information about what is being said on the web about you, your brand, your products or your sector. There may however be hundreds of thousands of these conversations which then need to be converted into actionable knowledge. This process requires an automatic understanding of the sentiment of each piece of content found. Sentiment refers to whether the content of the conversation and specifically the reference to your brand or product is meant positively or negatively. This sentiment analysis is conducted by complex algorithms that use latent semantic indexing and natural language processing to understand what’s being said. With this insight the conversations identified can be categorised and sorted to identify those that might be posing a reputational risk, or those that are praising the brand or that represent opportunities for it to exploit.

Without a robust and technologically-enabled solution it would be impossible to extract actionable information from the content being published about you across all the possible standard and social media channels. Greenlight’s SocialSentry platform does much of the hard work in making this process possible.

Greenlight not only alerts you to conversations that pose an immediate risk or opportunity, but also reports aggregate sentiment data on a weekly and monthly basis to determine how consumers are responding to the brand over time. Furthermore, the data collected at this stage feeds into the other stages in the framework – JOIN and START.

JOIN the conversation

Once Greenlight has identified the key issues and opportunities through listening to online conversations and coverage, it then determines where these conversations are taking place and who is driving them. In addition, Greenlight will identify who the authorities are, the ‘influencers’, by determining a score for each source and contributor in a conversation or set of conversations. This is achieved using complex algorithms designed to understand the structure of conversations and the relationships between the key participants in that conversation.

Once we know which conversations are important and who the key influencers are within them, a strategy can then be formulated and executed to engage directly with this conversation and its key instigators and contributors. This engagement could be anything from responding formally to the conversation, creating a micro-site for whatever purpose, creating or altering your Twitter or Facebook strategy, or any number of approaches that might be appropriate or necessary.

START the conversation

In many instances a brand has an agenda that goes beyond the conversations underway on the Internet about it. For instance, a brand may have launched a new product with the subsequent need to raise awareness for it; or in the instance of a relatively new brand, the need to raise brand awareness more generally. Starting a conversation involves designing and executing a social media campaign that is compelling enough to attract participants and form a life of its own.

In many instances a brand has an agenda that goes beyond the conversations underway on the Internet about it. For instance, a brand may have launched a new product with the subsequent need to raise awareness for it; or in the instance of a relatively new brand, the need to raise brand awareness more generally. Starting a conversation involves designing and executing a social media campaign that is compelling enough to attract participants and form a life of its own.

Just like the JOIN approach, the campaign could take many forms, from the creation of competitions, research, widgets, apps, videos, or even new sites designed to promote and nurture community and therefore take ownership of the discourse itself.

Greenlight is unique in that it can deliver bespoke campaigns that integrate SEO, PPC, site-build, PR, and monitoring, all within its current, inhouse capabilities.