As a brand, we love reading customer feedback and reviews. What helps make sense of customer feedback is using social listening tools to listen in on conversations about the brand.
In this post, we’ll go into detail about which social media platforms are best for brand listening to your customers, how social listening can improve marketing strategies, and customer experience and boost brand awareness, and the benefits of using this powerful tool.
What is social listening?
Social listening is a tool that can help us monitor social media for mentions of our brand, products, and competitors. Nowadays, social media isn’t just something millennials use; people across generations use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media platforms.
There are currently 4.76 billion active users on social media worldwide, which is almost 40% of the Earth’s population.
As you can see, listening to what customers say about a brand online is essential so social listening is essential for social media success. However, engaging directly with customers could negatively impact a business.
Social media monitoring can help us effectively analyze customers’ impressions of our products and services. The process uses specialized software and applications to monitor an organization’s presence on up-to-date social networks.
The information is delivered in various forms, such as blog mentions and other content posted by the followers or those who mention the company’s name. Social listening is also helpful in crafting content marketing strategy for your marketing campaigns by providing trendy topics and customer queries.
7 Ways Social Listening Improves CX
One may wonder how social listening tools can improve the customer experience. As brands, when we are set to launch a new product or try to improve a brand recall, monitoring and responding to customer feedback becomes vital.
Let’s look at some benefits of social media listening for improving CX.
1. Understanding how customers feel about a brand
Understanding customers’ feelings about a brand is a crucial element of customer experience management. This can help measure how good or bad a brand is by identifying the issues and finding solutions. During a new product launch, social listening tools can help brands measure the degree of interest in the product before launching it.
A social listening solution makes it possible to track customers’ feelings about any change over time. Here, social listening tools can also act as a digital pulse—they allow us to monitor the level of overall brand awareness across the internet. Social listening tools also measure how reviews are done online and whether customers are sharing positive or negative feedback. This contributes to the development of long-term customer relationships.
2. Handling Complaints
Handling customer complaints goes a long way toward building a successful business. Customer reviews and complaints can make or break brands, regardless of whether you’re a large multinational or a small, local firm. Social listening tools allow businesses to respond quickly and efficiently to customer issues and resolve complaints effectively.
Social media listening tools can also help us tweak products and services based on feedback and the reviews customers share online. Many businesses use social media monitoring software such as Hootsuite and HubSpot to monitor social media conversations about products or services. The software helps them respond quickly to customer reviews by offering effective solutions that put customers at ease.
Monitoring a brand on social media is a great way to track issues and customer complaints that need to be addressed. Once an issue has been identified, brands can use a social media monitoring tool to monitor specific keywords and identify which channel generates the most feedback. This helps in identifying common issues and resolving them.
Read Also – How To Implement A Social Listening Strategy?
3. Attract and Retain New Customers
Social media allows customers to comment on a product, which can lead to more positive feedback and brand awareness. Social listening tools allow the monitoring of social media conversations about the products. This is important because it determines how likely people are to buy from a brand based on online discussions.
The information revealed by social listening tools can help evaluate how successful a brand’s marketing campaign has been. For example, suppose customers have been talking about a product or service but not buying it. It could indicate that the target audience is not interested in these products or doesn’t know enough about them. In such a case, the brand can use a social media listening tool to send out promotional material designed to attract a new segment of customers and increase sales.
Retaining customers is crucial to any business. We can use social listening tools to identify and contact customers that show interest in our products. This is particularly important because it helps turn returning customers into brand ambassadors and increases brand loyalty.
4. Discover Brand Ambassadors
Social media helps improve brand awareness and public relations as it allows us to identify influential people for our brand. Reaching out to them can lead to more positive online discussions and reviews about the products.
Social listening tools can help identify the key influencers in the industry by measuring how frequently they share conversations about the brand on social media platforms. Searching for influencers within a specific industry is also a great way to improve brand awareness and generate new leads.
Social media influencers play a critical role in influencing many customers to buy the products. This is very important because customers are likelier to believe influencers they follow on social media than to trust a company’s promotion of the products and services. The recommendations of social media influencers are perceived as impartial and trustworthy.
5. Monitor Competitors
A social media listening tool can be used to monitor conversations that are taking place about competitors. This is a great way to spot potential issues during online customer discussions and respond quickly without losing customers to a rival company because of poor customer service.
Read Also – 12 Companies With Great Social Listening Strategies
Social listening tools allow brands to get deeper insights from online customer discussions, which helps them reach out and respond to customers on time.
Any negative feedback on a competitor’s product is an opportunity to increase one’s brand awareness. Social media listening helps contact existing customers before they leave for another business. This can help build a loyal customer base and prevent customers from defecting to competitors.
6. Sentiment Analysis of Customer
Social listening tools can be used to gather insights based on the sentiments that customers show online. Sentiment analysis helps gain a better understanding of customer sentiment and customer loyalty. For example, if they are talking positively, this indicates that they are loyal to a brand.
Social listening tools help to identify the emotions behind customers’ comments and determine any significant changes over time. This information can help businesses make better decisions in the future and keep the brand at the forefront of their customers’ minds.
7. Discover Consumer Pain Points
Social listening tools are used to collect, monitor, and measure the data that drives a successful business. The information gathered from social listening tools helps identify pain points that customers experience when using a product or service. This can help determine underperforming areas that need improvement and uncover new growth opportunities for the business.
Social listening tools can also be used to monitor how effectively the customer service team deals with customer concerns and issues. The Social listening tools give an insight into the questions asked by the customers and how the team responds. This information can then be analyzed to assess the overall effectiveness of the customer support team. It can also help decide if the customer service team needs additional training or guidance on handling specific issues.
Conclusion
Social media has changed how businesses communicate with customers. One of the greatest benefits of social listening tools is that they allow brands to connect with customers on a more personal level. Social media monitoring helps reach out to a customer base in real-time to provide effective solutions. Social media listening can help build trust between customers and brands, which is essential to building customer loyalty.
Social listening tools are valuable to a business’s marketing strategy as they allow brands to monitor conversations about their products in real time. In addition, the tools also offer valuable insights into customer sentiments, which can go a long way in building a successful brand.
