Discover Engaging Social
Content That Drives Action
By
Jamey Wood
The popularity of integrating real-time social media into websites, events and live TV broadcasts has grown over the last few years. It’s now more common to see tweets displayed on the Jumbotron at a football game or integrated into the weather report on the nightly news. The challenge is that with millions of fans interacting across multiple social media platforms, the sheer amount of content produced can be overwhelming.
It’s a similar challenge to the pre-search engine days. Remember fifteen years ago, before “Google it” was a commonly used term? We knew there was a lot of information on the Web but we weren’t aware of the infinite amount of knowledge out there, because we didn’t have access to it. That’s where social media is today — there’s an awareness of the wealth of information, but marketers struggle to access much of it and therefore can’t use the content to it’s fullest potential. A hashtag is helpful but it often doesn’t provide enough comprehensive data. Flexible search is an incredibly powerful tool that we often take for granted.
Last month we launched a new search and engagement engine, expanding the capabilities of the platform’s integrated real-time social media display to provide in-depth search capabilities. The updated Wayin engine aggregates search results for any term across social media platforms in real time, then evaluates the findings based on gender, location or a specific time window. Marketers can dive deeper into the data by determining the broader context and sentiment around social conversations.
The value of social media lies in the context of the message. A tweet is just 140 characters on a screen until you answer the who, what, when, where and why behind the message. With a hashtag, combination of keywords, location details, user demographics, as well as additional outside data, marketers can filter out the noise and access the material that they’re seeking. The updated platform easily sorts through this search criteria and pools information that unveils the true value of the content.
The engine combines more in-depth search with immediate flexibility. Alternatively, most other social tools use a far less flexible “tracking” approach, where users are forced to predict a set of hashtags and keywords that they wish to track in advance. This rigid structure can lead to tunnel vision. The broader context, or even half the conversation, can go unnoticed because of narrow search criteria. Today we have the ability to adjust, adding or removing keywords, hashtags or location information, as the search evolves.
Access to broader social media data sets, within context, opens up a wealth of opportunities. Marketers are able to discover who their customers are, who the notable people or influencers are, brand sentiment, purchasing behavior, insight on how to best target a certain demographic, and much more. The tools and intelligence that can be provided increases social media ROI exponentially. The future of real-time marketing is authentic brand stories and the key to creating those is flexible search.
Jamey Wood is the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Strategy Officer of Wayin, overseeing the company’s engineering and product groups. Jamey is an innovative entrepreneur with more than 12 years of experience in the development of new software and service technologies.
