You can keep track of every time your business is mentioned on social media by using social listening. 

By doing this, you will gain essential insights into how customers feel about your goods or services, their problems, and what they want to see from you in the future. But, tracking brand mentions is only one component of social listening. It can also be used to monitor rival brands and popular content and conduct sentiment research on issues affecting your company.

This insight can be utilized to guide everything from marketing and product planning to customer service and support, allowing you to make more informed, data-driven decisions that will benefit your company’s bottom line.

1. Keep your brand safe and customers happy

According to a J.D. Power and Associates study from 2013, 67% of consumers utilize social media for customer service. As you might expect, this number has since increased; according to a different survey, 36% of consumers who had a bad experience with a brand will post about it on social media.

A good social media listening tool allows you to find these comments and reply to them, which will enhance your capacity to serve customers. These comments aren’t always an attempt to contact the brand directly; sometimes they’re just a rant or a side note in a post that’s about something else.

Here’s an illustration from a Mediacom customer who tweeted about having issues with their internet service. Promptly, Mediacom was able to apologize and pledge to remedy the problem.

Tracking keywords: brand name.

The majority of social media listening solutions now provide sentiment analysis, as you’ll see. Positive, negative, and neutral mentions are separated by this feature.

Set up the keywords mentioning your product or brand name and select a filter to display the negative mentions first to check whether your consumers are having issues. In this manner, you’ll be able to track down dissatisfied clients and identify any flaws or defects in your product as soon as they occur.

2. Be on your toes with your marketing strategy

Through social listening, you can get insights into your campaigns and their success. You monitor the campaign through social media accounts, but a lot going on around the world might get missed by just looking at social accounts. Social listening can help you refine your marketing strategy by providing insights about your brand and campaigns. It can help you understand how your audience is perceiving your brand and campaign, which can help you improve your strategy.

With regular changes in technology and algorithms, it gets tough to keep track of everything, due to which good marketing opportunities generally get missed. Social listening assists in understanding and capturing all trends to keep your strategy more spontaneous.

Keywords for tracking include “brand name,” “campaign name,” and “trending.”

3. Be aware of your competitors

Your competitors may teach you a lot about what works and what doesn’t by sharing their successes and failures, which will help you avoid making the same mistakes they did.

You undoubtedly already monitor the social media accounts of your rivals to see what they’re up to, but social media listening gives you access to a wider perspective.

As Networked Insights CEO Dan Neely once put it, “Listening sees the forest; monitoring sees the trees.” You can utilize this information to create your own social media strategy by figuring out how consumers feel about your competitors’ brands generally, who their biggest influencers are, and which platforms they’re focusing on.

Tracking keywords: competitor brand names

Find out what others are saying about the products of your competitors. Set up notifications for all of your rivals’ brands, phrases, and hashtags. Additionally, don’t just leave this information hanging; rather, seize any chance to interact.

This business kept track of Radian6 references because it was able to step in when Radian6 ignored a customer. How many customers will see this dialogue and opt to go with a different provider rather than Radian6?

4. Know what your market needs

With proper social listening, your company will benefit from comprehensive knowledge about what is going on in your industry. You’ll find out what is and isn’t working for your rivals’ strategies. Even though you should never imitate someone else’s social media approach, observing what works for them can give you some valuable pointers for your own. They may be keeping an eye on you.

Directly asking clients what they want might not be the best course of action, as you’ll quickly discover that many items on their wishlists are impossible. Nevertheless, by listening to what people say about your product among themselves, you’ll be able to determine what the most crucial buying decision variables are for them.

Customer review sites are also a valuable source of customer insights, as recommendations and criticism here often include a detailed description of the product or service, which can influence consumer decisions. This may then be used in product development to ensure that you create exactly what your customers want.

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5. Find the perfect influencers

It stands to reason that individuals are much more likely to heed the counsel of someone they trust, whether it be a friend, a family member, or these days, even a blogger whose writing they enjoy.

Influencer marketing is not new, but it has come a long way since Michael Jordan was selling sneakers. Now that you know the channels that people use and are familiar with, you may advertise your product through those channels. Influencer marketing is one of the most effective forms of advertising since 90% of customers believe in peer recommendations, but only 33% do so with advertisements.

So where do you look to locate the influencers you want to collaborate with?

Many social media listening solutions now provide a social influencer feature that allows you to locate individuals who are already interested in your brand and give them a free sample or early access to a product. You can also track buzzwords related to your sector and find experts in your field who publish relevant material and interact with other people.

You can even find out who is collaborating with your rivals and encourage them to test out your goods.

Tracking keywords include brand names and industry buzzwords.

Like in real-life relationships, s/he developing a relationship with an influencer takes time and consideration.

Follow them on social media, read and watch their stuff, and leave comments on and like their posts to start getting to know them. They will see you in their mentions if they were previously unaware of you, which will help them form a more favorable opinion of your brand.

After that, you can get in touch with them and propose a partnership—guest content for their platform, a product review, a paid promotion, or whatever else your marketing team can come up with. But don’t stop there; be sure to express your gratitude for their time and consideration of your offering and, if at all possible, ask for their comments.

6. Understand your TG better

You must first understand your customers to satisfy them. You could discover some surprising concepts and sources of inspiration for your upcoming projects and marketing initiatives through customer research.

The conventional method of gathering consumer feedback is through surveys or questionnaires, but this approach is not always the best because few people enjoy taking the time to respond to questions that are not immediately relevant to them. Additionally, it is quite impossible to obtain an entirely unbiased opinion from a survey, and as a result, you only get a limited number of responses that you can’t fully trust.

Another useful application of social media listening is to obtain objective (or as objective as one can be) client comments with little to no effort on your part and no effort on theirs.

Using your social media listening tool(s), you can examine vast amounts of data and discover certain opinions.

Tracking keywords: brand name.

Observe patterns in people’s preferences and dislikes. You might be able to identify some less evident characteristics in your audience and take advantage of them.

Let’s say you see Westworld fans talking about Daft Punk’s new album; you tweet Spotify links and like their YouTube music videos. Daft Punk might be used in a marketing campaign or asked to appear in an episode.

If your product is quite specialized, you should give some platforms priority. You may learn about the most popular publications, networks, and forums in your sector by using social media to listen.

7. Know what people talk about you

One of the best ways for companies to use social media is to promote marketing initiatives by enticing users to post content with a specific or branded hashtag.

Branded hashtags are very helpful for promoting and raising awareness of your brand or campaign. Effectively branded hashtags are succinct and precise; as a result, avoid using any words or phrases with potential double meanings. Verify that your hashtag is unique before using it, because using one that is already taken will reduce the impact of your promotion.

In London’s Brick Lane in 2015, Carlsberg debuted the “best poster in the world”—a billboard that offered free beer. Though relatively straightforward, the idea was entirely appropriate for the brand. As expected, the hoax sparked a lot of discussion on social media, with #probablythebest receiving more than 3 million Twitter impressions in a single day.

Conclusion

The process of learning more about your audience than simply the bare minimum through social media listening is just getting started. As you discover more about your audience on social media and continue to go deeper to inform your digital marketing, going deeper pays off. Utilize insights about your audience to create specific and relevant content to increase the return on your marketing investments.

Consider what social listening technologies are accessible but haven’t yet crossed your mind if you don’t have the ideal program right away. Continually revise, update, and improve your social listening program’s objectives and the most effective ways to achieve them.