The world of social media has dramatically changed how we speak to our friends and family. Brands have had to drastically alter the way in which they communicate with customers.
Social media and the entire internet has given businesses a new way to listen and learn about their audience like never before.
Now more than ever brands are investing into social listening platforms to help them expand their scope to non-social and proprietary data. According to Google Trends, searches for “social listening” over the last 5 years have grown by 86.11%.
Social listening is not just about monitoring what a brands audience have to say across social media platforms, it’s also about understanding where the business is being mentioned across the entire internet and why.
Reviewing a study from Brandwatch, “Not having the right data” is a major issue for 58% of respondents. The second most popular option was not having the right technology to help, while the third was not having an understanding of what kinds of research could be helpful.
What are the obstacles to getting to know your customers and target consumers as we head into 2021?
When brands have a social media listening strategy and platform in place it is a great way to help them develop and identify opportunities. They do this by monitoring what is making their target audience sad, angry or happy. It is a method of gathering insights that help businesses grasp what makes their customers emotively tick and who are their biggest brand advocates.
On social media, businesses continuously benchmark themselves against their competitors and analyse data to understand the amount of engagement they are creating. There is something many businesses fail to do – actually look beyond engagement rates.
When Gartner asked 200 marketers how they were getting information on rapidly changing consumer behaviours during the COVID-19 outbreak, only 51% of respondents utilised social monitoring / listening in any capacity.
Social media engagement comes in many forms, the obvious ones are likes, reactions, shares, and video views but comments are far more valuable. Is your branded content-generating positive, neutral or negative conversations? This brings me on to sentiment analysis.
Sentiment analysis is a key operational function within social listening. It measures the positive and negative language from users across a brands social media network. Many brands have begun to use social media listening to understand users’ emotions. In an ideal world, brands want their audience to be sharing and talking about their business in a positive way – but that’s not always the case.
No matter what someone has to say about your business, it is important to absorb this information. Feed this intelligence back into the wider thinking as it may help your brand resolve audience frustrations and grow market share.
What challenges are there for social listening?
Elements of speech such as slang, sarcasm and irony are extremely common, and algorithms can sometimes struggle to recognise them, leading to feedback being incorrectly categorised.
Modern-day social listening applications however can be taught about how users talk about your brand, strengthening the algorithm’s intelligence.
3 ways a business can utilise social listening?
Customer service
Social listening is a great way to understand the quality of your services. According to ZenDesk report, 64 percent of us expect to receive real-time customer service, regardless of channel and 78 percent consider a company’s customer service reputation important when choosing to buy.
By listening to conversations, brands can participate, educate and build relationships with their audience. A study from Global Web Index found 88 percent of social marketers believe it’s important to provide customer service via social networks and 45 percent of customers said social media is one of the first places they go with questions or concerns.
Market research and analysis
We can also determine with social listening analysis whether there’s something consumers hate within your eco-system, or someone is offering an alternative to your product or service.
Social listening is a great way to gain a deeper level of understanding of the themes relevant to your brand. It can help you begin to understand global trends about the subjects important to your business.
Once you have these insights, you can develop new ideas and feed it back into your wider business strategy to craft stronger messages and help drive brand innovation.
Brand and campaign monitoring
Social listening provides the ability to capture a 360° view of your brand online. No matter what corner of the web your brand has managed to earn a mention, this data can be utilised to help understand what you should start, stop and continue to do.
Social listening vendors all come with the ability to understand how your campaigns have resonated with users. The engagement numbers will tell you hard facts, but to understand “why” we have to capture conversations. The more brands begin to know about their target industry and market, the better it is for the brand. Social listening is an incredible way to collect an infinite amount of data about a businesses digital footprint. There is an incredible amount we can learn from social data to help improve services, products, messages and campaigns. Social listening puts your audience at the heart of your future developments and strategies.
When was the last time your brand or business did any of the following?
- Captured what users said about your brand across the entire internet to improve brand strategy?
- Measured the sentimental value of your campaigns and how they made people emotively tick?
- Reviewed conversations to understand your audience frustrations with your service to help improve ROI?
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Email us at: The.Collective@lewissilkin.com