Learn to "listen" to your customers and let your brand rock
With the rise of social media analytics tools, you can achieve many different goals – drive conversions, raise brand awareness, or provide excellent customer service. There are plenty of tools on the market that will provide you with thousands of social media KPIs. But in aim to improve your customer experience you have to base your decisions on data.
In this article, I’d like to spot the lights on one of the most powerful, in my opinion, social media listening tools. It will help you determine not only the results of your social media activities but your in-workshop performance as well. It will tell you what your customers talk about your brand, service, and competitors.
Let me introduce you to 'Brand24' and make you aware of their "listening" tool benefits and features.
The tool will automatically gather online mentions from different online sources, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram within your predefined time frame. You can not only see the social media reach of your hashtag or any other keyword you want to track on social media, but you can also analyze KPIs like:
- the volume of mentions;
- sentiment around the posts;
- location of the people using the keyword;
- influencer score which allows you to choose the right influencer to work with;
- type and number of interactions;
- the share of voice of authors using your keywords;
- slack integration, which means you will get instant notification
The amount and variety of data combined with advanced filters guarantee that you will get the action metrics, not some worthless noise.
Mentions
People are talking about your brand not only on your social media channels but also on other places, where you might not be present. You will want to find those comments and keep an eye on them.
This social media KPI shows how big your brand popularity is. Being able to spark or extinguish discussions at places where you are not socially active is a big advantage for your brand.
Learn about the 5 reasons to track social mentions and how to do it.
Sentiment analysis
Let’s talk a little bit about sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis is the jelly onto your peanut butter sandwich. It’s important to check how often people talk about your brand as much as know how they feel about your brand as well.
Sentiment analysis is there to help you.
Sentiment analysis is based on the NLP algorithm (natural language processing). The tool analyses the emotional characteristics of particular words and categorizes the mentions into three groups: mentions with a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.
The more the positive chat about your brand, the better. Happy customers are what makes a business run and grow. But take a look at the negative mentions as well, they are a gold mine of knowledge. Analyze the issues your customers have and improve on what you can. A surge in the volume of negative sentiment is an indicator of your omissions. In this case, time is essential. Interact the negative comments quickly and you could swap the positions around and even benefit from it.
Locations
All social media mentions of the keywords you monitor, keywords relevant to your business, marketing, or competitors can be identified on the world’s map. That includes social media mentions from Twitter and Instagram. Apart from the other analytics from Brand24 such as sentiment analysis, social media reach, metrics of influence, the volume of mentions, etc., now the tool filters your mentions by location.
Influencers
The number of worldwide Facebook users is growing steadily each year, making the popular social platform a source of very prime real estate for targeted marketing. Looking at the data, it makes a lot of sense – this is where your customers like to hang out, and not only your customers. We all spend much more time on Facebook than we should.
Who are Facebook influencers? Facebook influencers are people who have built a large number of relationships with their audience through their Facebook profiles. They produce valuable content, which is why their followers trust their expertise and opinions and engage with their Facebook posts instead of just scrolling through.
What’s the most important thing to remember when choosing Facebook influencers to work with?
- are the members of their target audience your potential customers?
- is the personality of this Facebook influencer a good match for your brand?
You’ve probably noticed how many of the Facebook users and communities actively use Facebook Recommendations to get first-hand recommendations for brands, products, and services before making big or small purchase decisions.
Get more tips about how to find the right Facebook influencers and take your Facebook marketing strategy to the next level.
Interactions
Seeing how popular a given post is could bring a number of benefits:
- Faster decision making – It takes less time to decide if you should take action, and we all know that time is essential when it comes to social media.
- Increased productivity – It is easier to prioritize which mentions you should engage with first, or whether they are worth paying attention at all.
Let’s say a person has 14k followers and probably you’d think that person’s content would gain a lot of engagement. But it got only 1 likes and 5 shares, for example. The new feature allows you to know that without checking the mention in its initial source. In other words, having the number of interactions in your Brand24 dashboard allows you to make the decision to check this mention or focus on another one.
Share of voice and how to measure it
The share of voice determines how big your share of advertising is compared to the whole market. It’s one of the most important metrics when it comes to measuring your social media KPIs for social media reach. The share of voice is all about chatter.
Back in the days before the social media revolution, the share of voice was a metric commonly used by marketing managers. Since, social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, allowed many brands to develop their brand voice and brand awareness without investing tons of dollars into paid advertising.
Why should you spend time measuring the share of voice? You measure the results of your marketing activities – how much people talk about your brand or products? Are you building a community around your social media profiles? Spreading your message organically is much more valuable than paid traffic. And the more your audience resonates with your voice, the more engaged they are. Share of voice is also great metrics if you’re running a competitor’s analysis.
Read the full description and features of these metrics here.
How to set up notifications
There are a few types of notifications in Brand24. They all keep you notified about your keyword mentions found on the Internet and social media. Also, each of them contains a different piece of information than others:
Slack notifications – they inform you about mentions you should respond to immediately (a customer describes a problem online, negative online press, social media mentions about your company). There’s no way you miss the most important mentions. Slack notifications allow receiving your keyword mentions in real-time directly to one of your Slack channels.
Email notifications – email notifications are pretty simple as they keep you notified about every single new mention of your keywords. What’s important, you can apply filters and receive filtered notifications.
Daily & Weekly reports – it’s a good solution for people who don’t have the need to know about every single mention, or simply don’t want to get disturbed. These reports can give a good insight into the daily or weekly performance of a company within social media.
Storm Alerts – Storm Alerts can keep you notified when the number of mentions and/or their social media reach suddenly increases.
Summary
What, actually, are the benefits of having Brand24 by your side:
1. Reach Customers Fast
React and engage quickly to real-time comments posted about your brand. Follow-up on positive comments from your brand ambassadors or respond to unsatisfied customers before the story grows too big.
2. Detect Sales Opportunities
80% of consumers do research or ask online before making a buying decision. Brand24 gives you the listening tools to find these consumers, identify where to promote your service and products and acquire customers before they go to someone else.
3. Boost Conversions
Conversions are what we all, eventually, look for. Social media should affect your bottom line and bring revenue to your business. Of course, not all of your followers will buy your services and products but if none of them is buying, then your social media efforts aren’t fulfilling their purpose.
4. Create Better Customer Experience
Social media is a great place to offer customer service. Reacting promptly to your customers’ queries has many benefits, including:
- showing appreciation to your clients;
- preventing escalation of social media crises;
- turning your customers into brand ambassadors;
- showing a human face to your customer audience;
Good customer service is a key factor that will set your company apart from competitors. This is how you increase your customer lifetime value and, in the end, increase the profit.
5. Increase The Customer Lifetime Value
Excellent customer service should result in increased customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV indicates how long your customers stay with you. If you’re selling services or goods, see how often your customers come back and purchase your services and goods again.
Social media is all about building relationships, providing content that resonates with your audience. Your social strategies are directly correlated with customer lifetime value.
6. Help You Solve Issues
Sooner or later, your customers will complain about something. Your job is to find those complaints and resolve the problems that your customers experience.
One of the tricks of the trade is to react quickly to every message posted on social media channels, even if a customer only mentioned your company name and didn’t use your branded hashtag or company handle.
Let's wrap up
And so, social media channels are powerful tools that can boost your business and help you achieve your goals. To succeed you need action data. Closely tracking different social media KPIs will help you make informed decisions about how to boost your social media presence and run even more successful campaigns.
Social media KPIs will indicate which form of communication with your audience works to your advantage. Track the right social media KPIs and you will see results of your actions in your overall business goals.
Vladislav Gerginov
The Garage Mentor founder and CEO
English 
Bulgarian