The Value of Social Listening
Harshita Kale 25-03-2020
Digi
Kraft
Harshita Kale 07-04-2020
Harshita Kale 07-04-2020
The volume of social media conversations is massive. The number of messages, comments, shares done on social media is only forecasted to increase. From sharing the old wine songs on Facebook to a unique way of building a garden on YouTube. Each platform can be interlinked and thus increases the engagement rate to an unimaginable rate.
Social listening gives you an opportunity to collect all the brand and industry-related data to make meaningful insights. This blog will give you an overview of the value of social media along with some tools.
Can you recollect when Orkut had first launched, and every one of us was searching for our friends? We were looking up for them to know what are they up to. Things were different in those days. Similarly, you must have had a MySpace account too. We used these to get in touch with the ones we cared for.
Whereas, now, social media hasn’t remained the same that we once used for. It has outgrown itself where people manage their brands and is used as a powerful sales tool.
There are your customers present on nearly all platforms and saying good and bad things about you. It can become difficult to manage each platform minutely. Therefore, developers have come up with various tools that might help you in this.
If in case you don’t use social media listening, you might be leaving a crucial insight to add value to your brand.
Where social media monitoring calculates the metrics of engagements, social media listening works beyond the numbers. It’s not only about counting the number of your brand’s mentions. The key part of listening is social media sentiments.
Social media sentiments are the “online mood” of your audience. Understanding how people feel about your brand helps you in the marketing process and respond to them appropriately.
The crucial aim of social listening is to look forward and backward. It can be used in gathering data and analyzing the daily activities that guide your marketing strategy.
Social listening can impact your brand in the following ways.
Social listening helps you in boosting the engagement rate with your audience.
For instance, a customer might have tweeted or mentioned in their Instagram story with a review. You can easily get to know and respond to them accordingly.
JetBlue does it fantastically! They know what their clients’ mean to them and make them feel special in the most unique way.
Mason's travel outfit >
everything. ?????? https://t.co/GYHwMThoi4
Similarly, Slack
nails it too.
@SlackHQ
can you add emojis to your slack display name or was this
discontinued?
These brands take the user experience to another level just by keeping their customers engaged. You can do it too.
Good and bad customer experiences are a part of the game. But, it can leave a lasting effect on your customers. You have to be aware of bad experiences or grievances as it may affect the brand value over a period of time. However, this can be taken care of with the help of social media listening.
You can manage the PR disasters before it gets viral or out of your hands. If you come across any such an incident, you need to get in touch with the customer urgently. Also, you need to ensure your customers that such incident won’t be repeated in the future.
If the sentiment is very low, research the cause of it and tweet an apologizing message to the customer and the entire community.
For instance, this is how Dominos managed a grievance.
Yoooo I ordered a Pizza & Came with no Toppings
on it or anything, Its Just Bread???? @dominos
Social listening is not just limited to our brand but your competitors too. You can easily follow your competitors and look for what their customers are saying about them. This, in turn, can give you some crucial insights of their performance.
You can also learn how your competitors respond and manage customer sentiments. If you’re looking for a product launch, you can look if your competitors are also planning the same. Track their campaigns, look for their reviews, look-up their news, and plan your brand strategy accordingly.
You can simply knock down the opportunity of knowing your competitors and enter into a healthy competition.
Influencers are the new trend in every industry. Social media listening can help you in knowing more about your industry and the people who are important for it. You can know how and which people are using your brand and can approach them for influencer marketing.
These influencers play an important role as they hold credit for their personal brand. They have a mass following, which can be used as a medium to market your products. You can also come across some of them who are already your customers and love your brand. You can look out for them and use this opportunity to collaborate in some way.
There may arise a question about implementing social media listening in your business. We have come across some steps that will help you do the same.
Before you jump into social media listening, you might have to answer a question. What are you listening for? There might be different scenarios going around in your company, and you may want to focus on a couple of them for the time being. Hence, it is important for you to choose the right keywords for your research.
For instance, you own a karaoke restaurant in Chicago, USA. In this case, you might search for keywords for music, karaoke, or hip-hop. You will not listen to the same keywords as an apparel store in San Francisco, California.
The keywords may evolve over a period of time and may require timely research. You may also use the keywords in your content marketing strategy or other SEO practices. You can simply know what your audience is saying about your brand for a particular keyword.
Here are some important topics to monitor right when you plan social listening.
1. Your competitors brand name, products, tagline;
2. Your brand name and tagline;
3. Campaigns;
4. Industry axioms;
5. Grievance or support handles using keywords;
6. Competitors' grievances and support.
The above areas will help you to put your social strategy in place. We will show you some examples of the brand that are successfully doing their social media listening.
We're thrilled to hear you loved
it!
We have just the shoe! ???? https://t.co/wKKT68FeST
Picture Courtesy: Sprout Social
There might be a lot of confusion on how can you strategize your social media listening, isn’t it? We have curated some simple steps that will help you do the needful.
The first step towards a successful social media strategy is to determine your goal. It can be anything from your priority. There can be multiple goals depending on your business type and market competition. Most of the businesses keep it as good as three main goals for a particular time period. Some instances of goals are:
Determining your goal will set a mark on your efforts going forward. Hence, it is crucial to follow SMART goal setting criteria as a helping hand.
Next, you will need to find relevant data identical to your goal. This data may include:
Finding the right data will ease the next steps. To start with data collection, you can initiate with Twitter hashtags. Explore what your competitors are saying about their products or the industry. List some company giants and the terms that they’re using for the brand or industry.
Now that you have curated all the relevant data, it’s time to take action. Taking action here means replying to the overall data that you’ve collected.
For instance, you're apologizing to a grievance with the help of a powerful message. You can even appraise an artist’s post in which s/he has used your software or service.
This is the crucial step as the message you share will be judged by a million others. Hence, using correct words and messages is an important part of the entire process.
To maximize your outreach, it is best to use social media tools. These tools provide you an opportunity to reach the maximum audience in a short period of time.
1. Hootsuite
3. Keyhole
4. Adview
6. Synthesio
7. Talkwalker
9. Audiense
10. Mentionlytics
11. Brandwatch Consumer Research
Social media is an invaluable tool that helps the brands reach their goals. However, social media listening isn't the end but a learning process.