Social Room: the key steps

In honor of the recent launch of our latest project, Social Room Inside, we wanted to dedicate our article to all things Social Room. At Saas Advisor, we have seen the importance and the benefits Social Rooms can give to companies and we want to explain the basics to give a better understanding of them as well as concrete examples of successful Social Rooms.

Our goal with the Social Room Inside project is to highlight different rooms, identify best practices, and discuss critical social media topics. So, think of this article as an introduction!

Today we will cover the following topics:

• What is a Social Room?
• The rise of Social Rooms
• What is Social Room Inside?

What is a Social Room?

A Social Room is known by many names: social media command center, social media war room, social media listening centers, etc. What you need to know is what they do and why businesses use them! A Social Room can be described as: 

These rooms are filled with screens that show personalized data, dashboards, news, and more surrounding a given brand. These rooms are where marketers (and people from other departments as well) can congregate to monitor and respond to things going on about their brand on social media.It can be used to analyze performance, engagement, reach, awareness, and more.  Here is a great example of what a Social Room can look like, from one of our clients: 

There are many different situations in which companies use their Social Rooms. The development and advancement of social rooms has allowed for businesses to do monitor things such as:

• Brand reputation: Depending on the martech tools available, many Social Rooms have dedicated dashboards that show the current sentiment and reputation of a brand by bringing in analytics and real-time mentions from social media channels to give an overview of brand reputation. This allows for marketers to see what is working, what isn’t, and where they should be focusing their energy to better their social marketing efforts.  In addition, users can directly respond, post, and generally engage with their audiences from the room. By seeing what is happening around a brand in real-time, a Social Room allows for marketers to quickly get involved in conversations on social media to promote a better customer experience and help avoid any issues. 
• Engagement: A deeper understanding of your audience is necessary to make sure you are communicating the right messages on the right channels. Nowadays, customers expect more and more personalized experiences. Brands that fail to keep up may be in trouble! This is where a Social Room can come in. Thanks to its screens and metrics,  marketers can monitor different brand communication on social networks and be able to monitor brand consistency and results, and adjust where needed.  
• Product or campaign launch: When a brand launches a new product or campaign, it gives them a new opportunity to interact with their audience and measure the performance of the launch. Social Room metrics allow brands to curate, streamline, analyze, and measure any important insights from the launch so marketing teams can respond quickly and effectively. 
• Crisis Management: The monitoring of sentiment around a brand and their social channels allows for marketers to detect any signs of a possible crisis or negative reactions to a post, product, etc. and gives them the opportunity to act quickly and effectively to avoid a larger issue. 
• Events: If a brand launches any sort of event, online or offline, Social Rooms can be configured to monitor the event to measure its performance, effectiveness and respond to any opportunities or challenges that may arise. Additionally, for large events like the Superbowl, the World Cup, the Oscars, etc, brands can use Social Rooms to monitor these events and join in on conversations, and potentially promote their brand when relevant.
• Competitors: A big aspect of Social Rooms is the monitoring and benchmarking of competitors to follow their activities and get an understanding of their share of voice, new products or campaigns, sentiment, etc.

In case you haven’t noticed, Social Listening is a big theme in Social Rooms. To learn more about Social Listening, check out our article.

The benefits of social rooms are boundless. They can promote communication and collaboration within the social media and marketing teams as well as other departments and facilitate the way you share data. In addition, these rooms give companies a better overview of their key performance indicators, their overall performance, and more to give a clear picture of results from social efforts. Finally, the quality, real-time data that can be gathered allows for quicker, smarter, and more efficient marketing decisions.

The Rise of Social Rooms 

Social Rooms have been around since as early as 2010. In the early days, they were often used for large events such as sports events, award shows, yearly campaigns, etc. However, these “one-shot” initiatives were costly and difficult to put into practice. Social media monitoring is no longer something that happens just for big events or crises. It is something that brands do day-in, day-out. 

Despite a lull in the use of Social Rooms, they have made a comeback as a permanent space and aspect of social media strategies to protect brand reputations, identify threats, benchmark competitors, interact with customers, and more. We have seen the rise and effectiveness of Social Rooms at Saas Advisor, and it is part of the reason we launched our new initiative, Social Room.io

What is Social Room Inside?

At Saas Advisor, we have seen the rise of Social Rooms and the benefits our clients and other businesses have gained from them. We teamed up with our friends at The Metrics Factory to create Social Room Inside, where we interview professionals about their Social Rooms. From Orange to Pierre Fabre, we can see how Social Rooms are being used and developed. The goal is to highlight the different room architectures, identify best practices, and discuss critical social media topics. 

Check it out here! (For now, the information is only available in French).

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Want to keep reading? Check out our article on the Sprinklr platform!