Kiss Insight

THE POWER OF SOCIAL MEDIA 21 October 2011

Social media. We see this term online, read it in newspapers and hear it being discussed at work. We know it as the world our Facebook and Twitter accounts belong to – but what does it mean for businesses? And more importantly, how can radio stations harness its awesome powers for good? Here at Kiss Confidential we want to share how we're approaching the growing world of social media, and also a few things we've discovered telling us not only what our fans are saying about us and our brands, but how they live their lives.

486,000. That's the amount of listeners across the UK who follow Kiss across our Facebook properties.  

@KissFMUK. That's the twitter feed that just shy of 25,000 listeners now follow every day (which, by the way, is an increase of 83% in the last 3 months alone).

Add them together, and Kiss now reaches 471,000 listeners on their phones socially, across tablets and computers, as well as at work, home and play. Combine that with the 4.3 million that tune in to listen every week, and it allows Kiss to have a two-way relationship with fans that transcends sound, sight and now social; Kiss fans can hear us on the radio, they can see us on the TV, and talk to us online.  

Bruce Mitchell, Digital Product & Innovation Director here at Kiss, has been central to Kiss’ digital evolution: “Radio is no longer a one-way experience, we live in a world where our listeners can talk to us, we can talk to them and they can talk to each other. By building audience across our multiple platforms, we can engage with them in ways that were traditionally impossible. We can now have a two-way conversation with our audiences at any time of the day, which not only gives us great audience engagement, but delivers new commercial opportunities as well.”

Kiss recently used social media to great effect, when late on a Friday afternoon Kiss received a call from Beyonce’s record label. They were offering us 300 tickets to a special Beyonce gig, on the Monday and we had to give away the tickets in 48 hours. With no time to build a traditional commercial competition on Totalkiss.com we looked to social media, and to Twitter, which gave us both an audience and infrastructure to do something instantly. To enter to win tickets all our listeners had to do send a tweet with the hash tag #KissisBeyonce. The take up was huge with tens of thousands of tweets as our audience rushed for the chance to join Kiss at the gig.

This constant conversation with our fans also helps us discover how they see the world around them. Sometimes we want to know their deeper feelings, like how the London riots affected them. Other times though we want to know about the lighter issues, such as which failed X Factor contestant they would like to have seen have chart success, or which fashions they least want to come back (the mighty shell suit, received the most nominations as the fashion which left our listeners looking back through their photos and asking why).

Facebook also helps us add a further level of connectivity to our listeners by showing them what we’re up to when we’re out and about. For example we can show them pictures of Kiss at the Notting Hill Carnival, or in the crowd at the Wireless festival, or in the studio interviewing Britney Spears, whilst they are listening to us talking about it on air. The 360 digital world that we now exist in allows radio to have a truly live visual element for the first time.

We're learning that social media can be so much more than just a question and answer session with our fans, we can post pictures or provide great commercial possibilities: there is also a fantastic opportunity to measure and understand our audience and their behaviours.  Software such as Social Mention can tell us the ratio of positive to negative comments made about us, how far-reaching we are and how likely it is that people will continue talking about us. Google Insight measures the amount of times a term is searched for on Google, and can give us an insight into how our competitions, events and commercial partnerships are penetrating the market.

Facebook itself has nifty insight tools which not only allow us to search all public profiles for comments about us, our brands and our events, but also has purpose-built analytics which gives us the breakdown of our followers, and the extent to which they are interacting with us and content that we post to our wall. One of the more interesting things it has shown us is that while London is the most popular city for Kiss Facebookers to be based, Manchester is actually second, meaning our digital presence across the UK is having a significant impact in major cities around the country. This is particularly surprising when you consider that Kiss 101 and 105 service some huge places in the East and West, and is just one example of a gem of information that we can use when we consider programming and commercial opportunities in the future.

One of our favourite fun tools here at Kiss Confidential is Twitter Streamgraphs. Streamgraphs searches for the last 1000 instances of the term that you designate, pulls out the words used most frequently in association with it, and graphs it by time and volume used. Using our Twitter username below as an example, we can see that the words used most when our followers tweet us are things like love, shout, play and tune. We can also see when followers are most engaged with us (in this instance, in early afternoon), and what exactly is being said. Try it out for yourself here.

The free tools around for measuring social media are endless, and the challenge for us here at Kiss is discovering the best tools that tell us the most about our business.  A good example of this comes from one of our Bauer sister stations, Key 103. Using Google Insight, Key 103 monitored the Google searches made for a brand that sponsored one of their live events, Cheshire Oaks. They were able to track a sharp increase in search volume following the event, and armed with the knowledge that Cheshire Oaks were not using any other advertising, were able to present the client with a tangible example of the success sponsoring a live event can achieve.  This can be seen on the chart below. The date of the event is represented by the star, and the red line represents the peak of searches following the event –a level not matched throughout the previous year, and significantly higher than a year earlier.

Ultimately social media is about showing and sharing. If it is engaging and relevant to your audience it will succeed. But unlike traditional word of mouth which is hard to quantify we now have the tools to analyse it properly. We’re constantly watching the impressive things other brands are doing so to finish take a look at one of our favourites that we have seen recently from Tipp-Ex. It’s a You Tube sensation that has spread across Facebook and Twitter and revitalised a tired product. Take a look and have a play – and don’t type anything rude!