Ep 57: Serious Social – Sizzling stats and what to do with them
It’s BBQ season! And we’ve uncovered some sizzling opportunities for brands who want to reach the grilling parties – from equipment to meat-free choices, Brandwatch has come through for us and we’re ready to share some with you. In this episode of Serious Social Belle Lawrence explores how to utilise data to create relevant, meaningful content for social, and why it’s so important to listen to understand what audiences want to hear.
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Full Transcript
It’s gonna be all about data, and I’m using the barbecue data that research that we’ve recently done as a bit of an example of how to use it so at immediate future, we love data. It underpins everything we do because we don’t like to make assumptions about your audience on social. We don’t like to base things just on age and gender and where people live, it’s about their behaviours and their interests so psychographics, rather than demographics, but how we figure out what those psychographics are of your audiences is a bit of a tricky thing, not gonna lie, it’s especially skilled, and we use the data to guide us, so we want to uncover the opportunities where social can make the most impact.
But this was really the just the first stage, we use a tool called Brandwatch, which is awesome. And it pulls in billions of conversations from blogs, forums, news sites, Twitter, and review sites and shapes them into analysis that we can really get our teeth into, they’ve banned what’s actually just partnered with a decision, and they’re going to combine it with falcon.io. And that’s going to really broaden their digital consumer intelligence, even further so one of the reasons we love brand voice, if you aren’t following them on social I’d recommend it. They’re absolutely great.
So really what we want to do from that is understand the data within your audience conversations get closer to the audience what triggers them to purchase, because that’s really essential for businesses to understand if they’re looking for engagement and potentially ultimately return from social media. Now, this is all very sort of sciency and hypothetical so what I thought I do is use an example take your topic. An example something that we kind of quite universal and explore what to do with all the duty data.
So we ran some social listening around some queries, around the topic of barbecue, not just the equipment or not just the cooking of it but what are people drinking, Where are they spending time with their barbecues, is it celebration what equipment, are they using, and also what retailers really shopping. So I’m going to do some reveals if you want to grab your pen and make some notes, or you can obviously come back to us at some point in the future and ask for more info.
And so conversations are in growth around barbecues. Alright, Captain Obvious probably. But obviously, year on year, they are starting to grow especially now that the weather has finally started to warm up. And in particular, we’re noticing a lot around family activity. Now again this might sound quite obvious but the big drivers have been words around garden home and love. Now, of course, while we were all locked down last year and some people still are having that kind of trouble in the world. We’re spending more time at home. We’re cooking at home, we’re celebrating at home just within the family. And if you’re anything like me, What happens at home when you have a gathering, or a barbecue, you run out of fridge space pretty quickly, no matter what size your fridge is because you’ve got the salad, you’ve got the drinks and the meats and it’s just endless so maybe it’s no surprise to hear that massive ice buckets won’t cut it anymore. And that’s been proven because we can see mentions of beverages are up, 400%, year on year which is whopping so we’re clearly getting a bit more techie, about how we store our drinks, and the another tricky thing is something called a lift lighter. Have you heard of a lift lighter. No, I haven’t either. And I’m not going to explain what it is. If you’re someone out there who makes these, you might notice a little bump in your search traffic over the weekend as people raise up people have to listen to this and then go off to Google to discover what a lift lighter is so let me know. Give me a call next week. If it’s increased because social mentions of these are up 83% year on year, which is not the 400% of average tillers but still quite an increase. So go on, have a search for that over the weekend.
Now let’s move on to some food. My drumstick and lettuce opinions aside and you want to know what that’s all about just head over to LinkedIn and read some of my posts. Obviously there are some key meats that people will still continue to have at their barbecue so chicken burgers and sausages remained to be the most discussed types of meats, however, burgers are down 15% year on year and I’m talking about mentions of burgers so people really saying, I’m gonna have a burger on my barbecue down 15% whereas, brisket mentioned are up by 64% which was the largest among all the meat varieties that we took a look at so people are getting more sophisticated, they’ve perhaps watched lots of TV shows and thinking, I’m going to do something a bit more special for my barbecue this time. Interest in vegetarian and vegan diets, broadly flat year on year. Now, is it just that there aren’t enough products, I know there’s been a big boom in manufacturers and brands coming out with lots of different vegan and vegetarian products that are out there, but perhaps it’s not quite made it into the vernacular and vegans maybe still aren’t barbecuing that much. And the pescetarian diet so all about the fish that’s actually had the largest increase year on year so salmon is super popular, it’s up 48% But makrolon prawns are the biggest year on year both at 96% So, again, maybe just people choosing something slightly different on the barbecue.
Now let’s pause on the stats for a second and talk about what we do with these stats. So I mentioned search volume tracking, if you’re not looking at your SEO trends, and if you’re bidding on your brand terms and other brand terms if you’re not watching those trends and seeing increases from mentions of your brand on social or social activity that you’re doing, then start tracking that now it has to be a digital ecosystem social doesn’t exist on its own if somebody wants to go and search for something they will use Google or they’ll talk to their friends, or, you know, perhaps then go watch a TV show so consider how you’re tracking that customer journey and where people are going to find out about it. Another option is to obviously, join the conversation so if you go to our feeds, you’ll see a couple of posts about these barbecue trends. Now we’ve gone for content that is thumb stopping headline grabbing and hopefully worth a look. And so we’ve done for example Brits are boycotting burgers and obviously that’s the headlines that we’re looking for people to go at really 15% year on year down, not huge amounts however they’re going for brisket, much more so we’ve mentioned that, we’ve also done a post about the author’s being right everyone’s throwing their shrimp on the barbie. And the last one, probably my favourite one is vegans hate parties, well, they make, they don’t hate parties, they’re just not really talking about barbecues much. So we’ve gone for that kind of thumb stuff paying, get involved in it. Headline newsworthy kind of thing. But what we haven’t then done is released a report.
Now, we did do a barbecue report couple of years ago still on our site if you want to go and have a look. But this time around we haven’t done a full report and this is a b2b tactic that you can possibly use, or one that we call nudge nurture, where we’re putting something out, and we’re gonna start seeding that through into our content, and people will come to us and ask for more, we haven’t released the report, or they’ll wait for more, or they’ll watch this video so a couple of pieces of different content now. CJ our Managing Director He explains this much better than me, so go over to our channels and watch one of his videos where he explains it, but we’ll hold on to that valuable content. Now, when we’re talking about how to use the content in the context of your social. If you’re a food brand and we’re talking about barbecue content here. Think about how to incorporate the trending food and drinks, can you create a new recipe with one of these trends, can you interview a special chef, maybe there’s a vegan barbecue chef that you could talk to, or can you just go and interview and explain what the Hello lift lighter is that can be some really great content, people still don’t really know and I see a couple of comments coming through saying, No, I didn’t know what it is either.
Alright, let’s get back to some stats. Now this is interesting as I do remember from our last report that we talked about grill manufacturers so who’s making the Bob keys, and we have now seen that there are two brands Cadac and cob are now the most discussed barbecue grill manufacturers with 144% and 138% respectively year on year growth. Now I know that in our previous report we definitely mentioned the likes of Weber Landman and Big Green Egg. So where have they gone, are they not doing much marketing are people not loving them anymore. Are they just out of fashion, you have to do a bit more digging but really interesting see two different brands coming to the light, and retailers.
Now I know this is something that lots of food manufacturers out there will be really interested to hear about. Where are your brands being stocked. Have you got the right retailer relationships. So, just to let you in. When it comes to pub G conversations around 28% are mentioning Tesco, that’s the top one. The three discussion leaders for Tesco at 28% then Aldi and Morrison’s equal at 11%. Each Aldi mentions are slightly higher than their market share now, They obviously do a lot of different marketing, and they are also able to offer that middle aisle of various items which will definitely include some barbecue equipment right over the summer, and that can be an extra pole to get people in store so perhaps that’s what people are, are mentioning so Tesco Aldi Morrison’s you’re winning, apparently.
And the other thing that we looked at is whether people are mentioning their local butchers now that they’re shopping closer to home and keeping it local was certainly a trend that we saw over the last 12 months during the pandemic, but it’s harder to see whether people are talking about their local retailers, mostly because butchers are going to have unique names in each local area, same as greengrocers etc. But people are really only mentioning the big retailers when it comes to barbecue, only about 8% are mentioning local, so it doesn’t mean that nobody’s shopping local, but when it comes to barbecue perhaps there’s a decision to be made about convenience and price, particularly if you’re cooking for a lot of people, and that’s where the bigger retailers will come in.
So I have got some drinks trends for you. Next, there’s a bit of a back to basics trend again could be driven by people enjoying barbecues mostly at home. Not really many people talking about cocktails. And you’d think. If you’re anything like me, being a Briton the summer would get the pins out right but actually pins is down 36% year on year. Have we seen many of those for them. Maybe it’s because they’re about big gatherings and we’re not really getting that, maybe there’s been less tennis on. It could just be that. And also, T and T is down gin and tonic 56% down year on year now, that could be driven by uplift in other areas, and one of the things that we saw is hard seltzer. If you haven’t heard of hard Seltzer, go out and try it. It is really it’s really good. So it’s, it’s basically a fizzy water with flavourings and alcohol, and it’s becoming to popularity because it’s slightly lowering calories, carbs, and mostly gluten free. It’s just kind of nice and refreshing comes in cans so the rival to the gym and attend, I guess.
Now, the number of matches the hard seltzer is still quite low, but they are growing really fast and actually it’s up 800% year on year which is massive. So that’s clearly a bit of a trend for this summer drinks last bit of stuff, and this is, these are my favourite really it’s always about the cheese for me. Any meal to be perfectly honest, but interesting couple of stats that we saw blue cheese has had a real growth, year on year, I don’t mean that growth on the blue cheese, pun intended, hundreds and 73% up year on year. What is it about blue cheese, really interesting. Other types of cheese that are mentioned in the context of barbecue so gloomy 17% up year on year, and fetter and mozzarella both up so people possibly looking for cheese that is going to be melted, but also looking at the slightly more exotic I guess something that could be used as solid, rather than just the traditional English cheese varieties, or even that sort of French phrase that maybe we would have seen in previous years.
So, lots of lots of stuff to get your head round there are a couple of more ideas then for how you can use stats or social listening and understanding your audience better ask the audience, so you’ve seen a trend, you’ve heard something is trending up, you’ve perhaps picked up on something, ask them, how are they enjoying their blue cheese, are they melting it. Why is no one drinking Prosecco this year. So get involved and get them to come back to you and let you know, not only will you get the engagement from that piece of content but you’ll learn something from their answers that you can continue to create content, it should be a cycle like that. It can also as a brand help you source the right brand partnerships.
So, for example, not to create a piece of content, maybe with a secondary brand or a complementary brand, that will help both of you on social. Consider which ones are going to have the right trend for you, so you want to partner with the Chief Brand Great, let’s just say that a cheese brand that you happen to pick is about to launch a blue cheese variety in a couple of months, spot on because that’s trending up year on year so it kind of helps you make those decisions. You can also brief your influences to create content around the trending topics so get that trend in mind, and find the site guys if you see it. And you can utilise that over, over the coming months. And the other thing is to news Jack hop on the trends, and get involved in the conversation maybe be a bit controversial, like are boycotting burgers or vegan tasting parties, but certainly talk about it’s obviously being cold right you can see it’s trending up. So get involved, and you can do things like that on tick tock, if you’re super agile, take up trends fly by, in a, you know, a matter of days, so consider where it’s going to be best to create this content. And in order to be agile, you have to plan, I know I say it every time on here, but plan out your content and plan ahead, make sure that you’ve got all of that done, and then leave some gaps to be relevant and pick up on those trends, because you’ll resonate a whole lot more with the audience, if you’re talking about the same things that they are and that they care about.
So, well lots to think about loads of tips and tricks. If you want to know more about the barbecue trends and sales, or you have any other questions about social listening, just DM me or get in touch with one of us through our social channels, and thank you for joining us this week, as you know you can go on watch any of our previous series socials on YouTube or Facebook and IPTV, in fact, and you can also listen to it as a podcast pretty much anywhere you get. So hop into that, do subscribe, and then come back to us next week, and let me know if you found that what a little lighter is. Alright, so pretty much anywhere you get those, so hop into that, do subscribe and then come back to us next week, and let me know if you found out what a lift lighter is. Alright, I’ve pretty much anyway.