Inside an Insurance Company’s Social Media Game

Liberty Mutual, one of the nation’s largest insurance companies, maintains a similarly strong social media network, with over 2.5 million likes on the company Facebook page. However, just a simple scroll down the comments on the page’s posts shows that not everything is totally all right with the insurance provider. Comments, especially on an Insurance page, are usually generated by strong reactions and emotions. We used Signals, our cloud-based data analytics platform, to sift through 6000 comments from last June to today and determine — what are these emotions that are driving people to comment on Liberty Mutual’s Facebook page? Not only are they good or bad, but what topics are they pleased about? What topics are they frustrated about?

A Successful Social Media Campaign

In January 2016, Liberty Mutual launched a campaign that offered $10,000 to two members of the community who had the highest number of likes on their respective posts on the Liberty Mutual Facebook page. This was a boom-or-bust campaign with the potential to generate a ton of traffic or nothing at all, and Liberty Mutual should be pleased to hear that it was definitely on the boom side of things.

This is Signals’ Buzzword feature, which generates a word cloud of the most important terms in the conglomerate of the comments. By a large margin, “John Thomas” and “Chief John” were the two most frequently-occurring terms in a crawl of this Facebook page over the past year. Who is “Chief John?” He is a firefighter who happened to also be the most liked post on Liberty Mutual’s Facebook page. The heavy blue hue of the words shows that the comments surrounding John Thomas were largely positive and should boost the reputation of the Insurance Company sponsoring him. All in all, Liberty Mutual’s social media campaign created both a quantity (dominating the Buzzword word cloud) and quality of comments, which makes it a large success.

Social Media Caretakers Doing Their Job?

Many large companies have devoted social media specialists that, among other things, hear out consumer complaints and respond to them. Liberty Mutual has a social media “caretaking” presence, shown by this screenshot of the company Facebook page responding to consumer complaints:

The question is, are the social media caretakers responding in a positive, standardized, fashion? We filtered out all comments to only those written by the company itself and then used Buzzword:

The largest Buzzword is “Private Message” — a good sign because the company doesn’t want nasty slugfests being thrown around on Facebook, where everything is public. However, they also want to let these disenchanted customers that they are there for them — and the rest of anyone else watching. That, combined with the heavily positive tilt of this word cloud, shows that Liberty Mutual’s social media specialists are committed to positive, responsive customer maintenance. That’s a good thing.

Playing Politics?

If we look back at the first Buzzword, we see a heavily gray (borderline negative) buzzword prominently displayed: Planned Parenthood. Obviously, we wonder what a car insurance company has to do with Planned Parenthood, so we click on the term and filter out results by comments containing the abortion provider.

The company’s financial support of Planned Parenthood is turning away many customers, according to the individual feedback given. While it may be a boon to some politically-minded customers, is it really worth the potential controversy Liberty Mutual might stir among many others? That is a question the company needs to ask itself and resolve.

Using Signals, we were able to discover several unique insights that pertain directly to Liberty Mutual’s business success. We were able to evaluate the quality of their social media initiatives and business partnerships from publicly available Facebook comment data. Signals generates actionable insights from raw unstructured data of any form. Imagine what we can do with your next dataset!