A leading travel portal used brand health analysis for social media marketing using text analysis & SEM.

The travel platform client wanted to boost brand loyalty using social media. They wanted to understand the impact their social media marketing activities were having on the brand attributes. Building and maintaining brand loyalty was one of the central themes of their social media marketing activities. They also wanted to know the factors driving brand attributes, especially – engagement campaigns, promotions and activities on multiple versus single social platform.

The content of social posts drives brand loyalty

The scope of the study included users who made at least three posts every week on social media and only those users who followed the online travel brand.

• Average age of followers was 28 with a high percentage being students
• Popularity of content among first degree connection biggest driver
• Participative, game based content drives maximum engagement (relevance)

The study identified that users avoid sharing social content that is promotional or seen as advertisements.

Try to sell or make connections?

The goal of any marketing activity is two fold – boost branding e.g. awareness, engagement, loyalty and generate sales. It is therefore easy for a brand to assume social media marketing is no different – and treat it as any traditional marketing channel. Other unique positioning of social media as a marketing platform is the dynamic nature of the platforms – vying for user’s attention. Is it better to grab users’ attention than trying to sell?

One of the challenges of measuring brand attributes on Social platforms is the difficulty in mapping likes and shares to sales. We proposed to extract the attributes and the emotions associated with these attributes to map them with the branding variables – like awareness, loyalty, quality of offerings. Appropriate sales proxy variable was identified to be used as dependent to measure branding.

Brand attributes on a dynamic platform

Brand attributes being driven by social media include engagement, awareness, relevance and quality.  

We categorised the social media marketing posts based on content into – promotional, games, awareness, fun and participative. These posts were then scored on relevance, engagement and similar other metrics.

We then extracted the sentiment attached with each of these posts and the branding attributes to which each of these posts could be mapped.

Structural equation modeling was then utilized to measure the impact of latent, direct and indirect factors on branding attributes.

Popularity of content with first degree connections and relevance were the top two drivers.