Social Listening In Action

Social listening is the process of monitoring online conversations to understand what customers are saying about a brand and its product or service online. It is primarily used for community management, such as identifying customer pain points and providing a direct response to questions, complaints, and comments. It is also used to surface feedback that could help to differentiate a brand, product, or service from competitors.

Monitoring is a valuable source of knowledge and there are plenty of areas where you can employ it.

There are countless ways for consumers to share feedback and experiences both directly and anonymously. This feedback can be used by a business to monitor brand reputation, prevent social media outrage, increase brand awareness, create more appealing offerings (products, service, content, advertisement), get insights, engage with the community, watch competitors…

SOUNDS FREEKING GOOD, RIGHT?

IN THIS ARTICLE YOU ARE GOING TO READ ABOUT 6 MAJOR TIPS YOUR BRAND IS GOING TO GET FROM SOCIAL LISTENING

“One of the best forms of research online is listening to conversations about your company, products or services or your competitors. You begin to understand what are the real issues and what are the real opportunities. It gives you the opportunity to react to these conversations. This could involve a change to how you communicate, a change to your products and services or it could end up with sales by interacting with prospects. Listen and Learn every day and your company will grow.”Ian ClearyRazor Social

SOCIAL LISTENING IN ACTION

Social listening tools are designed to collect public mentions related to a specific topic, brand, person, product, etc. in real time. All data collected from monitoring goes to one dashboard, which lets a user analyze mentions and gather insights about the monitored item. The social listening tools contribute to the precise analysis of brand performance, service quality, customer experience, and also, help users to predict the clients’ intention to become returning customers or seeking another product or service providers.

1. MONITORS BRAND REPUTATION

Brand reputation is a crucial part of every company. Reputation is a valuable asset that is hard to build but can be destroyed in no time, especially on social media. This is why it is important for your brand to be always up to date with everything that people write about you on the Internet. (‘How to measure brand reputation using the web and social media monitoring’ by Brand24)

Social media creates plenty of opportunities for business but there are also many threats and risks – you better be familiar with both. You will not want to miss even a seemingly harmless mention that might escalate to the extent of an outrage nearly impossible to control and extinguish.

“Monitoring the web is essential for any business. Not only can you identify potential PR issues as they happen, but you can also identify opportunities to turn your customers into ambassadors for your brand..”

Adam Conell , Blogging Wizard

2. INCREASES BRAND AWARENESS

Customer testimonials are a great way to build brand awareness. What are the perks of customers’ testimonials?

• They help establish your credibility as a brand;
• They drive sales. There’s nothing more inspiring and engaging than reading success stories from satisfied clients;
• They are highly effective and free ads;
• They build brand awareness.

(‘8 Marketing Tactics To Build Brand Awareness’ by Brand24)

So, where do you start with increasing your brand awareness? You start with implementing customer testimonials.

A social media listening tool, for example, ‘Brand24’ will help you with that! Start creating a project in the project creation wizard, enter the keywords you’d like to monitor. Your predefined keywords can be:

• The name of your company;
• Your competitors’ company name;
• The name of your product;
• Your branded hashtag.

The tool will then start to gather all publicly available mentions from the Internet and that’s how the magic happens. Of course, you will want to display only positive mentions on your social channels or website, right…

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3. PREVENTS SOCIAL MEDIA OUTRAGES

Nowadays, easy access to information and social platforms creates limitless opportunities for brand development and marketing strategies. Along with that, it increases the risk of negativism as a consequence of corporate omissions or mistakes up to the extent of social media outrage. Information, especially negative one, spreads across the Internet so quickly that sometimes is nearly impossible to extinguish. Social media crisis management is a crucial skill for a company that is present in the online space. (‘How to prevent a social media crisis in your company’ by Brand24)

Why the negative opinion and information, generally speaking, spread faster than the positive ones?… Because people pay more attention to negativism and are more likely to pass it over, it’s natural – comes from the fear of threat and aim to safety. Also, the Internet guarantees its users privacy and anonymity that leads to confidence in expressing their opinion.

You should be up-to-date with information that people share about you. And it is not only about mentions or tweets where someone tagged you. Here is where social media monitoring tools come handy – thanks to monitoring solutions, chances that you miss a crucial to your business interaction decreases to a minimum.

4. WATCHES COMPETITORS

Most business owners strive to become an industry leader in customer service and sales within their business niche. A stepping stone of that leadership journey, though, is performing regular competitors analysis. Doing so, you will be able to position your products better, meet your customers’ needs, harness your competitors’ weaknesses and strengths to work for you… Generally speaking, competitor analysis is a time- and labor-taking task in terms of the amount of information you will have to process but the number of benefits are countless. (Read the step-by-step guide ‘How to perform competitors analysis’ by Brand24)

When it comes down to “profitable business”, everyone knows what actions they got to take to make their business flourish. Some of them include:

• identifying market opportunities to increase the market share;
• explore the market and provide attractive service and products to competitors’ customers;
• plan future marketing strategies;
• make informed decisions about product and service development.

For all that, you need good knowledge and a vast database that you can create yourself, spending a lot of time and effort in a web search or use detailed ready to go search tools.

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5. HELPS CREATE CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT, LOYALTY, AND COMMUNITIES

USER-GENERATED CONTENT

Different studies may provide different results but they all discovered that customer retention is 5 – 25 times cheaper than new customer acquisition. Customer engagement strategies that feature user-generated content are a clever way for businesses to build customer relationships. That’s why customer engagement strategies are so important to any brand.

There are a few different approaches but when you build customer relationships with user-generated content examples show that you also increase user engagement, maintain the interest of existing customers, and catch the attention of new customers. It could be difficult to find the right person to produce engaging content for your brand (far not impossible) but worth the effort.

The right tools can make your life a lot easier. If you already have your own social listening tool, set up a social listening project for your brand to find the best user-generated content examples. Brand24 is a highly recommended social listening tool to start up.

Here is a 4-step process that will help you set up a Brand24 project and find user-generated content that suits your business best:

Step 1. Sign up for a Brand24 account – it’s easy and free.

Step 2. Set up a project to monitor your brand and each and every branded hashtag.

Step 3. After the Project is set, go to the Analysis tab on your dashboard (left side).

Step 4. From the Analysis tab, look over the results listed under The Most Popular Mentions.

Here you go, now you can rock&roll 🙂

BRAND PERSONALITY EXPOSURE

A few crucial points to keep in mind if you want to shine in exposing your brand’s face:

• Commit to your brand personality and be consistent – after you’ve figured out the type of brand face that’s right for your business, commit to it by implementing company-wide consistency for any and all public communication. Whether it’s in the form of print, digital or physical advertisements, be consistent in the tone that you set for your brand personality.
• Encourage personal branding among employees – stand out by encouraging personal branding among your employees. This doesn’t mean that your employees have to adopt the same brand face as your company (unless it suits them). But the extra effort could be made to highlight that there is an actual human being behind your brand avatar.
• Listen to your audience and see what they think about your brand personality – listen to your customers especially when they express frankly their opinion. Research shows that your customers want your brand to respond to their mentions online, even they expect you do so. Ignorance creates the perfect opportunity for your competitors to swoop in and interact with every customer you’ve been ignoring.

Well, I think that now you are ready to turn your customers into raving fans.

BUILDING AND MANAGING AN ONLINE COMMUNITY

What’s cool about community building and management is the fact that you don’t always have to build your own community from scratch. In other words, you can also become an active member of already existing communities and there is plenty of them with high engagement rate.

Obviously, you need goals behind your decisions to join those communities. We live in a social media monitoring age but numerous people still don’t have a clue what to do with social media monitoring. Hence, my mission to educate people about the benefits of such tools.

If you want to build an online community by letting it grow by itself it won’t work out. You got to keep an eye on it and be the one who embraces every opportunity to engage before others. But if you choose to join existing communities, you have to be consistent as well so that more and more people become familiar with your brand and you eventually become a leader in your field. The key takeaway, however, is that you should never build an online community of your own if you haven’t been a member of existing ones before! Whatever path you take, you have to keep in mind that it takes time, patience, and dedication.

6. HELPS YOU CHOOSE YOUR BRAND AMBASSADORS

According to Wikipedia, a brand ambassador (sometimes also called a corporate ambassador) is a person who is hired by an organization or company to represent a brand in a positive light and by doing so help to increase brand awareness and sales. Nowadays, however, a brand ambassador can be anyone who has the knowledge or can identify certain needs a brand is seeking.

In your case, a brand ambassador is more likely to become a customer who has experienced your service or product and has left very happy. How are you going to find those ambassadors? Of course, using the results of your positive mentions search + mentions engagement in your Brand24 dashboard. Next, you got to connect to those people and share your idea about increasing brand awareness using their influence within the social media channels. Get more insight on how to identify influencers here.

Here are the caveats – if you pay or offer free service/products to your ambassadors in exchange for their “favours” you risk to lose your customers’ trust. So, preferably, expand your brand popularity from the point of exclusive customer service and experience.

Want To Try To Find Influencers?

So, after this extended tutorial about the major tips of social listening, it’s time you roll your sleeves up and apply what you’ve just learned. Give your business a kickstart with Brand24… Now, don’t get me wrong, probably there are tons of valuable apps and tools out there in the internet space. But if you are set to acquire a trustworthy partner by your side, without any doubt that’s Brand24.

YES, I’M READY TO ROCK