“What else are my fans and followers interested in?”

It’s a question that social media marketers ask themselves all the time. You know that your fans like you, of course. That’s why they liked your page! But there’s nothing on Facebook or Twitter that tells you what other interests they have.

It would be great if there was something like that. Something that’ll get you to know your fans better and see how they interact with your competitors. A way to target your audience more precisely, verify your results, and adjust your strategy.

Luckily for you, there is something like that.

Enter the Interest Analysis

One of the services provided by Sotrender’s Research Team includes Interest Analyses. Using our database, an Interest Analysis will show you what other pages your engaged users like and how engaged they are on those pages. Prepared in just a couple of days, these reports allow you to compare yourself to your competition and industry leaders and see how you might improve your own marketing strategy.

Based on your desires and goals, these analyses will show you where interests intersect online by comparing your page to:

  • All users of the social media platform in your country.
  • Your direct competition.
  • Specifically chosen profiles.

This data analysis goes beyond your standard number of likes, clicks, and comments. It gives you a broader understanding of your brand’s community and where they stand in relation to other brands on the market. It’s the perfect tool for agencies and anyone that needs a report to show them more insights into their social media performance.

What does an Interest Analysis look like?

The best way to get a feel for our Interest Analyses is to see some of it in action. That’s why we’ve prepared a whole new report on beverage brand’s in the UK, based on the the biggest pages from our Fanpage Trends UK reports. For this analysis, we looked at fan’s mutual interests for Coca-Cola’s UK fanpage, seeing how their brand coexists with other brands on Facebook in the UK. The analysis was conducted on 2, 433 UK profiles over three months, between 1.07.2016 and 10.10.2016.

The chart below displays the brands with the highest amount of common engaged users across all Facebook pages. So the pages with users that engage on both their page and on Coca-Cola’s page will appear on the chart. For example, this means that the Daily Mail has 4, 186 users that engage on both Coca-Cola’s page and the Daily Mail’s page.

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Interest Analysis Bar Chart

The column on the right tells you the percent of common engaged users. Meaning what percent of users the number on the left constitutes. So, again looking at the Daily Mail, we can see that 4, 186 users is 0.05% of their total user base.

What does this chart tell us? It helps you get a sense of where your brand stands in the general Facebook community. You can see the biggest brands that your fans engage with and if they’re engaging with your competition or with something you can talk about. For example, we can see that Coca-Cola fans engage on a lot of news sites. We can then surmise that Coke can talk about topical events and stories from the news, as they’re fans are likely already interested. As long as Coca-Cola can relate it to their brand in an appropriate way, of course.

This happened to Natalia Drobniak, strategic planner for digital agency OS3. She recalls: “In one project, it turned out that among the 15 most popular fan pages among our fans – all 15 were related to football and sports. These sports aren’t connected with our brand, but thanks to this [analysis] we were able to modify our content to suit their interests in the context of our brand and plan new posts appropriately.” Expanding your research into different categories can lead to some surprising and beneficial results.

However, for a deeper and more specific analysis, you’ll need something additional. And that’s why we at Sotrender created interest graphs.

 

Visualize your shared interests

Interest Analysis Graph

Interest graphs visually show you how many common engaged users you have between custom chosen brands you are interested in. The thicker the line, the higher number of engaged fans shared by brands. Use this to compare your page directly to your competition or pages that you think your fans are interested in. It also gives you a clear indication of where your brand stands in relation to other brands in your industry.

For this graph, we looked at the top 5 biggest active beverage brands in the UK, comparing them to Coca-Cola. We can see that Coke shares the most fans with Pepsi Max and innocent. Pepsi is their biggest direct competitor, so that’s no surprising. However, innocent is a relatively small brand. Yet they have so many mutually engaged users. Why is that? Because innocent is rocking social media. Our graph can reveal hidden success stories, like innocent, that you might not have noticed otherwise.

You can also see other relevant facts, such as Pepsi Max having more common engaged users with the other brands than Coca-Cola does. Or how Lucozade Energy doesn’t have the same presence as any of the other top beverage brands.

Understand what’s causing a crisis

Interest Analysis is also an excellent tool to understand crisis situations that might arise on your page. What do we mean by crisis situations? We mean any time people start unloading tons of negative posts and comments on your page. Based on user’s mutual interests, you can determine if the users commenting are your actual fans or just people who made accounts to troll you. You can then gauge what is the most appropriate response for the crisis, and manage it effectively.

So how is this different from Facebook Audience Insights?

You’re probably wondering if you can’t just get this info from Facebook Audience Insights. Interest Analysis is different than Facebook Audience Insights because it simply offers more. Facebook’s tool is great for basic data, but it won’t give you the detailed info that you need.

Firstly, Interest Analysis let’s you compare any page you want, not just your own. Our analysis compares pages for you instead of making you do it yourself. No need to do the busy-work. Secondly, we’ll tell you the specific profiles that your fans like. Don’t waste your time figuring out which brands might be grabbing your audience’s attention when we can do it for you. This added specificity allows you to compare yourself to your direct competition or truly explore what your fans want to see.

Conclusion

That data gathered from social media platforms is immense. So many people and companies are doing it, but few of them know what to do with that data. With Interest Analyses, we’re taking that data and making it easy for you to:

  • Know your fans better
  • Understand your relation to your competitors
  • Target your audience more precisely
  • Verify your results and adjust your strategy
  • Understand crises effectively

It’s just one example of how Sotrender takes terabytes of data and identifies what your business needs to improve your social media marketing. We know you have tons of questions about your marketing strategy, and trust us when we say the answers are in the data. We’re just here to help you find them. If you’re interested in an Interest Analysis, please contact us at sales@sotrender.com.

 

What do you think of this analysis? Share your thoughts and questions below!

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