Tips, and tricks to connect with your customers

Pretoria, South Africa, 3 December 2020 - YOUKNOW Digital today announced its collaboration with Idea Hive, an agency that creates and executes pioneering Brand Storytelling Solutions. The two companies, brought together by Brandwatch, the world’s leading social intelligence company, will work together to deliver powerful AI-driven insights across every part of Idea Hive’s business.

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“Data is the foundation of every digital transformation, that’s why we’ve never been more committed to delivering powerful analytics to all our clients. We are thrilled to work with such a forward-thinking company, and we are confident that will exceed their expectations,” said Kelvin Jonck, MD at YOUKNOW.

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Idea Hive is an agency that creates and executes pioneering Brand Storytelling Solutions to illuminate brand power. It applies a strategic framework that extracts and aligns all the key components of any brand story.

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"We've been telling brand's stories successfully for years. Idea Hive believes that digital and/or social media analytics and insights are key to assisting brands to make more informed decisions on what they should be doing to best add value to their clients. An in-depth analysis will tell it is going to rain, but it won’t carry the umbrella for you, hence, we are extremely excited to partner with Brandwatch to ensure that in the future, we deduce data to gain rich actionable insights, which will ultimately benefit our core business of brand storytelling to achieve enhanced outcomes for our clients," said Yaw Dwomoh, CEO at Idea Hive.

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Brandwatch is the only social-listening platform with the most data and the smartest artificial intelligence. It gives marketers access to deep-listening capabilities across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and online news, backed by robust artificial intelligence and real-time alerts.

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“With Brandwatch being the world’s leading social intelligence company that builds intelligent software solutions, we will be able to accelerate our mission and help Idea Hive and Africa as a whole more than ever see and understand data,” Tsebanang Tsimba, Head of Customer Success at YOUKNOW.

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YOUKNOW, whose clients include NCBA, the Kenyan Tourism Board, MTN, Multichoice and Standard Bank has been in the Marketing Technology industry since 2013 and is known for its support and local implementation of global marketing technologies such as Brandwatch, Khoros (formerly known as Lithium & Spredfast), Hootsuite, GlobalWebIndex & Audiense.

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About YOUKNOW Digital YOUKNOW is dedicated to helping brands utilise the right technology to enhance its Media Strategy, Consumer Insights, and Social Customer Care. We offer the best global intelligence technology solutions for curious companies with local, African expertise. Brandwatch, Khoros, Hootsuite, GlobalWebIndex & Audiense.

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About Idea Hive At Idea Hive we create and execute pioneering Brand Storytelling Solutions to illuminate your brand’s power. We apply a strategic framework that extracts and aligns all the key components of your brand’s story. We craft and execute heartfelt and character-driven Brand Storytelling campaigns that position brands and organisations to achieve their full market potential.

Black Friday is chaotic with stores jam-packed with customers putting their hands on the best deals. This has taken a turn-around this year, because of the “coronavirus”. The pandemic has changed the rules of shopping. This has forced businesses to adapt to the current times by participating in Black Friday while following lockdown regulations. How do they operate within regulations? Someone might say online shopping, but this can’t be the only option, especially in South Africa.

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Online shopping is convenient, in that your package can be delivered at your doorstep or you can schedule your items for collection to avoid long queues, but if we are being realistic the cons outweigh the pros. The cons being security, quality, waiting time, return policies, added delivery fees, and scams. Those are some of the things that give customers anxiety.

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Now, with a lot of feelings around Black Friday, we’ve gathered data using Brandwatch Consumer Research to uncover useful insights about Black Friday in the middle of a pandemic as businesses try to meet customers halfway.

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Sentiment While analysing the conversation leading up to the 27 November, we noticed that the majority of the sentiment was positive. 80% of the posts were positive especially in discussions around savings and deals, while only 20% of it was negative with customers expressing their fear of scams and catching the virus. While there are negative things expressed about the day, we still see the excitement building across social media in the lead up to the shopping bonanza.

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The most positive keywords used were Black Friday as the lead keyword of the conversation, The flame emoji as an expression of “hot deals”, WhatsApp as small businesses advertise their products, Unbeatable in reference to the prices, and Card as customers are warned about giving their details on the web when shopping during this time.

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By looking at this data, businesses and brands have to build trust and confidence by communicating how they’ll make stores safer while providing an excellent customer experience at the same time.

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Gender Breakdown Now, despite the stereotype about women and shopping, data is proving this to be a myth as we see that more males are engaging in the Black Friday conversation than females. They are hoping to find a great deal on the PS5, which comes as no surprises. Retailers know that this demographic is browsing their sites for discounted prices on devices and cool gadgets.

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They’ve heard what their customers want and now they are preparing some exciting, budget-friendly deals. We see this data through social platforms like Twitter as retailers are working tirelessly to ensure their campaigns are engaged.

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A whole month has been given to South Africans to do more than a few days of Black Friday shopping (online and in-store shopping). Therefore consumers must be careful when it comes to month-long 'shoppertunities' and should be extra vigilant when making a purchase, especially online.

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While online shopping isn’t the only way to shop around during a pandemic, brands have figured it would be easier to start their sales earlier in the month to avoid stampede on Black Friday. Black Friday presents a major opportunity for retailers to improve processes that can sustain them beyond the holiday shopping season and other companies are offering innovative shopping promotions such as shopping online and collecting in-store to avoid queues and paying for shipping fees.

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While 2020 has been a year and a half for both customers and businesses, it left many wondering if Black Friday is canceled. Thankfully, the answer is not, because we see businesses and brands announcing sales and deals daily as the date gets closer. This annual shopping event is going to be different as we are in the middle of a pandemic and social distancing is still a thing.

Johannesburg, 18 November - GlobalWebIndex (GWI), the leading target audience company, and Digital Optimisation, New Generation Awards 2020 “Small Agency of the Year", today announce their strategic partnership to drive performance and growth.

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Through its flagship study representing 2.6 billion consumers globally, GWI provides consumer insights across 46 markets to the most renowned brands, agencies and media organisations. Digital Optimisation becomes one of the first African independent agencies to be GWI-certified and joins some of the world’s most iconic agencies and brands that have access to its market-leading research and solutions.

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Dani Morley, CEO of Digital Optimisation, says the partnership with GWI forms an integral part of Digital Optimisation’s broader business strategy. “As a company, we are obsessed with our client’s performance and growth. To drive this performance, we need to have access to trusted data to make informed audience profiling decisions. GWI enables this. The insights gleaned from GWI data allows us to shape our strategic thinking and delivery on e-commerce, lead generation, digital media and social strategies.”

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“At Digital Optimisation, our approach is to combine our local, entrepreneurial, agile Indie DNA with the power of globally-recognised, world-leading, heavy-weight partners, such as GWI.”

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“We’re delighted to be partnering with Digital Optimisation at such a crucial period in time”, says Sebastian Hedencrona, Chief Growth Officer at GWI. “As budgets tighten and the pressure on agencies to deliver fast results mounts, it’s never been more important to understand your audiences and how exactly they’re changing – and this is an agency that knows the value in being informed. Since the coronavirus outbreak, consumer behaviours and mindsets have been changing at rates we’ve never seen. Our aim, as always, is to bring that much-needed insight to every agency, big or small, to help them succeed. Our partners play a key role in helping us achieve that – on a global, local, and regional level.”

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“We love GlobalWebIndex, and we love Digital Optimisation. It’s a match made in heaven, and we’re excited to help DO compete at the highest levels by providing their customers with up-to-date, useful and relevant consumer insights. YOUKNOW’s goal is to connect local, African organisations with the best global technology companies, ensuring that they do so with local expertise and experience,” says Kelvin Jonck, MD at YOUKNOW.

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Morley continues: “Our partnership with GWI gives us the benefit and insight into rich, customised research to identify key consumer trends and opportunities. Not only does GWI provide us with customer journey mapping and targeting validation capabilities, but we are able to tap into a representation of over 2 billion people, in over 40 countries with over 40,000 profiling attributes, making us truly, locally and internationally capable and relevant.

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Access to GWI provides us with the ability to find and validate our client’s ideal target segments, with locally relevant insight into attitudes, interests and perceptions in a way that we have not been able to achieve previously. We can then map the behaviours of these segments to identify the touch-points and media moments that matter. Quality customer profiling, quality conversion and quality lead strategies have to start here. Developing a nurturing CRM strategy is only valuable if our customers are the right profile from the beginning and this enables us to deliver loyalty, profit and an advantage over other brands.”

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Morley believes that as marketing budgets are tightened, and Chief Marketing Officers are under the baton to produce results, there will be an increasing demand for paid media agencies and performance marketing agencies to deliver high-value ROI and bottom-line impact. She believes that the GWI partnership with Digital Optimization is a critical element in its ability to deliver on high performance and growth for its clients.

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About GWI

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GlobalWebIndex (GWI) is a target audience company that provides consumer insight across 46 countries to the world’s leading brands, communication agencies and media organisations.

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The company runs a global survey representing more than 2 billion connected consumers, which offers up over 40,000 data points on the behaviours and perceptions of internet users around the world. Using the subscription-based platform, clients including Twitter, Google, Spotify, WPP, IPG and Omnicom Group can gather in-depth insights into audience behaviours, attitudes and interests through a combination of survey data and analytics.

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About YOUKNOW

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YOUKNOW started in 2013 with the understanding that there was a disconnect between local industry professionals and the technology vendors they wanted to work with. Geographically, industry, cultural and language differences meant that getting to excellent took a lot more work on both sides than needed. We were then fortunate enough to get the buy-in from some of the most innovative technology companies in the world to allow us to represent them locally: becoming their experts on the ground, so that we could sit right in front of our local, African peers and help them succeed by seeing the value, and realising the potential that the solutions provided.

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YOUKNOW is the authorised distributor and local support partner for GlobalWebIndex.

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You can also follow us on Linkedin and also subscribe to our Youtube channel.

It’s coming to that time of the year when we all start daydreaming about 2020 holidays to destinations near and far.

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The internet allows consumers to research their holidays in more depth than ever before, opening up travel booking sites to closer scrutiny. Online reputation can be a powerful influence on travel agent take up – both bad and good.

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YOUKNOW, using Brandwatch Consumer Research, analysed the South African conversation around nine of the top travel sites in the country over the past year to find out which were faring the best online.

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These are: Travelstart, Travelcheck, LekkeSlaap, Cheapflights, Thompsons, Flightsite, Pentravel, STA Travel and Flight Centre.

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Of the travel sites we looked at, Flight Centre was mentioned by far the most in the past year, accounting for a 44% share of the conversation. Flight Centre was followed by Travelstart (26%), Lekkeslaap (14%) and STA Travel (8%). Thompsons, Flightsite and Travelcheck accounted for the least share of voice accounting for only 3% of conversation combined.

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The conversation about travel sites increased during the Christmas holidays, peaking between the 25th and 29th of December due to discussion about Flight Centre’s competition to win a trip to Mauritius in collaboration with Glamour SA.

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Brands with the highest percentage of positive conversation were Pentravel (36%), Travelstart (29%) and Thompsons (27%).

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The conversation around Pentravel praised its customer service, especially their expert advice.

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The brand with the highest percentage of negative conversation was FlightSite. Much of the negativity surrounding FlightSite regarded the inability to get in touch with customer service. So that’s a snapshot of the online South African travel companies.

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*This data was analysed using Brandwatch Consumer Research, with the most volume of conversation coming from Twitter, for the period of January 2019 - January 2020.

LinkedIn Channels

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LinkedIn is the largest professional social network, with more than 690 million users on the platform. Last year, the platform’s engagement increased by 50%, so it makes sense as to why 97% of B2B marketers find LinkedIn as their go-to channel for their content marketing efforts.

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Brandwatch allows you to keep track of the performance on all of your company’s LinkedIn pages in one place. This allows you to strengthen your content strategy to make it more impactful in the global professional community.

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When you are seeking to better understand what drives engagement the most, and how it contributes to reaching a larger audience, you can measure the success of your owned and paid content. Build a more valuable audience by analysing and monitoring your following over time. Study responses to recognise your top employee advocates and industry influencers who could ignite new conversations and opportunities.

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Facebook And Instagram

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Social media giant, Facebook, recently revised their terms to further define how social intelligence partners utilise their data for analysis.

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What should bring joy to Brandwatch users is that Brandwatch has been compliant with Facebook requirements for years. So, unlike other data providers, there will be no loss of data or significant changes for our users. Brandwatch can continue to focus on further developments that help users make the most of their Facebook and Instagram data.

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New Additions This Month:

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• Bulk uploading of non-owned Instagram business accounts: Increase your coverage by monitoring the posts of the brands, newsrooms, brands, and companies in your industry.
• Improved user-experience: The Brandwatch Query-builder now has alerts to notify you when you need to set up channels and hashtags to get sufficient coverage.

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Upcoming Additions:

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• Even more user experience improvements: Monitor Facebook and Instagram accounts with more agility and with easier authentication.
• Hashtag autocomplete: It's now easier to search for and find the correct hashtags to monitor.
• More historic data: Now you can get 400 days of historic data for both owned and non-owned Facebook pages as well as owned Instagram accounts.
• Non-owned Facebook pages now allow bulk uploading.

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Disqus: Article And Blog Comments

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Disqus is a public commentary sharing platform used by many news sites such as the Boston Herald, Mercury News, and Bloomberg. Disqus is also used by blogs, review sites, and forums.

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When your query matches the text in a comment, Disqus data will be automatically added to your results. Ask your Customer Success Manager on how to best utilise this new content source.

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• Monitoring comments under blogs and articles adds a new layer of consumer insight to your brand tracking.
• Understand how people are reacting to articles or blogs about your brand to get your consumers opinions on the current events.
• Notice when people bring up your products or competitors’ products on review sites or forums.
• Identify unlicensed selling of your products
• Analyse comments on your own site, if you utilise Disqus.

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Geofence Queries

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Using latitude: and longitude: operators, you can now filter or search within a particular area. This opens up an entire host of new possibilities such as:

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• Monitoring live responses to events.
• Comparing consumer discussions at various transport hubs, malls or shop locations.
• Discovering where your brand logo appears at popular monuments and attractions.

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Per Capita Maps

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Brandwatch Vizia now has a new 'per capita' map view, this allows you to see where your brand or topic has been mentioned the most. This is very helpful for answering strategic questions that will inform important business decisions such as:

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• Which audience does your campaign best resonate with?
• Possible regions in which your new product should first be launched
• Identifying new markets in which your brand may be gaining traction.

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Better Location Tagging

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Locations provided by social media users in their bios cannot be easily placed. They are often slang, playful, or ironic (e.g. “Jozi Maboneng” or “The mother city”). Brandwatch’s advanced machine learning algorithms can learn to interpret those informal references and correctly link them to their actual geographic meanings, providing you with sharper data for your location analysis.

There is Lekker Food at my Door, does it Ring a bell?

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Food has always been a social occasion, it brings people together irrespective of race colour or creed. Most cultures communicate love through food and South Africans fall within that margin. In that case, how do fast-food restaurants in South Africa ensure that food lovers' needs are well met?

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Food plays a big role in our lives. Not only as a source of nutrients but as part of religions and a centre point of some cultures even. Food has been a symbol of respect and a way to show love and appreciation.

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It’s no wonder we invest so heavily in what we eat. But how has our perception of food changed throughout time. Particularly with the introduction of fast food. Many traditionalists, culturalists and nutritionists have always seen food as freshly made in your home.

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But how does the landscape of food look in 2020 where fast food and food delivery is growing at a rapid pace and there has been more demand than ever before.

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The average person in 2020 has definitely either eaten food from a fast food chain or ordered food online. Why? Well we are busier than ever and always on the go.

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YOUKNOW, using social intelligence collected consumer insights on how the South African online community talks about fast-food outlets and food delivery apps.

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When we analyse the fast food industry in South Africa we have to look at the two aspects. Fast food chains and Food delivery.

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Though growth is undeniable within the industry, economic issues like load shedding are a big challenge for most business owners. On the bright side though, food is a basic need which means fast food eaters will continue ordering their food even if it means doing that online, because when this generation wants something, they want it now.

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With instant gratification came forth convenience which led to the invention of food delivery apps. These applications are preferred by consumers for their convenience mostly. Being able to order from numerous restaurants without having to rearrange schedules is one of the benefits. Other benefits include allowing for instant payment methods, real-time tracking, delivery scheduling and looking at the menu and price while reading reviews by previous customers before any order can be confirmed. This isn’t only convenient for customers, but for restaurant owners too.

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Though the benefits may be numerous, the CoronaVirus pandemic is affecting this industry as well. Not only the customers are scared for their health, but the drivers too, and we see that through customer conversations on social media when a driver almost throws a customer's order over the gate.

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Besides catching flying food, customers are getting used to getting their food in a click and are becoming more and more demanding. What does this mean for the fast-food and food delivery industry?

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Fast food delivery players backed up by modern technology can start looking into genius marketing and bizarre innovations so that they are able to withstand competition and can keep up with ever changing customer demands.

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A few innovations that are being implemented to meet customer demands use new delivery channels like order by tweet, self-service ordering kiosks, order by smartwatch and order with a smart tv are already penetrating the industry.

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Smarter technological advancements like robots and drones delivering your food will become normal as food delivery companies will no longer be limited by labour force.

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With today’s busy schedules and lifestyles, mobile devices will keep people out of the kitchen and send them straight to apps where they will order their food in one click. Will that stop fast-food restaurant owners from coming up with new concepts? We are yet to find out.

“The new normal”: a term I think we have all grown to hate. Hate is a harsh word, but from some of the reactions I have gotten in meetings in 2020, I would say it may be a fair label. But the term exists for a reason. Our life, as we knew it, has turned on its head. And marketers and brands alike tried to talk to their clients about how the world will look post-COVID.

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Now that we know COVID is here to stay a bit longer than we thought, it has bought us some time to collect enough data to get an overview of how consumer perceptions and behaviours have changed throughout this period.

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COVID may be a thing of the past by the end of 2021 (vaccine dependent), but will consumers go back to their past lives? Let’s look at some of the data and give you an idea of what may transpire.

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DATA For Good.

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If you have not watched “The Social Dilemma” yet, do yourself a favour and give it a viewing, but try not to take all the doom and gloom that comes with it. Social media and data can be exceptionally beneficial to us humans. If you have been drawn into the outrage - on social media - by a group of people who believe that “The Government is stealing all my data!” via the COVID tracking app; you are probably misinformed.

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A trend has appeared, globally, where internet users appear willing to suspend their usual concerns with personal data to assist contact tracing software. Facebook was even experimenting with paying users for data, which in the long run can change our mindset and bring us closer to fair monetisation of personal data. With enough transparency and education, data can be your ally in times like these and moving into the future.

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Exclusively Excluded

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Calling all influencers.. calling all influencers! It’s easy to hop on the bandwagon and bash celebrities and influences during times like these. There were even articles stating that, “Hollywood is dead”. The pandemic was new, we had some wild ideas.

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Let’s be honest, it must be difficult for people to show off Gucci watches and BMW’s when thousands were losing their livelihoods at the same time. The virus does not discriminate. We are all equally affected in one way or another.

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Initial data collected out of Italy and parts of Asia tells us that consumers will be less likely to want to stand out from the crowd, with a focus on solidarity within the collective. Brands may want to focus on values that try to escalate their consumers above the pack. Emphasise practicality over exclusivity, where possible, over the coming months.

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Life In The Slow Lane

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With the opportunity for a lot of us to work from home and with movement limited we tend to have immediate access to screens, pretty much all the time. One way we have filled this time is to stream and stream some more.

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Ongoing COVID survey data, performed by GlobalWebIndex, did eventually show a drop in online media usage after the initial spike in a number of countries. This shows that consumers may be moving to a stage where they are trying to pursue offline pursuits. A large number of people in my personal network have found new passions in cooking and reading again, and have limited hours they are allowed to use their phones. COVID highlighted this dependency on screens for them, and more than likely to you as well.

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Brands should consider how to engage and support consumers wanting to look away from screens. Good examples of this are Mcdonalds and Kraft Heinz with their branded jigsaw puzzles.

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Reduced Horizons

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International travel has ground to an absolute halt. Because of that we have somewhat been forced to focus on our immediate environment. From the bespoke COVID research conducted by GlobalWebIndex in the first few months of the pandemic, we noticed consumers have become more and more conscious of their countries’ performance and well-being during the crisis. Flags on balconies, from images on CNN and Sky News, became cliché and conversations about global lockdown comparisons became a hot topic when our beer had been taken from us.

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Brands can tap into feelings of national pride and solidarity. For airlines (I’m looking at you, SAA) a focus on domestic travel isn’t only practical, but also a meaningful way of connecting consumers who have a personal stake in the recovery of their nation.

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We can all agree that COVID-19 has probably shaped society differently for the rest of our lives. Brands need to adjust quickly. While most small businesses were forced to adapt very quickly (have a look at the Shopify share price from January to now), larger, more “traditional” retailers and brands were not immune. With consumer insights readily available and becoming more accessible and affordable, change can be implemented swiftly, backed by the right data. The question is: “Can you afford not to change?”

Hello December! Today Hootsuite brings you a little light summer upgrade and a sizzling hot new product feature.

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For the longest time, users have not been able to report on Instagram Carousels despite them being one of the most engaging formats on social media, but that is all in the past now.

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Hootsuite has launched its Instagram Carousel metric in Analytics which allows users to track their Instagram post-performance. Users will be able to compose, schedule, approve, and publish up to ten carousels using their Hootsuite mobile app. A notification will be sent through to their mobile app for verification and then they will be prompted to open Instagram to complete their publishing workflows within a few clicks. From there, the tracking begins, all in Hootsuite Analytics.

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Some users may ask if they will have native editing capabilities from the Instagram app to finalise and fine-tune their content before they send it out, and the answer is yes. Hootsuite made this feature available for all plans as Instagram Carousels are an enormous advantage to expand any business.

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Now, Instagram Carousels are one of the most versatile tools you can use to achieve your business goals, and with a good creative strategy, you can boost engagement levels, increase brand loyalty, and even drive product sales.

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Carousels have become an important part of Instagram marketing strategy, and Hootsuite allows you to prepare, preview, and schedule your Instagram Carousels so that with a single push notification, you have everything ready to publish.

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This feature is set to be released on the 8th of December 2020. Be ready to get an in-depth analysis of key metrics for your Instagram posts.

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Instagram Stories

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Instagram is obviously one of the most popular photo-sharing apps today, and with its stories feature, it allows users to share all the moments of their day, not just the ones worth keeping on their profile.

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Hootsuite enables users to download a free pack of of 20 customisable Instagram stories templates, to save time and get results. It also enables users to Create Instagram Stories campaigns in Ads, which allows brands to connect with their audience on a personal level.

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Hootsuite continues to evolve and keeps introducing more engagement boosting features that give users a direct line to connect with their audience and learn more about them. The platform has lots of hidden ways to take user experience to the next level.

Just in! Hootsuite has updated its dashboard for a better social media management experience.

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While some owlies have already been enjoying the new look and feel, the final implementation across all accounts will happen towards the end of August 2020.

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Last year the SMM dynamo went through a rebranding exercise, and the new Hootsuite interface is a continuation of the future-focused initiative. Fresh colours and improved features position Hootsuite as the easiest SMM tool on the market, suiting both social media novices and experts.

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So, what can you look out for? The left panel has core product functions bundled together The compose button is positioned to be easier to find, no matter where you are in the platform Streams and tabs have been redesigned into boards. This simplifies the experience when toggling between social networks

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Along with the above, Hootsuite has also added some NEW functionalities:

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Now users can publish and schedule Instagram stories as well as Instagram Carousels from the dashboard. Hootsuite works closely with social networks to deliver value-added features to clients regularly. With this release you can: Post multiple images to LinkedIn Add subtitles to Facebook and Twitter videos Leverage additional metrics in the analytics component

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More exciting additions to Hootsuite will be announced over the rest of the year. We're keeping mum for now - but stay tuned for how Hootsuite is quickly becoming the most coveted Social media Management tool in South Africa

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To see a brief demo of the environment click here.

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Alternatively, drop us an email at theteam@youknow.co.za

If you are looking to thrive in the aftermath of COVID-19 is all about keeping on top of consumer trends, and moving with them.

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The best way to do this is to listen to what they are asking and understanding what they want from you. Once you know what that is, you can change your strategy to meet their needs. Consumer insights play a massive role in this.

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We can all agree 2020 has thrown a spanner into the works in everyone’s lives, from personal to work to how brands need to rethink their strategies and where consumers are spending more time these days. COVID 19 has brought radical change and new habits, opinions and perceptions.

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Our partners at GlobalWebIndex have fielded coronavirus research across 20 countries and have recently released their 4th wave of findings. These types of surveys allow us to map crucial changes that consumers will bring in a post-pandemic world.

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The crucial question we are looking at here is: what changes will stick? We have highlighted some trends that are most likely to continue:

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Travel Habits Will Continue To Change.

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When asked what type(s) of vacation people intend to take in the next 12 months, domestic vacations and staycations in the local area top the list, scoring considerably more than short-haul foreign vacations or long-haul ones.

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If we look specifically at South African survey respondents from the last round of survey data (29 June - 2 July 2020). 43% of South Africans say they intend to take a domestic vacation in the next 12 months and 35% tell us they will not be taking a vacation at all. We can assume that comes down to a squeeze on finances during this period.

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Consumers Are Reassessing Their Personal Finances.

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When asked about their personal financial response to the coronavirus outbreak, over 90% are planning to change their behaviour in some way.

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This is reflected in the 83% of consumers expecting the pandemic to impact their personal finances, albeit with the largest amount anticipating only a small impact across multiple markets. (44% say this, compared to 30% envisaging a big impact and 9% bracing for a dramatic impact).

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If we look exclusively at South African consumers, 64% of survey respondents have told us that COVID 19 will have a big or dramatic impact on personal and household finances.

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Globally, around 4 in 10 plan to cut back on their day-to-day spending or are looking to reduce their regular financial commitments (e.g. cancel subscriptions, memberships, etc).

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Online Shopping Will Continue To Boost

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Online shopping is set to grow - and this enthusiasm has increased since April, showing no signs of waning even as more countries move into the recovery phase of the pandemic.

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Free delivery is the single biggest motivator for global consumers when online shopping, with discounts and customer reviews taking second and third place.

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These trends are just a few of a number of developing trends happening globally due to COVID 19.

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For free access to the report please find it here, these reports are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the information available on the intuitive GlobalWebIndex platform.

“Now don’t go wasting my precious time...”

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The Spice Girls were actually way beyond their years. A few of their lyrics hide some really great customer engagement do’s and don’ts that are relevant to customer engagement in 2020.

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Hootsuite considers current customer engagement trends as the ‘Age of the Individual’. Meaning generic broadcast messages have come to an end, and one-on-one connections are on the rise. Companies who prioritise busy content calendars, while having a response rate of 8+ hours to customer comments, could be missing the plot leaving customers throwing their hands in the air.

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On the topic of time, during one of my online shopping binges, I wondered whether South African consumers were upset by a lag in the delivery of items due to restrictions. I used Brandwatch to quickly investigate this further.

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Surprisingly, courier services are not as large of a concern as anticipated. It seems as though the majority of South Africans are more dissatisfied with responsiveness from online retailers. Customers appear to be understanding of delays in delivery, but many just wanted a response- to their calls, emails, and social messages.

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"And, all that I want from you, is the promise you... will be there"

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It’s well known that many call centres weren’t equipped for operating during the lockdown, and this has put pressure on optimized digital transformation. Social media has always been seen as a departmental activity while it actually is the golden thread that weaves a business operation together. Luckily, there's a fix for looping queries from social, emails and calls together to track a customer's complaint cycle. Enter: The Hootsuite and Zendesk integration.

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The below numbers provide a glimpse into how capturing customer engagement data can provide valuable insights into how customers talk to a brand- and ultimately- what they need.

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In this example, we see positive brand-related topics from consumers on a brand’s social pages. However, depending on the brand and industry, the majority of topics aren’t always positive. In some cases, a first response time could be 15 hours, with the customer topics all being support related. This drowns out any of the brand’s marketing activities. What is the best practice then? You should be aiming to respond to customers on an average of 0-4 hours, no later than 8 hours.

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So here's the story from A-Z... Customers are voicing their opinions and needs. Tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch provide businesses real-time monitoring and response capabilities to streamline activities. To learn more about customer engagement and best practices, download the below toolkit.

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Hootsuite’s customer engagement toolkit

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YOUKNOW helps curious companies with marketing technology, and represent the leading global solutions.

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To find out how Hootsuite can help your business, email ashleigh@youknow.co.za

While in the midst of a pandemic , any good news is very much welcomed, however I think we got a bit more than we bargained for when Sony decided to drop the designs of the 5th PlayStation console. The PS5 design which is to be released at the end of this year was revealed at the PlayStation5 Future of Gaming event on Thursday, June, 11, and gaming enthusiasts took to social media to share their thoughts.

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The PS5 design was revealed on Thursday, 11 June at the Future of Gaming event. This release, which is set to be available towards the end of 2020, will be competing with the Xbox Series X which is also scheduled for release at the same time. The game will be competing with Xbox Series X which will also be released towards the end of this year. Fans had a lot to say about the PS5 design which included a white outer shell, black hardware, and blue lighting elements.

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With such a big release comes very big conversations around specs, design, price, compatibility and competitor comparisons. The 4 p’s of marketing. Using Brandwatch’s consumer insights platform we delved a bit deeper into the conversation to understand what this looks like. Within the 1st week of release there were over 1 Million mentions of PS5. Most pressing question amongst gamers was the official release date, The Spiderman: Miles Morale game that is one of 15 games that come standard with the console.

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The PS5 design gained over 1 Million total mentions gamers describing the console as a superior gaming console. With much praise on the envious design, came the difficult discussion of price. At what cost to which body part would this beautifully crafted piece of engineering come? According to social media the speculated retail price estimate would be around $500, R8715,18 to be exact. The CEO of Playstation has however contradicted these rumours by releasing a statement saying that they are focusing on value over price for this edition.

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Either way South African gamers were quick to express their willingness to do almost anything to get their hands on this hot property. A female influencer took the lead by offering to buy any male the new PS5 console if they twerked for her. Stereotypical gender roles were quickly reversed as a male took her up on her challenge to secure himself a PS5.

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There have also been speculations around the price of PS5 being $500, but Sony has not said anything about the pricing as the company CEO has emphasised it must ensure that they focus on getting the value equation right.

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Only two versions of the game were revealed, the first being the edition with an optical drive and the other is a digital edition for game downloads only which might cost a little less than the other version.

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With that being said, we looked at conversations that happened during the week of the release of the PS5 and we were able to get up to a million mentions around the PlayStaion5 conversation with over 740 thousand authors taking part. With Spiderman: Miles Morale as one of 15 games that comes with PS5, most people showed excitement around it than with other games.

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As we look at people’s feelings around the release, we also take at a look at emojis that were used to show expression when PS5 was mentioned. The emojis that stood out were the face with tears of joy emoji, the loudly crying face emoji and the smiling face with heart eyes emoji. Most emojis depicted positive emotions around the conversation.

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With Twitter being at the forefront of our data collection, people on the app had a lot to say about the release of the game and it is evident that #PS5 and #PlayStation5 were the most mentioned hashtags with people also ensuring they tag @playstation5 within their mentions.

All insights were collected through Brandwatch Consumer Research. The data used are from different content sources, but most of it is from Twitter. With all that’s been said, PS5 looks pretty cool and the reaction received was mostly amazing, though it was expected.