This blog post has it all: bargains, anger, jealousy, love, swearing and even some sexual language. Unfortunately for those of you who found your way here through the Googling of foul words, this post is tailored to both Boolean lovers and Brandwatch users, and is devoid of any explicit scenes. Sorry.

One way in which Brandwatch is head and shoulders above other social media monitoring tools is that it allows users to carefully customise their queries using Boolean operators, affording almost unlimited control over what can be searched for.

However, with great power comes great responsibility. And great patience.

It can mean typing out long passages of key terms to make sure the right words are being included or excluded. If you’re looking to isolate customer-service related tweets from other data you may have collected, it can require a bit of thought as to how best to separate them.

Our crack team of in-house analysts have put together some commonly-used strings of words that can be copied to find certain criteria, such as the aforementioned customer service. This can be great for categorising and segmenting your data.

As well as positive and negative lists, we’ve included a generic emotive one too, which lets you separate all social media mentions of your brand (or product, competitor et cetera) in which someone has an opinion, from less emotive reporting and neutral statements. It means you can see comments like ‘I love my new Sony Bravia screen’ and ignore things like ‘just moving my Sony Bravia into my bedroom’.

The copypasta is freshly prepared in Brandwatch syntax, so it’s all ready to be served into your existing queries.

To read a quick guide on how to build queries and get to grips with how Booleans work in Brandwatch, you can cast your eyes over this beauty.

In the meantime, here’s your cheat-sheet for helping you build your queries and searches.

[Note: you’ll need to replace :: with your search terms or original query string]

Voucher/Coupons

Price

Ticket Price

Recommendation

Customer Service

Customer service is notoriously difficult to create rules for. It can be better to employ an emotive category instead (see below)

Emotive: Mild

Emotive: Intensifiers

Emotive: Positive

Generic Emotive Language

I hope you agreed that this post made for a jolly good read, and if not, you at least managed to enjoy some delicious copypasta for your social media monitoring queries.

Social bookmarking websites are sites on which Internet users share their web pages, articles, blog posts, images, and videos. There are a number of advantages to submitting your content to one (or more) of these sites. For one thing, they help to increase your brand awareness.

The more people who have access to your great content, the more likely that your content will go viral.

These sites also help to get your blog posts indexed more quickly and increase your website traffic. Any SEO company will be familiar with this strategy and use it as part of its marketing strategy.

Popular social bookmarking websites

1. Twitter

Let’s start with the big one (and one people might not associate with social bookmarking too much). Twitter is an excellent tool for this and you can achieve it in a couple of ways.

First, simply posting links, images, and content with your account means you’ll have technically bookmarked them. You could then go back through your account to find things again.

On top of that you can also use the ‘like’ button for certain tweets. Many people use that too bookmark interesting things they find and go back to them in the future.

2. Pinterest

Pinterest goes for the “show, don’t tell” approach to marketing, and with 70 million users, it has been very successful. Most of its users (80 percent) are women and 42 percent of US adult women online have an account.

Over half of daily users consult the site before making a buying decision in a store, and the average order for visitors referred by the site is $58.95.

3. StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is one of the bigger social bookmarking sites. Whenever you bookmark something you can add extra details to is, such as what type of content it is and its subject.

It comes with a great toolbar to make this process simple. It also allows users to enter their own interests and be shown relevant content submitted by other people.

4. Dribble

Dribble is an excellent (and beautiful) bookmarking site aimed at designers. Not only is this a great place for inspiration, it’s a great place to get traffic to your site if you’re a designer, or have a design team.

A nice idea for gaining some traction would be to encourage your design team to get involved. If they have some downtime, see if they’ll put something unique and interesting together to go Dribble. It’s a perfect way to showcase your team.

5. Pocket

Pocket is a really nicely designed social bookmarking site. It comes with an app to Pocket stuff as you go, saving you returning to the site all the time. You can also search by interest to find interesting things.

This means adding your own content to the site offers an extra avenue for people to find it. With well over 22m users that’s not to be sniffed at.

6. Digg

Digg has changed a lot over the years. Previously it was more like Reddit where the front page was curated through the users of the site. Now this is done by editors, but it retains its bookmarking function.

Digg can be a great place to find new content and organise it through your profile. Be careful, it can get quite addictive though.

7. Reddit

Reddit is the self-styled ‘front page of the internet’. Users submit links to stories, images or videos that they find interesting and other Reddit users can either upvote or downvote these submissions.

By upvoting, commenting, or downvoting, you can generate a list of bookmarked content. It’s also an excellent way to promote your own content. If you want to do that, check out our piece on subreddit analytics.

8. Slashdot

Slashdot runs user-submitted news stories (with appropriate links) on Linux, computer hardware, devices, games, cloud, mobile, storage, security, management, book reviews, and more. See submission guidelines for details.

9. We Heart It

We Heart It is a bit more specific. It mostly sticks to visuals – including images, GIFs and videos – alone and also acts as a social network too. But it now allows you to submit articles in a similar way to Medium. We Heart It positions themselves as a place to find inspiration.

The site has 45m users, so it’s worth looking into using it. You can submit your own stuff and see some nice levels of traffic come in.

10. scoop.it

Scoop.it caters to professionals, business and non-profits, and corporations. The site has well over 1 million registered users so while not the biggest site on this list, it’s still got a substantial audience. Choose from a free or one of the paid plans, depending on how many topics you want to post about.

If you are going to use social bookmarking sites as part of your marketing strategy, don’t ignore the ‘social’ part.

Do be a good online neighbour and “pin” other users’ content, RT other users’ content that is interesting, and participate in discussions.

The more generous you are, the more you will find that other users will return the favour with your interesting content.

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Memes are an ever-present part of the online experience, especially on social channels. This internet phenomenon has grown in popularity, along with the visual nature of the web and social media. They are a very interesting and now large part of our online culture.

For the most part, memes are meant to be funny of sarcastic but because they do grab our attention, businesses can use them to their advantage as long as it is done in a smart or clever way.

What is an Internet Meme?

In case you aren’t familiar, we thought we should just get the description out of the way.

Meme is pronounced with a long E and the last E is silent. The original, pre-internet definition of a meme is, “an element of a culture on system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by non-genetic means, especially imitation”.

The newer definition is, “a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc. that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.

Many of the popular image memes you see (and most of the ones we used in this article) are actually called Macros. Our Kermit the Frog meme / Macro at the top of the article is a variation on this popular one where the user will add text on the top:

How to Make an Effective Meme for Your Business

The key to an effective meme for your business is finding the right image to use. It can be a picture you take, an image of a product or service you offer, or a spin on a popular meme.

You can find popular memes by searching the web; several sites will show you meme base images that have been popular for a long time, as well as current trending ones.

We will talk more about creating memes and using meme generator tools in a bit.

The image you choose and overall meme must tie into your branding or your company in some way. Memes are also supposed to be clever, witty, or funny, so that element should be added in order to help get your meme viral.

The short answer to the questioning baby is “no,” but a meme or macro that is already viral can help your cause. As a general rule, to help your meme be popular it should be:

• Easy to create
• Easy to consume
• Relatable to your audience
• Shareable
• Familiar
• Funny, witty, clever, or smart

What is the theme for your meme? Do you want to evoke a sense of pride or humor?

Think about your goals and the feeling you want your audience to have when they associate the meme with your company. Once you have the theme, you can then pick the image and lastly develop the text.

Here are some popular themes or text ideas:

• Animals saying human things.
• Babies saying or doing adult things.
• Sayings from popular television shows or movies.
• Popular images of characters from television shows or movies.
• Popular or classic quotes.
• Puns or joke punch lines.
• That moment when. . .
• Grumpy Cat.
• Most Interesting Man in the World.

Use caution with popular memes that might be associated with risqué or off color jokes. Be sure that you understand the meme to prevent it from being hijacked, or copied over in a negative way.

The other point of caution would be with grammatically incorrect memes.

There is one popular type of meme [a person or group of people] be like [something]. Since “be like” is not grammatically correct, but known in pop culture, it is up to you to decide if you want to use something like that.

Think about how your audience would react and whether or not they might understand it. As with any other type of marketing campaign, this can be tested for its efficiency and the best reaction.

Once you have found the right picture for your meme and have created the funny or clever saying on it, then it is time to share it on social media.

You should use all your social channels to distribute the meme, and push it out often enough to ensure that it is seen by a majority of your audience.

Use your social channels as a test audience and the ones that get the most attention should be tapped for some advertising campaigns.

Here are a few examples of great advertising ideas:

Meme Making Tools

There are several sites that allow you to make memes for free, however they add their own watermark at the bottom.

If you have a designer, a design team, or if you are handy with Photoshop, then you can make your own and add your own watermark; this would be ideal for your own branding.

Sites like www.MemeGenerator.net help you write and download memes, and also show you the most popular images and trending images too. Another similar site that helps you generate memes for free is www.Memesly.com.

Those sites allow you to add the top text and bottom text and then download the image, royalty free. The popular images that are all over the internet are not copy written, so do not worry about grabbing an image an adding your own text and watermark. Especially when you are modifying an image, it makes it your own.

Using memes as part of your marketing efforts definitely can grab the attention of users, help increase your reach and help your branding efforts.

It can also be a fun and exciting project for the marketing team. Memes must be planned out with your social media team in order to get the most out of it and increase chances of it going viral.

Even if your meme doesn’t go viral, using a well-recognized macro that already is viral will definitely increase the chances of it grabbing the attention of your target audience, followers, and customers.

It’s been months in the making, and as of this month, all of the Brighton Brandwatch HQ were finally re-homed and under one roof again.

For the past few months we’ve been spread across two different office locations, and although only a short walk away from one another – so not too much of a hardship – it’s great to be all in one place.

Of course, the new office wasn’t going to be a sterile, boring affair.

With over 20,000 square feet to play with, we’ve now got a pretty cool new work environment. Lots of little cubby holes to sit and work in undisturbed, an airy, open exposed ceiling, bright colours and a whole host of beanbags for a change of seating position.

We’ve posted before about the people behind the product, but we haven’t given you the grand tour of where we do all of that great work yet.

So, fancy having a nose around? Sure.

Here’s the reception area, where Dani greets any visitors. I mainly chose to show this as I like the flowers.

This is one of two cool little wooden huts. We in Marketing refer to them as ‘The Sheds.’ They’re full of the big beanbags, so a popular choice for a one-to-one meeting or some afternoon cake.

The meeting rooms are all bright and airy, with different coloured seating, and big wall-mounted screens to make meetings over Google Hangout with our colleagues in the US and Germany much easier.

The reception area, with the Brandwatch Vizia display so everyone’s able to see who’s been talking about us online at a glance! All good things, I’m sure.

The kitchen is MASSIVE, and with a fußball table, table tennis, a giant Connect 4 and cupboards full of snacks, it’s always a high-traffic area.

It took a mere 4 hours to get a ‘Table Tennis Ladder’ up & running…who will top the rankings? #insidebrandwatch pic.twitter.com/K5GyXXsLzT

— Holly Youdan (@HollyBrandwatch) January 27, 2015

Somehow I managed to get a shot of the kitchen empty. This never happens.

I made some of the Marketing team show you how happy and excited they are with their new digs. Here they are, doing just that.

One of the little cubby holes. You’ll usually find the People Team in this one. They know a good thing when they see it.

Cosy cubbyhole for productive humpday. #insidebrandwatch #theviewfromhere pic.twitter.com/x1sSqUabTx — Holly Youdan (@HollyBrandwatch) February 4, 2015

There are a couple of these cool little phone booth areas, designed to give confidentiality when it’s needed.

With over 150 staff over two floors, even though we obviously love each other’s company dearly, sometimes a little extra privacy is required.

A new office wouldn’t be complete without a party to open it!

.@Brandwatch new HQ launch party #insidebrandwatch pic.twitter.com/y2IDcLlS6z

— Ross Barrett (@IAmRBee) January 29, 2015

We all gathered on the new first floor and had pizza, beer and champagne to celebrate.

Rumour has it that PA and Office Manager, Frankie, had to dash out for extra alcohol supplies well into the night. This can neither be denied nor confirmed at this time.

Oh, and it wouldn’t be a Brandwatch party without a MASSIVE CAKE!

And finally, to play you out, here’s a shot of our monthly sushi lunch. Just because.

Fancy joining in the fun? We’re hiring! There are currently over 30 jobs available on our careers page.

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The old saying “Men are from Mars, women are from Venus” holds water when it comes to how men and women use social media.

Females use social media less than men for business reasons, whereas women use social media to share more personal information than me, revealing more about their personal lives. Women are more vocal, expressive and willing to share. In other words, women are biologically wired for social networking. At least, that’s according to data compiled by FinancesOnline.com

Sounds cliché, doesn’t it?

Generally, females use social networking sites to make connections and stay in touch with family or friends.

Men, by contrast, use social media to gather the information they need to build influence. Social media helps them perform research, gather relevant contacts and ultimately increase their status.

While this explains how they use it differently, but do you know who is more active on social media: men or women?

This may seem like an important question, but if the majority of your consumers are predominantly men or women, it will impact which social channels you would need to focus on.

Men and women have varying degrees of online activity across different sites. 74% of internet users are using social media, with women (76%) having a slight edge over men (72%).

Behind every social media platform stand millions of women – and they certainly seem to love their mobile phones. A Nielsen study shows that women spend nearly 10 minutes social networking through the mobile web, or through apps every day, whereas men spend a little less than 7 minutes.

The diversity may not surprise you, but drilling down to a platform-by-platform level might.

Among internet users, a greater percentage of women use Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter.

For example, 22% of women are active on Twitter, compared to just 15% of men. Facebook, which is used by 71% of the online population, is dominated by women (76 percent) as opposed to men (66 percent). On average, women have more than twice as many posts on their Facebook walls and they have 8% more ‘friends’ than men.

One social network that boasts more men (24%) than women (19%) is the professional-networking site LinkedIn.

Same goes for Google+, but less so. Men are more likely to use it than women, despite only 10% of the internet population spending time on the network, as shown in Quicks Sprout’s infographic below.

Pinterest, not surprisingly, has a more female-centric user base with 33% of female internet population using it, compared to 8% of all men. But the tables turn with Reddit, YouTube and music-based social networking sites in which men are found to be the savviest networkers.

Here’s where it gets really juicy.

Pew, Nielsen, and Burst Media data depict some other impressive stats about male vs. female use of social media. In checking out their sources and data points, we discovered that women are more likely to interact with brands via social media than men.

More than half of women use social media to show support and access deals or promotions from brands, compared to just 36% of the men online.

Not only do women use social media to stay up to date with brands, they also comment on their favorite brands more than men do.

The fact that women are more active on social media than men has held true for at least the last five years. However, it is important to note that women interact in different way and are leading the shift from desktop to mobile where social media is concerned, which is a huge concern for social networking sites launching in the next few years.

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In the beginning of social media for business, social media efforts and campaigns were all marketing focused. However, social media for businesses really has morphed into a hybrid between marketing and customer service communications with customers. In fact, they’re a perfect pairing – they go together like toast and jam. 

If your company has ignored this important aspect of social media, then chances are it could be hurting your customer service efforts and hampering the way that you communicate with your customers.

Missing out on important customer communication cues can damage their customer experience and hurt your business.

This article will offer up some tips on how your business can successfully integrate customer service into your social media efforts and improve upon your customers’ experiences.

1/ Plan to respond to social media comments and messages quickly

Most customers that post on your social channels expect an answer within the hour – even if it isn’t during business hours.

There are plenty of tools that you can use to monitor your social media channels for comments and messages.

Depending on how large your company is and the scalability, having the social media team on call 24/7 could be worth it depending on how often comments come through.

2/ Go above and beyond just responding to negative comments

Since social media is about communication, there is an opportunity to go above and beyond just responding. Instead of focusing on putting out fires, social media channels give you the option to communicate with customers and get to know them.

When you go beyond expectations and don’t just fix a problem, you can strengthen the relationship and increase the value of your customer service.

When you make a previously unhappy customer happy, they can become brand advocates for your brand and will remain loyal and steadfast customers.

3/ Empower employees to fix problems

Your social media team needs to be trained in customer service so that complaints can be handled swiftly and expertly. Give your staff not only training, but also power to do something to make it right for the customer.

When customers have to wait for approval or speak to multiple staff members, repeating their gripe, they are likely to become more disgruntled.

Then there are companies like Trader Joe’s that empower their employees to go above and beyond the normal call of duty.

In this case that went viral on Reddit, an employee went above and beyond by delivering groceries to a WWII veteran during a snow storm. The company normally does not deliver, but not only that, the store covered the costs of the groceries.

When you look at the Reddit posting, you can see other stories form other customers who experienced other examples of Trader Joe’s employees’ good will that, no doubt, comes from the top.

This activity creates much more good will, customer loyalty, and business than it costs the company.

4/ Solve problems before they happen

Many companies have customer service teams monitoring social media and daily operations just looking out for customers to try and find resolutions to potential problems before they happen.

Companies like United Airlines have teams that work on protecting the interests of frequent flyers. They help stranded frequent flyers get on earlier flights and make other accommodations when travel plans go awry.

This trend of then blending of social media and customer service will continue to be an important factor in many businesses.

Interested in this topic? You can also read up on 6 Ways to Boost Your Customer Service on Social Media and Customer Service and Marketing – A Perfect Pairing.

The 2014 Commonwealth Games kicked off last night with 4,950 athletes, 2,000 performers, 71 Scottie dogs and 1 awkward baton.

As always, Twitter users were not shy in voicing their opinions with over a quarter of a million tweets posted during the ceremony.

So what can we learn from the abundance of data posted online last night?

1. Unicef Shone on the Global Stage

The link-up between Glasgow 2014 and Unicef was the first of its kind for the Games and has – so far – been an undeniable success.

£2.5million was raised in just one hour for the children’s charity, yet the recognition the brand gained may have been even more valuable.

Unicef’s appeal was mentioned just over 20,000 times on the web – undeniably impressive.

Standing out during an event of this magnitude can be tough due to the huge amount of online chat, yet Unicef stayed top of most online trends.

To put this in context; the four other main sponsors for the Games received a total of just 2% of the mentions relating to sponsors, the other 97% was attributed towards Unicef.

BP, Ford and Scottish and Southern Electric must do more to make the most out of their sponsorship.

@Unicef_UK tweeted live throughout the event sparking online conversation about their brand.

Whereas, @BP_plc, @FordUK and @SSE did not live tweet and therefore lost out on a unique chance to raise brand awareness.

Virgin Media did tweet during the event but only via their second, less popular account @VMLoves.

So, we award Unicef with a gold medal for their committed social media presence last night!  Other sponsors still have time to raise awareness for their brand, but to do so they must commit themselves to the Commonwealth story.

2. Usain Bolt is as Popular as Ever

As most of you can imagine, Bolt’s arrival at the games dominated the athlete chatter on social media.

61% of the conversation was about the fastest man in the world, while 22% spoke about Bradley Wiggins.

Only a measly 10% mentioned Mo Farah – so a bad few days for the now injured long distance runner.

Bolt will hopefully light up our screens again this summer with some more of his record breaking displays.

With the track sport rife with doping bans, a clean and popular winner will help direct the sport back on track.

3. People Really Do Feel ‘Better in the Morning’

Interestingly for any sleep advocates out there, people became more positive about the opening ceremony once they’d had a good night’s kip.

Twitter users were also less likely to criticize the ceremony after resting.

Maybe the old age adage that ‘you’ll feel better in the morning’ has some tangible meaning behind it after all.

4. Rod is ‘Sailing’ ahead of Susan

Famed for having one of the most viewed YouTube videos of all time, Susan Boyle seems to have lost the spark that once made her so interesting to watch.

Rod Stewart had almost double the amount of mentions Susan Boyle received during the Commonwealth curtain raiser.

Despite both being on stage for a similar amount of time, Boyle’s appearance did not leave a lasting effect on journalists.

News articles this morning mentioned her performance only 60 times, whereas Rod Stewart’s performance was acclaimed over 140 times.

We will continue to blog about the Games throughout the duration of the tournament, finding out what people are saying and why they’re saying it.

All data used for this blog was gathered and analyzed by Brandwatch. Want to see what insights you can pull about your brand? Get a demo today.