Social buzz is a critical, but often volatile factor when driving regular sales within FMCG. A single comment could affect brand reputation and sales unexpectedly.

Beyond regular social figures, the context of the post is what matters to sense the intention a post generate. And beyond sensing the intention, how a post is affecting sales is what really concerns brand. Therefore, to develop an early warning system, we need a complex metric to not only “measure” but also “predict” how social posts may affect sales. This is what Sales Intensity Index is invented for.

Costco, accounts for 15% of adult milk powder sales, is a significant sales channel for KLIM Taiwan, but importantly - one with a restricted policy on advertising & in-store merchandising, making it difficult to promote Costco listings elsewhere.

Therefore, Facebook Costco group, a place for Costco buyers to share the product experience and recommendation, becomes a very fierce battleground for brands. Posts inside the group often raised unexpected attention and sales momentum. KLIM Taiwan found it challenging to keep track of social conversation in Facebook Costco group and, more importantly, manage its influence at an early stage.

These powerful social conversations can soar within days or even within hours, catching brands unprepared. Once the damage, such as negative comments or competitors’ brands gained any advantage, it would take KLIM a high amount of effort to reverse the impact, if even possible at all.

There are no objective metrics to evaluate how the social posts affects actual sales. Beyond trackable figures (likes, comments, and shares), it is critical to understand the level of purchase “intention” provoked from the post, and how all these factors combined would predict its intensity on sales impact.

If we could capture the sales intensity with every evolving posts, then we get a chance to identify potential threat or opportunity before it goes big and provide real-time warnings for brands to get ahead of the game.

We invented the Sales Intensity Index, an AI-powered social sales prediction solution.

We analyzed 3-year historical data of FB Costco groups, including likes, comments and leveraged Natural Language Processing to “read” the content of the posts.

The intent of each comments was identified into 7 groups: neutral, aware, interest, recommend, experience, purchase intent, and negative.

Together with historical Costco sales data, we uncovered the relationship between social reactions and sales, forming the Sales Intensity Index (SII). We use SII’s complex metrics to assess the sales potential of social posts.

We scan FB Costco groups every 10 mins to convert the intention into SII and generate a SII curve of time for each posts.

Once KLIM-related posts (with pre-selected keywords, including competitor brands) get outstanding SII growth, indicating high probability that it would affect sales, an alert email is automatically sent to the clients and social teams.

The evolvement of the SII enable us the track the intention showed by the posts and build active social placement to engage audience better. Together with pre-planned action from social team, SII gives KLIM the opportunity to take necessary action in real time to avoid any possible loss, or even maximize possible gain, before buzz grows too big to control.

SII highly improved the efficiency of social monitoring, filtering 75% of unimportant posts, saving approximately 300 hours a year, almost 2 months full-time working, to deal with irrelevant posts.

SII provided automatic alerts for possible threats/opportunities within 1 hour of posts being published, enabled KLIM social team to early engage and provoke purchase intention, uplifting the influence of KLIM posts with a 69% growth of SII.

We identified the high momentum posts of competitor brand and actively balanced the talk with alternative opinions, which distracted the desire toward that brand. Influence power (SII) of the competitor brand posts dropped from ave 755 per post (2019 Nov) to ave 339 per post during its recent promotion (2020 Nov).

We successfully enhanced the communication toward Costco buyers while Costco had restricted control. And the accuracy of SII continues to provide an impact as we use machine learning to optimize our algorithm constantly.