SocioConnect 101

If you are a Socio Local customer or if you are contemplating becoming one, here is all you need to know about our platform, it's modules and how to use them to their maximum potential.

Contents

1. The Connect Modules
2. The Venue Profile Strategy
3. The Content Pool
4. Planning Content
5. AI Post Module
6. The Publishing Module
7. The Analytics Module
8. Advertising on Connect
9. Manage your Reputation

The Connect Modules

Before you make a decision on whether this platform is a good fit for your business, it’s worth getting to know all the modules on the platform.  Like many social media platforms it can be tempting to navigate to the publishing module and just get going or even worse to think that publishing is the only value you can get (and this is far from the case). So, here’s a brief overview of the modules available on SocioConnect. Each has been built to give local and multi-location retailers greater insights into the power, value and success of their social media marketing...that is, if it is indeed successful. If it's not, you'll find that out soon enough too, but you will have the tools and insights to fix it.

SocioConnect has been built and continues to be part of innovation to solve the issue of proving the value of social media; its monetary value and its social value to a business.

Now that you’ve had an overview, it may, depending on your previous experience seem a little daunting to get going. If you are part of a marketing then you can skip this keep scrolling. If not, you should know our platform is designed to be easy-to-use. When building it, we wanted our customers to be able to use it within their daily lives whilst they also run their businesses. If you do ever get stuck, you just hit this icon below in the bottom right hand corner of the screen and one of the team will gladly help you out.

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The Venue Profile Strategy

The ‘Home’ icon on Connect is your business's venue profile. The venue profile has been designed to be the home of your digital strategy or the digital strategy for each of your stores. Here you can fill in all the fields and start to gather a clearer picture of what you want out of your social media management. Why do this? Well, would you start abseiling down a cliff without strapping yourself in, checking all your ropes and looking for a route down? No (well at least we hope not). The same applies to social media; if you just start posting you leave yourself open to any result; and most businesses we work with have clear results in mind. If you are new to managing your social media and like top tips, check out our recent article ‘How to make your digital storefront match your in-store experience’ this will give you a good grounding on how to set up your profiles and the best next steps to take.

The Content Pool Module

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We store your content. The ‘folder’ icon, or the Content Pool as we have named it, is quite simply your storage space.  An easy-to-use folder and tagging system to store all your photos and any other documents that you may need to execute your social media strategy. There are a number of epic features within the Content Pool module...

1. If you are scrolling through looking for images and find the one you want, you can select ‘create post’ and the image is pulled into the publishing platform for you.
2. In the publishing module you can either choose to upload a new photo or search content pool (okay, this one is more basic, but still, efficient).
3. Once you upload your images to the content pool they automatically become available to anyone else in your business who is on the platform. So no more sharing images on Whatsapp!
4. You can label your images based on what they are, for example #food or #packagedfood and these labels are used to create our most fabulous feature...AI Posts

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Planning Content on Connect

Before you get to clicking that ‘Create Post’ button on the Publishing dashboard, we recommend setting some time aside at the beginning of the week or month to assess your sales, stock and what you want to push. If you are new to social media management, check out this recent article with Top 5 Tips to Grow your Stores Social Media Following. Planning your content in advance helps you to have consistent and valuable posts that meet the objectives you set out in your digital strategy. No business needs posts that don’t add value, you want each post generating something for you. But, before you get to planning there’s a little feature we’ve built that you will also want to check...Ai Posts

The AI Post Module

AI posts are as you’d expect artificial intelligence social media posts.  They are recommended posts that show up on your Publishing dashboard that you can simply select and publish.  The image, the post caption, the scheduled time of posting is all done for you.

Okay, what is this witchcraft? Well, The technology behind our AI Posts is designed to take the best performing posts from within your industry across multiple data points and pre-populate your Publishing dashboard with posts ideas that are guaranteed top performers. This includes image recognition; so, once you upload your imagery onto the Content Pool module the content of the images will be scanned so the accurate image can be pulled into the AI posts.  This feature increases your chances of successful social media marketing and saves you a serious amount of time, allowing you more time to focus on your business.

Below is a small data study of AI posts versus human generated posts over the month of March 2021. We took the same amount of AI posts and human generated posts and compared the post reach (Reach = the number of users who have come across a particular content on a social platform) . Can you see what we see?  AI Posts are outperforming human generated posts; helping business owners get what they need from social media quicker and leaving them to focus on their business.

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The Publishing Module

Scheduling your posts on SocioConnect is very simple with the Publishing module.

Before you begin,

1. Decide on your post ideas
2. Check AI for any post ideas you can use
3. Make sure your imagery is uploaded onto Content Pool
   

Now we can finally schedule our post, 

• Click on the ‘Create Post’ button under the date you want to post
• Write out your caption and select an image from the Content Pool
• Select your scheduled posting date and time 
• Select which channel you want to post on, it can be one or hundreds
• Label your post (we’ll get to why this is important later)
• And finally, click ‘Schedule’ 
  

Just like that your first post is scheduled! Doesn’t that seem quite straightforward? 

The Analytics Module

Once you get comfortable posting, do not leave it too long before you visit the Analytics module. From speaking with clients we know looking at the insights and analytics can be daunting...sure most people prefer posting!  However, if you want your social media to make an impact you must become comfortable with reviewing the Analytics module every now and then. Look for this icon in the left-side navigation. 

Within Analytics you have a dashboard as shown below. You have non social media metrics ranging from your website visitor traffic, your website conversion (if you have a shop or online order system) and the amount of people who called your business by searching for your phone number online.  For social media metrics, you have everything from number of posts, post reach, number of likes through to the performance of posts with ad spend and without and how they compare. If you are new to Analytics, just hover over the question mark icon besides each metric and it will provide you with a definition.

So, the learning here is, if you have Connect, get on the Analytics dashboard and have a nosey around.  If you are contemplating joining the Socio Community for your business, the platform has all the metrics you need to ensure you are driving value for your business.

Advertising on Connect

Help your posts reach a wider audience by creating and publishing ads through SocioConnect. Facebook and Instagram advertising is a great way to build your brand awareness online helping to show a wide audience what you have to offer.

Using the Advertising module on SocioConnect you can create an ad for both Facebook and Instagram at once and target your exact audience in your local area. Equally if you are a business owner of multiple businesses you can create posts for 10’s to 100’s of profiles in just a few clicks.

You can post your own ad in a few simple steps: 

• Click  ‘Create Ad’ 
• Select your objective 
• Name your campaign 
• Select the post you would like to push 
• Click ‘Next’ to set your budget and time frame 
• Click ‘Next’ to select your target audience with your location and specific keywords to reach an exact audience 
  These are the main points to help you get started in creating your own ads, however, you can visit our Advertising module page to get more in depth info.

Manage your Reputation

Connecting with your customers through your social media pages and responding to reviews on all platforms helps you to grow your customer relationships outside of your four walls. Our Reputation and Inbox modules enable you to manage all your reviews, comments and direct messages from your Facebook, Google and TripAdvisor, in one place. What a great way to improve customer sentiment and efficiency across your business.

So, that’s it. A bite sized introductions to each of our platform modules, all derived to transform the digital marketing landscape for single store and multi-venue retail. We hope that this has given you enough of a taste, and if you want more information you can book in a call with one of the team here.  We’d be delighted to talk through how SocioConnect could help and support your business.

Chat Soon,

SL