How to Excel in Marketing by Tracking Social Media Mentions: Lessons from Chevrolet, Ford, and Mustang

Welcome to YouScan's ultimate guide on how to use social mention monitoring to improve your brand marketing. Get ready to absorb expert insights and proven social media management practices.

Brand monitoring on social media allows discovering what a target audience thinks and says about your company online. Social media is the honest and richest source of social feedback. It gives you a better understanding of how your brand can tackle customer problems. There are a lot of reasons to track social mentions. We have broken them down into the four categories.

Research your audience and its true desires

By tracking your brand mentions on social media, you can research the audience's reaction to your company's latest initiatives, better understand customer desires, and create a more realistic buyer persona.

The user posts provide trustworthy information about customer preferences, interests, social status, and occupation. They help you clearly understand customer expectations from the industry and address them at no time. With these invaluable insights into customer life and personality, companies can adjust their products and services for the customer's reality.

Discover what your prospects think and say about your brand

Most people express their feelings and attitude toward brands by mentioning them in posts on social media. Brand mentions provide a lot of insights about what customers think of your products or services. In a happy scenario, people express their gratitude to a company or write a recommendation to use a particular product or service. While in other cases, they might post a complaint addressed to a customer support team. When interacting with a brand, customers always get a specific kind of experience and very often share it online.

By monitoring your brand mentions, you automatically access an extensive gallery with your target audience's posts and opinions about your company. Social mention tracking enables businesses to investigate what's in the customer's mind. You can learn what people think of your newly launched product line and what problems with your brand they experience.

Social mention monitoring keeps you always aware of an actual brand image and reputation. It helps you improve customer experience by providing timely support in the comments under the posts or in the direct messages on social networks. Track your brand's pulse on social platforms in order to be ready to react to a negative brand mention and handle a critical situation immediately.

Measure the effectiveness of brand campaigns

Social mention monitoring allows companies to evaluate the effectiveness of branded events, learn from mistakes, and build more effective campaigns in the future. Usually, successful marketing campaigns are accompanied by increasing positive social mentions.

For instance, in YouScan, you can assess the sentiment of social media mentions over a certain time that spans a specific marketing campaign. It will help you understand how the audience reacts to your marketing initiatives and adjust them to potential customer expectations.

Usually, you need to track a brand name and hashtags related to your marketing campaign. Traditionally, many famous brands launch their campaigns under a specific hashtag on social media. They encourage people to use it in order to become more distinctive in the media space, as well as to investigate and analyze the campaign's social impact more easily.

Monitoring your brand name and the title of a marketing campaign or event, you can get insights into the audience's reaction and analyze the changes in a brand reputation.

Spy on competitor campaigns

We name this practice "stealing like an artist." Competitor research can reinforce your marketing, show what works for your target audience, and help come up with new ideas. You can track mentions of your competitor's name or hashtags related to their campaigns and evaluate their social impact.

It will open you the new world of interactions between brands and their target audiences. You can learn a lot of lessons by monitoring your competitor's mentions on social media. For example, it can help you define whether the initial idea of a marketing campaign is successful or if specific keywords and hashtags used during this campaign have been effective. With this information, it will be much easier for you to build your own marketing and run more successful social campaigns.

To help you conduct in-depth research, you should be aware of what types of mentions and keywords to monitor. Below, there are the most important of them:

• The brand name with or without direct tagging, aka @mention

• Common misspellings of your brand name

• Your product names and their variations or misspellings

• Marketing campaign names and hashtags related to them (the same can be applied to monitoring the impact of the branded events)

• Competitor brand names with or without direct tagging

• Common misspellings of competitor brand name

• The competitor's product names and their variations or misspellings

• The names of the competitor's marketing campaigns and hashtags related to them

• The keywords related to industry trends.

The results of these search queries will provide you with all the information needed to analyze a real state of things in the market.

YouScan is a social media intelligence tool that can help you perform advanced brand monitoring and provide invaluable information about your customers, products, and competitors. Recently, we have used it to conduct comparative research of the three most famous car brands in the world: Ford, Chevrolet, and Mustang.

Here, we will share how YouScan can help you create a customer persona, define the audience's sentiment, research the customer experience with a certain product, and get more insights that can help you level up your marketing. Do you already hear the roar of engines? Please fasten your belts, we start.

YouScan provides helpful data that has enabled us to create customer personas for Chevrolet, Ford, and Mustang. Let's consider how we have done it for these brands.

Chevrolet

In the "Demographics" section in YouScan's Analytics, we have detected that most of Chevrolet's customers (34,7%) are male, while a female audience constitutes only 13,5%. We have also found out that the average age of these people ranges between 18 and 24 years old.

We have investigated the context of user posts that mention Chevrolet to get a better understanding of its customers. In the "Visual Insights" section in YouScan, you can see a cloud featuring the words that provide some insights about who your customers are, what they like, what surrounds them, and more about their background.

For instance, according to visual insights based on Chevrolet mentions, we can conclude that most of its customers are athletic men and women who like various kinds of sports, such as football, basketball, ice skating, and professional boxing. Also, they are keen on motorsports, driving, rallying, and racing. These insights can help a brand come up with an idea for perfect advertising that will be relevant for customers and engage them.

Ford

We have defined that most of Ford's fans are male (83,8%). However, there is also a significant part of female (14%). The audience spans different age groups. Most of the Ford's audinence are 25-34 years old. You can see it in the image below.

The visual insights based on Ford mentions demonstrate that this audience is very similar to Chevrolet's one. These are also athletic people that like road racing, motorsport, volleyball, football, basketball, running, boxing, and cycling.

Mustang

Most of Mustang's potential customers are men of 18-24, 25-34, and 45-59 years old — (91%). There are only 6,5% of female users. The visual insights show that Mustang's audience has very similar interests to those of two previous brands.

YouScan has a handy set of tools that can help you estimate your customer loyalty and conduct sentiment analysis. Here we are comparing sentiments of the user posts related to the car brands mentioned above.

In the "Sentiment" category in YouScan's analytics, you can see beautiful graphics and charts displaying the sentiment distribution of your brand mentions. It covers the positive, neutral, and negative mood of the user posts.

We have found out that Chevrolet is the leader by the rate of positive sentiment (24,3%). With 19,6% and 19,4% respectively, both Ford and Mustang can share the second position by the positive sentiment distribution. While the negative sentiment is distributed as follows: Ford (9,4%), Chevrolet (2,8%), and Mustang (2,7%).

In YouScan's "Sources" section, you can see the top sources of your brand mentions. This insight helps you easily detect social networks, on which your audience is the most active. Consequently, these social platforms are likely the best spots to run your next marketing campaigns and draw the attention of more users.

We have found out that most of Ford mentions come from YouTube (50%), Twitter (27%), and Instagram (9%).

Even though the top three sources of Chevrolet and Mustang mentions are the same, they have different distributions. For example, Instagram has been detected as the most popular platform for Chevrolet's audience — 38%. While 24% of Chevrolet mentions have come from Twitter and 19% — from YouTube.

In the case of Mustang, YouTube has appeared to be the most effective social platform (50%). The share of mentions from Instagram and Twitter are almost the same (14% and 13% respectively).

YouScan has recently developed an aspect-based sentiment analysis. It is a model that allows companies to automatically break down customer feedback, define the public's opinion, and allocate the aspect on a sentiment level. You can access this feature in the "Aspects" section in YouScan's Analytics dashboard. We have decided to compare the car brands mentioned above by the main aspects considered in this model: price, customer service, design, quality, and performance.

Ford

We have detected that in May 2020, most of the positive customer feedback was about Ford's customer service (63%), performance (39%), and design (37,61%). While most of the negative customer posts were related to the quality (62%) and price (58,52%).

These insights help define the brand's biggest strengths and weaknesses. In this case, we can consider customer service, performance, and design as Ford's biggest advantages, while quality and price might be detected as areas that need improvements.

Mustang

Following the same algorithm, we have also researched what customers think about the same aspects of Mustang. According to the aspect-based sentiment analysis of the user posts, the audience says that Mustang has a great customer service, car design, and performance (50,44%, 42,62%, and 30% of positive mentions respectively).

The quality has got the worst feedback in the user posts (71%). Most of the brand mentions related to customer service and price have also been identified as negative (33% and 32,88% accordingly).

Chevrolet

When investigating the same parameters of Chevrolet, we have found out that in May 2020, the brand was mentioned mostly in the positive context in the user posts on social media. Customer service, price, design, and quality can be considered as the brand's most significant advantages with 73,8%, 51,72%, and 46%, and 41% of the positive brand mentions respectively.

The posts featuring the quality have got most of the negative mentions (it's nearly 48%). However, it still is a good result if compared to competitors (Ford has got 62% of negative mentions and Mustang — 71%).

In YouScan's Analytics, you can easily investigate what event has caused the spike of mentions over a particular period. The system categorizes trends evoking the sudden raise of mentions as positive (marked with the green color on a graph), neutral (marked with the blue), and negative (marked with the red) ones.

Ford

We have decided to check what has caused the increase of Ford mentions in a negative context the last month. You can see it displayed as a red "trend bubble" on the graph below. YouScan's "trend-bubble" feature allows you to instantly see the topic of the most important mentions and the top social network by user engagement. You need just to hover over the top point on the graph to access this information.

We have detected that the increase of Ford mentions has been caused by the event that happened on May 15. Kilmers Garage, a famous YouTube channel about car brands published the video “Here's Why Ford Will Only Let You Buy a Car That's Painted Black” that has got amazing audience engagement.

The video is based on one of Henry Ford's most famous quotes about the Model T: "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black." In the video, it's briefly explained why Ford cars were only painted black for years and how the brand became so famous and successful. It has got amazing audience engagement on YouTube and caused a lot of Ford mentions on social media. It has become the beginning of this trend.

Mustang

The graph below is based on Mustang's mentions in the media during the last month. Do you see this amazing growth of mentions at the end of April displayed on the image? To learn what has caused such an incredible audience engagement, we have hovered over the top point on the graph and seen the trend that has started this massive discussion in the media.

The growth in mentions has been caused by the public announcement of the new car concept designed by Ash Thorp for the next movie about Batman. The designer was inspired by a very famous Fox-Body Mustang created in the late '90s.

"The new Batman film is featuring an all-new Batmobile that’s unlike any other before it... It was Ash Thorp who designed the concept, which is based on the beloved Fox-Body Mustang. It’s a wild creation that looks ready to go on a hooning adventure." — duPont REGISTRY Daily

Here you can see the Batmobile concept that has created so much buzz on social networks.

Chevrolet

The analytics hasn't shown any noticeable increases in Chevrolet mentions during May, so we have investigated what has been the reason for the growth of mentions in the beginning of June.

Thanks to the trend-bubble feature, we have quickly detected that the increasing user engagement has been caused by the fact that Egypt's former President Abdel Nasser's car, a legendary 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air Sedan, has been recently restored to its original look.

"Deep in the night, a soft voice whispered into the ears of Minister of Water Resources and Irrigation Mohamed Abdel Ati the historic importance of President Abdel Nasser's vehicle... A 1958 Chevrolet Bel Air, which has a 3,000 CC and 167 motor, and 8 cylinders, was restored to its original colours: Turquoise and Cyan." — Egypt Today.

This event has positively influenced Chevrolet's image and increased the brand's popularity on social media even more.

Here we have demonstrated the power and the importance of brand mention monitoring. The social mention might be a rich source of information about your customers, products, market, and competitors, if you are armed with the right social media monitoring tools.

We hope you have enjoyed this guide on how to use social mention to improve your marketing. Brand mention tracking can help you bring your company's marketing to the next level. The social media mention software, like YouScan, can help you conduct detailed research and extract invaluable information that will empower you to build a stronger online presence for your brand.

Would you like to learn more about how YouScan can augment your digital marketing? Try out our 7-day free demo!