Singapore is the perfect destination for shopaholics. With the vast majority of stores located in malls, the shopping experience is very convenient, with various different brands available under one roof. Mall shopping is so popular in Singapore it attracts tourists from all over Asia. However, for locals, malls are about much more than just shopping: you can often find restaurants, cinemas, or even doctor’s offices in them. So which mall is the favourite amongst visitors? Using our social media monitoring platform, we collected online conversations about 8 of the most renowned shopping malls in the Lion City. We analysed 3 key metrics: share of voice, reach and Social Reputation Score to find out which mall consumers on social media rated most highly.

1. Share of Voice

As we can see in the chart above, the complex Bugis+/Bugis Junction is the most talked about online. It gathered 4426 mentions in just one month. The other malls that we monitored accounted for far fewer mentions.

The reason behind this vast difference is an event that Bugis Junction hosted. On June 9th, Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un impersonators posed for pictures with passersby at the mall. It was staged at just the right time – when the two heads of state were in Singapore for a summit on June 12th. The event soon became viral on social media, with people posting pictures of themselves with the lookalikes and commenting about the stunt online. Even mainstream newspapers, including the Straits Times, shared the information with the public on their own channels. By organising this sort of event Bugis increased online conversations and boosted their brand awareness.

The second most talked about mall was VivoCity. Our social media monitoring tool revealed that the high number of mentions for VivoCity was partially due to the launch of an advertising campaign by Nespresso for the opening of a new boutique in the mall. A large part of the share of voice for VivoCity could also be put down to a contest that they organised. The winners of the giveaway obtained free tickets to the movie Jurassic World, showing at the cinema within the mall. Giveaways and brand announcements tend to attract a lot of attention on social media, and are a good way to initiate online conversations about a subject.

2. Reach

When we focus on the reach of each mall, the picture changes. The reach is the potential number of people who have seen a message, based on the popularity of the source. In this case, it represents the potential audience of posts published on these malls’ owned media. As we can see, 313@Somerset dominates, with 30.41% of the total potential reach. This represents 116M potential viewers. This number is a huge advantage for the mall: if they publish a message proposing a giveaway, a promotion or to advertise the opening of a new shop, it could attract a lot of consumers.

We analysed the reach timeline to understand where the popularity of 313@Somerset came from. It was partly a result of a contest organised on the official Facebook page of the mall. To participate, users had to like and share a picture posted by 313@Somerset. As the message was spread over numerous accounts, the reach of the mall increased greatly.

3. Social Reputation Score

When we move onto Social Reputation Score, Paragon leads. Social Reputation Score (SRS) is a measure of the overall sentiment around a brand, based on all comments made online about them. The score can range from 0 to 100. With a score of 62.65, Paragon are ahead of 313@somerset and Ion Orchard, indicating that they gather proportionally more positive mentions than their competitors. When analysing their positive mentions, we unveiled that a lot of people posted pictures of themselves shopping at Paragon alongside positive comments. Some of them were linked to an event organised by the champagne brand Moet & Chandon in the mall. Others were simply customers sharing their pleasant shopping experience on social media. On the other side of the scale, Bugis comes in last, with a SRS of 53.69.

Social Media Monitoring: Key Takeaways

As we can see, the leaders for each of the 3 key metrics are different. While Bugis is the most talked about mall online, 313@Somerset has the highest reach and Paragon has a high percentage of positive mentions. If we were to award an overall ranking, taking into account the share of voice, reach and social reputation score, 313@somerset, being the most consistent, would come out on top. Interestingly, Ion Orchard would be second in the ranking: despite not achieving the highest score in any of the measurements, their scores were always good and stable. Bugis and VivoCity would then follow. The reason behind this is that although they both came high up in one metric they didn’t do as well in others. These results show that to identify how well your company or brand is doing using social media monitoring, you need to consider more than one metric in order to gain the true picture.

Malls – or any company or brand –  should aim to increase their online presence and enhance their reputation. Marketers can take action to increase positive sentiment around their brand on social media – promoting campaigns, giveaways, announcements, contests. Also, people trust references from friends and relatives more than anything else when making decisions. If someone sees a positive comment about a mall on a friend’s social media feed, they may decide to discover the place for themselves. Maintaining a good reputation on social media is therefore essential to attract new customers and retain current ones.

Conclusion

To analyze how well your brand or a particular topic is doing online, you need to take a range of metrics into consideration. Social media monitoring platforms allow you to have all the metrics you need in one place, empowering you with crucial data to help enhance your presence online and benchmark your performance against your competitors’.

Find out more about our social listening tool and request a personal demo with one of our experts.