Social Media Listening to Elevate Your Strategy Across Platforms

For brands, building a solid reputation alongside a powerful online presence is essential. Of course, boosting brand awareness is key, but ensuring that your brand develops a reputation for all the right reasons is crucial to your growth. Bad service, scandals, and more can all cause negative social media attention, so it’s important to continuously track your brand’s social media channels to look out for any signs of trouble and respond quickly. So, how do you do it? That’s where social media listening comes in.

What is Social Media Listening?

Social media listening is the act of analyzing conversations on social media that mention your brand, your industry, or any related topics to gather insight from customers and potential customers. Many brands use this method to monitor their reputations online, brand/social sentiments, the latest industry trends, and even check up on their competition. To do so, you can monitor and analyze your social media messages, comments, posts, mentions, and more. By looking in these areas, you can find helpful customer feedback or discussions regarding specific keywords that you can use to act on improving your online presence ASAP.

Unlike social monitoring, it’s important to note that this strategy involves analysis and actionable responses so your brand can meet the needs of its customers. Just keeping track of what people are saying about your brand isn’t enough, a great social media listening strategy will find the root of a conversation and ultimately implement long-term changes.

Why Does Social Media Listening Help?

By incorporating social media listening in your media strategies, you can find answers regarding the type of content your audience wants, how to keep up with industry trends, and how to improve your customer experience. There are plenty of other reasons to start, but here are some of the most important: 

1. Customers Like Interaction

Rather than assuming what your customers want or need, you should find out from them. Customers want to feel heard from their favorite brands on social media. According to Sprout Social, 83% of survey respondents said they like when brands respond to questions.

Additionally, 68% said they like when brands join their conversations. If that wasn’t enough to convince you, 48% of customers also claimed they make a purchase with a brand that is responsive to its customers and potential customers on social media. Clearly, responding to your followers with valuable answers will be a great tool for gaining brand loyalty and increasing retention rates. 

2. Increase Your Customer Acquisition

With social media, broadening your reach can be simple. But with social media listening, you can find new ways to make content that will not only please your audience but will attract new customers. By creating content that aligns with your audience’s wants and needs, you can convert your content viewers into followers and eventually into customers.

As HubSpot puts it, using social media listening allows you to discover the kinds of content that your target audience is already following and mentioning by staying up-to-date with their posts, shares, and conversations online. 

3. Find Ways to Update Your Methods

Customer satisfaction is a big deal. With social media listening, you can find the ultimate ways to keep your customers satisfied and coming back for more. Let’s say you have a clothing brand. When checking up on social media, you find that plenty of customers are frustrated with how certain sizes are never available on your website.

Upon seeing their conversations, your brand can now decide to widen your size range or to ensure you have more products in a certain size for restocks. This way, you can keep your customers happy while increasing your sales at the same time.

4. Keep Track of Growth

Are your sales decreasing? Are you losing followers on your various social media platforms? Social media listening can help you find out why. By analyzing your comments, you might find bad reviews or even conversations that are seemingly pointing potential customers in the direction of your competitor. Luckily, a consistent strategy can help you stay on top of these comments so you can determine if your brand needs to take more serious measures in response.

5. Campaign Analysis

Did your brand just launch a new campaign with popular influencers? Social media listening is a great tool for finding out how the campaign is reaching or resonating with your target audience. If you’re finding a lot of positive responses – great! If not, these comments can be the perfect constructive criticism your brand needs in order to find out how you can perform better for your next campaign. 

Looking to run an epic influencer marketing campaign using social media listening? NeoReach has the best experience in creating viral campaigns that convert on social media. Sign up here! 

Your Guide to Social Media Listening

 If social media listening sounds like the method you need, you’re in luck! There are several tools available online for you that you can use to analyze the results of your social listening. Here are a few of the best:

• Brand24: This service provides you with a “mentions” feed so you can see what people are saying online about your brand in real-time. Plus, it’s great for businesses of all sizes.

• YouScan: With YouScan, you can find mentions of your brand by the most influential users, get alerts when someone negatively mentions your brand, and integrate online complaints into your Helpdesk system.

• AgoraPulse: If you want to make your response time even quicker, check out AgoraPulse. With this tool, you can immediately act on a monitored post by replying or bookmarking it through the service.

• Buzzsumo: This tool has useful alert features, allows you to set specific parameters for your social monitoring, and even shows you how much engagement a post mentioning your brand has gotten.

• Sprout Social: Like AgoraPulse, Sprout Social gives users a “Smart Inbox” that allows them to respond to posts all from within the service. Plus, you can organize these posts that mention your brand in any way you see fit.

Listening before we speak isn’t just a phrase our parents or teachers told us growing up – it can even be applied to your brand. With social media listening, your brand will experience firsthand positive results that can come from active listening and thoughtful communication with customers and a target audience. Now is the perfect time to incorporate social media listening in your brand’s social media strategy, so be sure to check out some tools you can start utilizing today.

Check out these other social media listening tools online