Social Listening
What is Social Listening?
Social listening refers to the process of proactively monitoring social media channels to identify brand mentions, competitor brand mentions, and any other content related to designated keyword. Social listening enables companies to review every mention of their brand in real time, providing valuable insights into customer sentiment and brand position.
These insights positively influence sales, marketing, product, and customer service strategies leading to more informed decision making.
Benefits of Social Listening
Social listening has a wide range of applications with a myriad of associated benefits.
Here’s some of the advantages to social listening:
Deepened Audience Understanding
Social listening facilitates a much deeper understanding of target audiences. Many customers take to social media channels to express their opinions on different products and services. For example, customers may engage in a discourse in LinkedIn about additional solutions a product or service could provide. These organic online discussions are often a more accurate measure of customers opinions. Regularly monitoring brand discussions and mentions online provides a more comprehensive understanding of customer needs, sentiments, and overall satisfaction.
Advanced Product/Service Insight
Social listening enables companies to monitor conversations about their industry. This can unveil salient frustrations with products/services, customer service, and value propositions. Leveraging these insights to enhance customer service, marketing, and product/service development is an effective method of extending competitive differentiation.
Crisis Management
Social listening is a critical process in crisis management. Monitoring customer sentiment as it changes in real-time facilitates earlier and more accurate detection of potential crises. This enables companies to identify the issues negatively impacting sentiment and address them proactively before they develop into a crisis.
Customer Acquisition and Relationship Management
Monitoring industry discussions online presents the opportunity to provide value to them. Social listening can be used to identify industry trends and initiate conversations about them online or engage with existing ones. This allows companies to develop relationships with prospective customers online, ultimately leading to new customer acquisition. Similarly, companies can nurture relationships with existing customers online through social listening, leading to increased loyalty and customer advocacy.
Collaboration Opportunities
Using social listening to monitor industry conversations helps companies to identify industry influencers and thought leaders. These individuals are often open to collaboration upon connecting and developing a positive relationship with a company. Similarly, social listening can aid in identifying existing brand advocates who can then be engaged with to create meaningful collaborations.
Enhanced Campaign Targeting
A key element to any social media campaign is accurate personalization. Effective campaigns need to illicit resonation or they present as generic to audiences. Utilising social listening to first determine what subjects they’re passionate about and what resonates them is an effective method of enhancing targeting accuracy. For example, if a retail outlet identifies customers in a target area complaining about the recent weather, they could offer a short-term sale of climate appropriate clothing.
Establishing a Social Listening Strategy: Best Practice
Social listening is most effective when used within an established strategy which has clearly defined performance indicators and outlined goals. Below are some steps which can be taken to optimise a social listening strategy:
- Set clear goals: As mentioned, social listening has an abundance of potential applications depending on a company’s goals. Before introducing any social listening activity, it’s important to first outline these goals clearly. Some examples of common social listening goals are:
1. Increased brand awareness
2. Measurement of brand sentiment
3. Competitor benchmarking and differentiation
4. Product/service feature awareness
5. Identification of market positioning
6. Monitoring of industry trends and discussions
- Establish which keywords and competitors to monitor: Once clear goals have been outlined, relevant keywords and competitors to target can be identified. These may encompass:
1. Brand and industry keywords
2. Competitors
3. Keywords associated with a product or service.
- Select a social listening tool: There are a number of expert third party options for social listening management. However, if social listening is being conducted internally, it’s crucial to choose an effective social listening tool. Look for a tool which provides intuitive data analytics, advanced filtering features, and personalized insights.
- Create a social listening workflow and storage system: Create a response system for social listening findings. Determine which responses can be done promptly and which ones should be further contemplated. For example, liking or sharing a positive post or escalating a serious complaint for further consideration. Create a shared sheet to consolidate relevant social listening data as a reference point.
- Leverage insights to refine digital strategies: Social listening insights can be utilized to build more informed overall digital strategies. For example, insights on favourite product or service features can be emphasized in subsequent marketing campaigns and product complaints can be used to guide product development strategies.
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